Special Holiday edition: “Boy, what day is this?”… обманутыми… The Great Escape… The Operator of Last Resort… GW: ‘Tis the season to carry a brolly.

Happy Holiday!

Special Holiday edition to celebrate Winterval.

 

Australian politicians celebrate Summerval, 25th December, when a traditional meal of roast koala is barbecued on the beach.

 

“Boy, what day is this?”

I can’t help observing how, each year, the media seems to become evermore besotted with portraying the Christmas festival in a nostalgic, Victorian warm glow, replete with all the seasonal “tropings”:

…festive robins, mince pies, presents, Dickens, carol singers, cards, good cheer, turkey, Santa, pudding, holly, presents, the whole family glowing around the fire, tinsel, baubles, presents, trees, recipes, more turkey, the Queen, presents, Morecambe and Wise’s 1979 Christmas Special, lights, Lappland, elves, brandy butter, candles, mistletoe, children laughing, sleigh bells, reindeer, icing the cake, wise men, one too many Bailey’s, baby in the manger, more presents, cards, oxen, turkey sandwiches, shepherds, skating on ponds, people greeting each other warmly in the streets, supernovae in the East, woolly hats and scarves, more presents, marzipan, turkey curry…. the first Easter eggs in the shops.

Why, it’s almost as though the EU never happened. “Boy, what day is this?”

It doesn’t feel like that at all. Perhaps we should change the name Christmas to “Mythology mashup”? While, of course, Holiday wouldn’t be Winterval without… snow. Lots of snow.

Beyond the snug warmth of the radio or TV studio, the Lifestyle section of The Guardian with its tips for handy gifts costing only £400 and budget wine selections at £18 a bottle, women’s magazines and their endless recipe ideas, as we know the reality is somewhat different.

I shan’t depress you with images of working mums queuing at food banks between office cleaning jobs; the 130 thousand children in temporary accommodation, looking forward to going back to school hungry in two weeks; Leavers punching themselves in the head; the hundreds of Syrian orphans we promised years ago to take in, still being trafficked into sex slavery from the Calais jungle because the Daily Mail doesn’t think they’re deserving enough to be let in; mass turkey orgies in drafty church halls for the homeless and the elderly lonely; publicity-hungry World Leaders flying across the globe on First-class sleighs to bring photo-op cheer to the forgotten troops stationed wherever the enemy is poised to invade – nothing much on TV, no real news until there’s the usual Boxing Day disaster somewhere, pine needles all over the carpet, exploding tree lights, drifts of shredded wrapping-paper and the washing-up still to do – that terrible sense of anti-climax on the 27th – but I ought perhaps to bring you back to reality where snow is concerned.

I used to enjoy visiting my stepfather’s family home, a 15th-century Cotswolds manor house with its own village (houses were built to last in those days), as you could be pretty much guaranteed every year to get snowed in, and there was a Hawaiian-themed bar upstairs. Snow is not really a feature of Holiday UK these days, even at northerly latitudes. Indeed, to ensure the misery of hundreds of households whose Christmas trees will be sloshing around the living-room this year, some for the second time, there are something like 100 flood warnings out for the east and north-east of England this morning, where it has barely stopped raining for the past three months; while yet another storm is barrelling across the Bay of Biscay towards the south.

Back in 2017, my old boglposts remind me, the Met Office warned us that rain and floods would become a more regular feature as the region warms. The average British winter day is 2 degrees warmer now than it was back in the 1970s, when Christmas was Christmas and your Old Uncle still used to indulge happily in all the seasonal imagery, especially whichever trope contained the most alcohol, and there was often real snow on the ground. Remember 1982? I remember 1962! (Now I have just an artificial twig with LED lights on the windowsill as a nod to my childhood. It’s not the same after your mum’s gone.)

Indeed, the Old Bogler still clings nostalgically to memories of childhood Christmases: like the time he and his mother and her parents were ordered out of my other grandmother’s house, the wealthy one, midway through lunch, when “Ben”, my step-grandfather, City gent and unreconstructed Edwardian thug, learned that Grandpa Tomlinson – a career RAF officer – had voted Labour in 1946.

Being the only-child of two only-children who didn’t get on, either with one another or with their own parents, has its advantages. Where other kids hung a stocking filled with sparse hope on the mantelpiece, above the stuttering coal-gas fire – yes, great-grandchildren, we used to do that – anticipating perhaps a tin-toy train and an orange if they were lucky, I would cheekily pin up two pillowcases, anticipating correctly that parental guilt would ensure they were full in the morning, of space ray-guns and joke blackface soap from Ellisdon’s magic shop, a cowboy outfit and the Beezer annual.

I made no connection between my satisfaction with their parenting and the income they would have obtained as two struggling actors working in weekly rep. My own two children were brought up in deep poverty in the wake of my business failure in the mid-1990s without TV or the internet, deep in the countryside alongside our sheep, goats, pigs, cats, dogs, ponies and varieties of edible poultry. They were no strangers to death. As well as our own Christmas decorations, we made our own electricity with a clattery, 40-year-old generator and pumped our own well-water, until one day we discovered the increasingly foul taste was because the well was full of drowned rats.

I hope someday they will recall with a warm glow of nostalgia – rather than in the warm glow of a planet on fire – how we inculcated in them, values of thrift, self-reliance and a deep appreciation of what that first Christmas must have been like, two thousand years ago, when families lived in caves and your firstborn were traditionally slaughtered.

 

Winner of the Year

Denise Coats, the grasping, rat-faced female who founded online money factory Bet365, paid herself £323 million this year.

Fifty-five thousand children under 16 in Britain are reported to have an addictive gambling habit.

Postscriptum

Iain Duncan Cunt, the architect of Britain’s failed Universal Credit experiment that has killed hundreds of people and driven many thousands more into dire poverty owing to the sheer cruelty and incompetence of its execution, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list.

It just shows that it doesn’t matter how evil you are in life, honors always come to the dishonorable.

I for one will be delighted if she accidentally removes his tortoise-like head from his shoulders with her ceremonial sword, or if the ribbon tightens around his scrawny throat and he can’t get it off until his lungs burst, or if he finds it easier with his knighthood to book a table in a restaurant and he chokes to death on a bit of something expensive.

Otherwise, just a normal death in 2019 will do. Perhaps his black heart will rot, emanating a foul stench.

 

If only Victoria Wood had lived to see this.

On the front line in Estonia, Baris doles out oven-ready poussin with more than a slice of ham to one of our 600 brave British boys facing down a million Russians across the Baltic.

обманутыми - ?

Meanwhile, as the heavily redacted MI5 report on Russian money pouring into the Conservative party continues vitally to prop up one wonky leg of the cabinet table at Number 10, questions are being asked about the Prime Minister’s more-than cozy relations with Putinist mini-oligarchs Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, father-and-son owners of the Evening Standard (editor: former Conservative chancellor, George Osborne).

Reports allude to the bunga-bunga parties Baris has attended on their hospitality, both here and at their sprawling Italian villa (where “anything goes”, with “mountains of caviar” to follow) – even while he was Foreign Secretary, making him, one would have thought, more than a security risk – and a lavish, celebrity-spangled dinner held in London the weekend before last to celebrate his election victory the previous day.

Attention has been drawn to one especially notable dinner Baris hosted for Evgeny at his  Islington home in February 2016, with guest guest Michael Gove, where the three men reportedly discussed in private how they were going to handle the EU referendum.

Have we possibly been betrayed to a hostile power, like our American cousins?

By the Conservatives? Perish the thought.

 

The Great Escape

The Duke of Edinburgh, 98, has been admitted to hospital again, his doctors say as a routine precaution.

It seems to this old cynic that he’s more likely to have had himself admitted to avoid having to spend Christmas with his ghastly family, trying to coax Andrew out of the bathroom where he’s locked himself in, having to separate the Cambridge woman from Meghan Sussex as they roll around, kohl-eyed on the Aubusson carpet, pulling their hair and scratching one anothers’ eyes out.

(“You bitch!” “You slag!” “You tosser!” “One is an absolute Muppet!”)

Instead, he is reportedly sitting up in bed, cracking jokes with the nurses. Let’s hope they’re not too racially inappropriate.

I too am spending Winterval on my own*, unable to contemplate being without Hunzi and Cats, which – owing to difficult travel arrangements – I should have had to be, were I to have accepted an invitation from my ex-family to join them in London for three days of jollity comparing medical notes.

Oh well, as the song goes, we’ll catch up some other time.

*Except to spoil a good story I was just writing this when a kindly fairy godmother appeared on the doorstep and invited Hunzi and me to lunch with her family. Sigh, more shopping. I’m sure she just felt sorry for the dog….

 

Quote of the hour

“I should avoid reading the Culture sections from now on, I no longer have any idea who anyone is, or what it is they’re doing.” – Uncle Bogler

 

The Operator of Last Resort

As Southerners and Nor-folk wade through thigh-deep floodwater to do their final bits and bobs of shopping – festive wet suits are going well – spare a thought for Northerners whose Christmas train services have been hit by “unprecedented levels of sickness” among train drivers already scheduled for extended holiday breaks.

(Note; In his last posting as a domestic caretaker, your hardy Uncle B. took only one day off sick in six-and-a-half years, having had surgery under general anaesthetic. He still remained on-call. These so-called working-class people nowadays, with their 60-inch TVs and DFS “pay nothing now” sale-bargain sofas don’t know they’re born.)

The operator, Northern Rail, has managed to get only 56% of services running on time so far this year, consumer protests tipped over into the popular Northern vote to Get Brexit Done, hoping Baris is such a big fascist he can make the trains run on time, and Department for Transport is taking the matter quite seriously, promising:

“We are developing contingency plans for the replacement of the current franchise with either a new short-term management contract with Northern or The Operator of Last Resort.”

The what? That sounds ominous, in an increasingly secular society. Who in God’s Holy Name is The Operator of Last Resort? It’s like calling in the Grand Inquisitor, the Witchfinder-General, the guy with the nuclear football or Sir John Humphrys*. What if The Operator fails in his task? What then? No more railways?

Or maybe it’s Sir Rod Stewart?

A quick check with Wikipedia reveals the fascinating information that, despite its doctrinaire opposition to renationalizing the rail network, since 2012 the government has in fact had a plan for doing exactly that, on a franchise-by-franchise basis, with Department for Transport poised at a moment’s notice to take the running of the railways back in-house, operated by a consortium of engineers and accountants – and the French government.

Sneering Tory warnings therefore that Corbyn was planning to bring back the bad old British Rail days we remember from films like Brief Encounter, all clouds of sooty steam, desultory affairs and sad farewells over curly sandwiches, were – as one might have expected – totally hypocritical.

They’ve been planning it all along.

*You wait. New Year’s honours…. first broadcaster K’d since Sir Trevor McDonald. Listen for the sound of gritting teeth.

(Original reporting: Guardian)

 

Have a great whatever and a suitably bereft of hope New Year!

UB, carolling in concert with The Pumpkin and your old Granny Weatherwax (Global Warmed). Christmas greetings too, from our excellent editorial team: Political editor, Laura Facebook, @laurasweeplace.sco; Football correspondent and Brazil’s retired midfield supremo, Boglinho; and, of course, Economics editor, Sterling Pound, @longliquidlunch.urg. Greetings, one and all.

Look, they’re waving.

 

GW: ‘Tis the season to carry a brolly

Indonesia: At least 6 people have died after heavy rain triggered flash floods and landslides over the last few days. Days of heavy rain caused several rivers to overflow. Almost 9,000 houses in over 200 villages have been damaged and over 60,000 people have been affected. (Floodlist)

Philippines: Yet another typhoon,  “potentially dangerous” Ursula (Phanfone) has intensified to upper Cat 1 and is expected to make landfall on Christmas Day. Warm waters may support further development before it hits. (Severe-weather.eu)

Update: 110 mph winds as Phanfone hits the coast at Cat 2 causing extensive damage, power outages and travel disruption. No reports of casualties.

USA: “Much of the North American continent will experience unusually high temperatures into early January. At the same time, an intense cold outbreak will affect much of Alaska and the Yukon into New Year. Extremely low temperatures are expected – well below -40°C, locally more than 30°C colder than normal for this time of the year.” (from Severe-weather.eu)

Europe: Storm Elsa brought 100 mph winds and heavy rain across parts of northern Portugal and Spain on 19 Dec. 4 weather related fatalities were reported. Flooding also affected parts of Andalusia in southern Spain and strong winds caused power outages in southern France. 12 crew were rescued after a cargo ship was driven ashore in a fierce storm on the island of Sardinia, 21 Dec. Parts of the south and east of England have been battling extensive flooding after days of heavy rain. Houses have been flooded-out, whole villages underwater, farmland inundated and transport affected. More is forecast, with over 80 warnings out currently – although Xmas Day is expected to be dry.

Australia; A new heatwave with localised pockets of extreme heat will bring a return to dangerous fire conditions across South Australia on Saturday and Sunday, reaching NSW and Victoria on Monday. Temperatures may reach 45C in Penrith, 37C in Sydney and 35C along much of the NSW south coast on Monday. Thousands of Queenslanders are without power, Christmas Day, after severe thundersorms.

Tunnel Approaching…

Canada: Three shallow <M5s followed by a M6.0 earthquake struck in the Pacific northwest, 23 Dec., off the coast of Vancouver Island; since when there has been an M4.8 and another M6.2 on the 24th. No damage is being reported. The quakes are at the northernmost end of the Cascadia subduction fault, on the edge of the Juan de Fuca plate. Simultaneously, southern Mexico going into Guatemala had an upper M5, maybe M6.0. (Dutchsinse)

Lebanon: After 30 years of corruption, squabbling and incompetence following the civil war, the “economy is disintegrating at an alarming rate, sparking a currency devaluation, a mass flight of money, restrictions on withdrawals, a grave threat to the country’s banking system and a guarantee that – without a foreign bailout – the country will default on its enormous debts by March at the latest.” (Guardian)

Space: One of the biggest stars in the Orion constellation, Betelgeuse is about to explode as a supernova, say astronomers, ending a tradition of jokes about “beetle juice”. It’s expected to happen sometime in the next 100 thousand years.

Happy New Year: The 17 Dec. post of Arctic News website offers the enticing prospect of human extinction by the end of 2020. Yes, next year.

There are a few “If”s involved, obviously.

Basically the blue line on their graph goes on rising incrementally, based on 1880-2019 data and current rates of emissions, and hits 3 degrees by the end of the decade – which is bad enough.

The red line factors in things like an El Niño, rising ocean temperatures, a methane ‘burp’ from the warming Arctic and a more logical way of measuring things that makes allowances for historically missing data and a 1750 startline. It’s based on the faster rate of increase since 2009.

From today, roughly, the red line takes off like a startled grouse and disappears off the chart at 3 degrees by the end of next year.

Now, humans are pretty resilient. Let’s recall that in the 20th century, two world wars killed around 120 million people. Inbetween there was an influenza pandemic in which 80 million died around the world. Famines in India, Russia and China accounted for perhaps another 140 million people. Plus there’s always a natural rate of attrition – about 57 million people die around the world each year, 0.8% of the total. Yet the population bounces back and goes on rising. We’re at about 7.6 billion now.

So it’s debatable how long it might take to get down to the last human at only 3 degrees. Probably decades, it’s hard to kill us. But from 3 it’s a short step to 5, or even 10, and that really is curtains. And there’s a clue in that word “bounceback”.

There’s no bouncing back when the planet can’t sustain us anymore.

Happy New Year!

 

Assange: a conundrum emerges… Meanwhile in Moscow… In Sod we Trust… GW: And Bolsonaro to you too.

Quote of the Week:

“I blame the charlatans who peddled the falsehoods that [Brexit] would be easy. I wouldn’t trust them to run my bath, let alone the country.” – Former Commons speaker, Lady Boothroyd.

 

“Armed with a laptop, Assange represented a threat to Trump’s claim that Mueller exonerated him.”

Assange: a conundrum emerges

So, after seven years skulking in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange, the Great White Worm, has finally been dragged from his lair, looking – it must be said – more like a defrocked Santa Claus; the hospitality of his adopted country ultimately exhausted.

I have never liked anything I have ever seen or read about the man. Like “Tommy Robinson”, Assange, a self-promoting narcissist who was originally wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual assault, has made an art form out of turning the legitimate interest of the authorities into a political cause of whining self-martyrdom to please his elderly teenage fanbase.

No-one forced him to go into self-imposed exile, and he’d probably have got off the rape charge, which looked pretty flimsy from here as the woman had twice that night already given consent, or maybe served six months at most in an agreeable Swedish facility.

He has gained many followers who like to flirt with anarchy, but he is not a saint. He is not an avatar for our times, a beacon of free speech in a world dark with surveillance and repression. He is a simple fugitive from justice, who has collaborated with nasty people who wish to impose their own, probably worse forms of repression on us.

People are saying that from being bailed on a Swedish warrant under virtual house arrest with an ankle-tag, to the years of holding court to populist politicians while exiled in the embassy, charged with breaching his bail conditions, he has suffered enough. Suffered enough self-induced misery, which he alleviated by spying on his hosts, trysts with Pamela Anderson and plotting with a hostile state.

To pretend, as his witless American supporters do, that the British authorities were keeping him trapped there to ensure his silence is just absurd. His voluntary self-exile gave him as big a platform as he could have wanted; although, since the arrival of a new rightwing President in Ecuador, his internet access has been restricted.

While some of the things his group of hackers, WikiLeaks, has done have been valuable in exposing serious abuses of State surveillance and US military power, celebrating the exciting naughtiness of publishing highly classified files, it has been the whistleblowers who have suffered harsh reprisals, exile and imprisonment, not Robin Hood Assange and his Merry Men.

It’s not a game.

Let’s remind ourselves, in addition to the alleged offences, which he denies, he (allegedly) colluded with Russian military security in the hacking and release of tens of thousands of confidential files stolen from the Democratic National Committee, with the effect of helping Trump and the Republicans to game the 2016 election. Many Russians have been indicted in absentio for it.

Did he think he was buying a ticket to freedom by helping Trump? Well, that didn’t work out too well: the big fat liar, Trump, who is said to have mentioned WikiLeaks approvingly on more than 140 occasions during his election campaign, even declaring his “love” for them, is now denying he had ever heard of them, anyway not much.

And that leads us to the most intriguing aspect of the story. The timing.

It’s Trump’s personally appointed Attorney-General, Barr, the legal sock-puppet for hire,  doing his worst to stall and redact and cover-up the damning evidence that is almost certainly in the Mueller report of the GRU’s activities on behalf of Candidate Trump, who will preside over Assange’s extradition. The only point at issue has been, to what extent was Trump criminally aware of those activities?

And is he terrified that WikiLeaks could have gotten hold of a copy of Mueller, or might be able to obtain one, to add to the weight of evidence against Trump – evidence that is so far not quite conclusive enough to bring charges? With a bowdlerized version of the report due for release any minute, might that explain the timing of the arrest?

The US extradition request lists only a charge of conspiring to hack the US Army files leaked by Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning – who is back in gaol for refusing to testify against Assange to a Grand Jury, silly girl. You owe him nothing. Assange’s alleged criminality extended only to advising her on creating a password for caching the files – his role in publishing them is probably protected by the First Amendment.

And it’s her re-imprisonment last month that may have led to Assange’s arrest, via pressure applied on Ecuador by the State Department, and Britain’s role as desperate wannabe trading partner after Brexit..

Is that minor conspiracy to whistleblow in a public-interest matter really sufficient grounds to go to all these lengths to grab him? And why now, after all this time? Is it really just that the Ecuadorian embassy staff were fed up with his cat crapping everywhere?

Yet Trump is on public record – video – as boasting of how much he loves Wikileaks for exposing the Podesta/DNC emails that he says – the FBI disagrees – prove his opponent was a criminal security risk. Thus he sets up a potentially self-incriminating defense case that is at odds with the alleged breach of national security and the minor offence of aiding and abetting.

Armed with a laptop, Assange at large represents a threat to Trump’s claim that Mueller has exonerated him.

Assange could possibly turn evidence connecting to Trump against Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and other members of the Trump election campaign team – Nigel Farage too – who are believed to have directly “colluded” with him in London, and thence with the GRU team in St Petersburg in their efforts to produce “dirt” on Clinton.

If Barr tries to suppress or redact passages of Mueller that directly refer to Stone’s meetings in London with Assange, Assange can stand up in open court and give that testimony himself, much to the embarrassment of the Trump camp.

There is no conflict of interest, however. Trump is perfectly capable of holding to whichever of two contrary positions will benefit him more. Right now, incarcerating Assange in a federal penitentiary for 5 years (assuming the Americans don’t cheat and file more charges once he is in custody) or even holding him incommunicado in a military facility is probably the better option to get himself re-elected. Evidence can be suppressed on security grounds, hearings held behind closed doors.

Assange has no guaranteed stay-out-of-gaol card.

Ironically, it was the Kremlin-sponsored RT TV – its Ruptly news subsidiary – that seems to have had several days’ advance warning of the raid on the embassy, and which was the only agency present on the doorstep to get the scoop when burly policemen dragged a curiously elderly looking and white-bearded Assange out, blinking and protesting loudly in the unaccustomed London sunlight.

Russians. You sometimes wonder how that happens.

 

Meanwhile in Moscow… Last month a flurry of speculation surrounded a Kremlin-imposed temporary switchoff in Russia of the entire internet, said to have been a trial run of technology introduced to ringfence the country’s vital communications in the event of a concerted cyber attack.

Just now, the Duma has voted by a Putin-sized majority to permanently introduce the “Chinese ringfence” as it’s been dubbed, from 1 November – entirely concidentally, the next date by which Theresa May or her successor has to have wrapped up Britain’s departure from the EU, or hopefully opted back in; not that we’ll ever recover face after this fiasco.

While the Kremlin is arguing that it’s a much needed defensive measure – clearly, they don’t like it up ’em, to quote Corporal Jones – opposition politicians and critics are pointing out that it’s potentially the ultimate form of censorship. Not just shutting down Facebook, but switching off the whole darn’ thing.

Now, wouldn’t that be blissykins?

 

In Sod we Trust

The sheer incompetence of this Tory maladministration is what ought to doom them to decades in the political wilderness.

If it doesn’t, then perhaps the inability of ministers to put any of their egregious clusterfucks right with a sincere apology and an appropriate action certainly has to.

Having ruined the lives of thousands of legal migrant workers from the Caribbean and their families, many of them here since the 1940s, by misunderstanding their immigration status and issuing deportation letters or worse, effectively cutting them off from vital services, interning people and even having to bring them back from wherever they’d wrongly been deported to, the not-fit-for-purpose Home Office has had to agree to pay a minimum £200 million in compensation.

As if that were not enough, in the process of organizing who gets what, the email addresses and details of 500 claimants have somehow accidentally been released into the public domain. The Guardian writes:

“In a written ministerial statement, (Immigration Minister Caroline) Nokes said: “Regrettably, in promoting the scheme via email to interested parties, an administrative error was made, which has meant data protection requirements have not been met, for which the Home Office apologises unreservedly.”

So on top of the £200 million compensation – it will probably be more than twice that as the scheme is being extended to long-settled migrants from other parts of the world, including the EU, whose lives have also been messed up over the same paperwork, or lack of it – more “administrative error” – the Home Office is going to have to stump up a large fine to the Data Protection Registrar.

Money, as Mrs May tartly observed, does not grow on trees.

No, it comes out of our pockets.

As did the £33 million the Department for Transport is having to fork out in compensation to P&O Ferries for omitting to tell them they were asking relevant companies to tender for an increased supply of ferry services to and from France in the event of a No-Deal Brexit.

And the £14 million they have had to pay to get out of their contract with the famous ferry company they hired, the one with no ferries.

And the rest of the £4 billion contingency planning funds needed because of the Exit Brexit department’s futile two-year-long foot-dragging exercise, that could have gone to the NHS, or to Social Services, or to the Police, or to Education, or to mitigating local authority cuts… and the £39 billion St. Theresa’s martyrdom “Deal” has left us exposed to, in outstanding debts to the EU – in addition to whatever it has cost us to stay in the EU all this time while our dearly bought power and influence in Europe have drained away…

And the additional £1.5 billion in the Northern Ireland funding budget, that went to buy the votes of just 10 boneheaded, bowler-hatted Ulster Unionist MPs to try to shore up the disaster of Mrs May’s and Lynton Crosby’s 2017 hung election. MPs – the DUP – who have since been consistently refusing to vote for the government on Mrs May’s Brexit deal.

All public money, wasted.

Another 200,000 children fell below the absolute poverty line last year. Twice that number are expected to join them this year. Homelessness is increasing. Schools are having to fund clothing and food banks for their pupils and beg parents for money to buy books, paper and pens – and even teachers.

The NHS is short 45 thousand GPs and the medical establishment has warned that the service can never catch up the numbers now, at the current rate of training and overseas recruitment – it’s too late. And thanks to the abolition of bursaries for undergraduate trainees, another “austerity” measure, over 100 thousand more nurses are needed, a figure the Health Secretary disputes.

And now, after spending £1.5 billion on panic No Deal measures, including the recruitment of thousands of additional, temporary contract Civil Servants to put the country on a war footing, the Government has backed off and fired them all again.

What the hell is going on?

This is the Tory party that, come election time, will be telling us again all about their invincible reputation for fiscal responsibility and how the Opposition Labour Party bankrupted the country.

Twelve years ago. (And they didn’t. Bankers bankrupted the country. Please remember that!) Through sheer ineptitude, care-lessness, as their support base dwindles the arrogant Tories have cost the country a fortune.

And we’ve had enough. We’re mad as hell. Polly Toynbee writes:

“Once, the pied pipers of Brexit played tunes of hope and optimism with fantasies of buccaneering freedom, but none of that is left; not in Westminster or anywhere else. The fairy dust blew away, and now all that’s left is the dark, backward-looking nativism that underpinned it.”

A nativism that is finding expression in Nigel Farage’s new “Brexit”, the party of All the Deplorables.

 

Factoid corner

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, is paid $1 a year.

 

GW: And Bolsonaro to you too

Brazil: “At least 10 people have been killed by flash floods and landslides in Rio de Janeiro after a storm brought strong winds and massive amounts of rain. The city declared a state of crisis late on Monday, 08 April. Flash flooding turned some streets into raging rivers, downed trees and swept away cars. Roadblocks remain in various parts of the city, due to flooding and falling trees. Traffic and public transport have been severely affected. Thousands were left without electricity after power lines were damaged.” (Floodlist) And at least 3 more people have drowned in floods that hit the northeast of the country.

Ghana: “Heavy rain over the last few days has caused flooding and destruction in parts of Ghana, including the capital Accra” – where 5 deaths were confirmed after flash flooding late on Sunday 07 April. Heavy pre-monsoonal rain also affected other areas of the country, floods displacing hundreds and destroying homes. (From Floodlist) This, while the UN is again warning of increasingly severe drought conditions affecting food supplies in the northeast and Horn of Africa regions.

USA: Look, something is definitely wrong. Yet another winter storm is dumping a foot of snow over the northern midwestern states. “Blizzard warnings have been issued for parts of six states as Winter Storm Wesley takes aim at those regions with heavy snow and high winds, contributing to dangerous travel conditions and shutting down highways. Wesley could flirt with all-time April low-pressure records in parts of the Plains”, according to The Weather Channel. Severe thunderstorms are also predicted ahead of the snowline. “Thundersnow was reported early Wednesday in parts of South Dakota.” How many is that this winter? It seems never-ending. Almost a new ice-age….

Iran: “The north-east province of Golestan received 70% of its average annual rainfall within one day, but the worst effects have since been felt in the south-west where further rain is due to arrive.” Tens of thousands of residents of the southwestern city of Ahvaz were ordered to evacuate as floodwater lapped the suburbs. “Dams are presently at 95% capacity, renewing fears of flooding. Snowmelt from the mountain regions has also contributed to rapidly rising water levels.” (Guardian World Weatherwatch/Middle East Eye).

India: Sweltering heat has gripped parts of India in the past week, with temperatures regularly exceeding 40C (104F) in the north-west and central states, though the heat has also shifted northward in recent days. High temperatures combined with moisture and instability owing to the nearby “western disturbance” also triggered thunderstorms and dust storms across Jammu and Kashmir (Guardian World Weatherwatch).

Meanwhile on the hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons front, nada. Niente. Nothing. It’s all gone deathly quiet out there. And a lovely sunny day here in Boglington, bit of a cool sea breeze but I’ve got 18.4C in the front garden.

Oh, and it’s been snowing in Spain.

Yellowstone: Quakes still swarming at the Lake, M5.0 Eq. recorded at Hebgen Lake on the edge of the park, biggest in years (USGS downgraded to M4.4). Quakes crossed the plate, showed up again on the East coast. Spectograms showing magma movement and gas release “not working” again. Steamboat geyser erupts for the 12th time this year (record 32 set in 2018). (Greeley/Ferruaio blogs.)

How to stop a hurricane. (Warning: You will need $40 billion a year)… Jumpin’ Jack’s Not Very Flash…Stormy Weather… GW: “Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath, ‘long about a Saturday nite”… Censorship news…

Quote of the week

“One cubic metre of air at a temperature of 30°C can hold about 30 grams of water vapour. A cubic kilometre of such air contains the same energy as the Hiroshima bomb…. Hurricanes can be hundreds of kilometres in diameter and so contain tens of thousands of Hiroshimas.”

-Dr Stephen Salter, writing in Arctic News (14 Sept.).

How to stop a hurricane. (Warning: You will need $40 billion a year…)

Stephen’s topic is hurricane mitigation. He reckons that by using 600 times the mean output of all the electricity generated in the USA over 200 days, you could cool the volume of seawater it takes to kickstart a season’s worth of Cape Verde Atlantic hurricanes by 2C, thus probably preventing them from forming (unless the water is even warmer…).

A more practical way of preventing hurricanes then would be to spend $40 billion a year on building and maintaining a fleet of 100 ships specially designed and equipped to spray saltwater droplets of a particular size into the air, causing hurricanes to turn into ‘gentle tropical storms’. That’s just the Atlantic, by the way.

For those of us who remember his entertaining columns containing madly logical ideas in New Scientist magazine, the name of the late ‘Daedalus’ comes to mind.

“Comrade, famous spire is 123 meters! Who knew?”

 

“Now we know. He’s the real ‘little rocket-man’…”

Stormy Weather

So, “Full Disclosure”, the short-awaited memoirs of Ms Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, award-winning porno movie director, grande horizontale and Trump Nemesis, is hitting the stands about now and threatens to out-best-sell even last week’s Get Donny! best-seller, Bob Woodward’s fearless White House exposé, “Fear”.

Apart from the obligatory stories of her abused childhood, the key to rocketing sales of Stephanie’s tell-all tome is obviously going to be the more descriptive passages concerning That Night of seemingly not so steamy Passion at the Golf Club, and the exact dimensions of the priapic pussygrabber’s orange junk.

Reviewing the book, The Guardian‘s Tom McCarthy writes that Stormy reveals all in “excruciating detail”…

SPOILER ALERT

“She describes Trump’s penis as ‘smaller than average’ but ‘not freakishly small.’

‘He knows he has an unusual penis,’ Daniels writes. ‘It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool… I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart…

‘It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.’”

So now we know. He’s the real “little rocket-man”…

Presidential image (boingboing.com)

“Fear” on the other hand has had a lukewarm reception in Washington. Apparently, journos inside the Beltway are yawning, rather. There’s nothing the doyen of investigative journalists has dug up that tells them anything they – or we – didn’t already know.

And, opines Politico, since the Kennedy era, as expectations of the rectitude of the office-holders have waned over the years, we’ve learned that all Presidents are pretty inconsiderable people on the inside. Trump especially is benefiting from public neurasthenia: nobody cares how badly he behaves, how dangerously incompetent, capricious, corrupt, vindictive, money-obsessed, narcissistic and ignorant he might be, it’s all hard-wired into the political mindscape.

(It doesn’t bode well for Number 46, whoever that’s going to be….)

“…the combination of decades of disillusion, along with decades of Trump’s behavior hiding in plain sight, go a long way to explaining why Woodward’s merciless account has changed so little… Long before Trump, our would-be leaders began to strive to convince us not of their heroic stature, but their human dimensions.” (Politico Magazine)

The knowledge therefore that, to go with the Hobbit-like dimensions of his tiny hands and feet, the Leader of the Free World has a winkie like a button-mushroom and not much clue what to do with it; even banging a porn star while his undocumented new wife was still nursing their infant son, and being spanked on the bare bottom with a copy of Time magazine, might once have been Trump’s electoral undoing; not now.

Likely, the image will evoke feelings of maternal sympathy among the more matronly dumbfucks, and among those of his MAGA hat-wearing supporters for whom a very big gun collection has to substitute for whatever.

(Or a mushroom cloud? Ed.)

 

Retail news extra

Jumpin’ Jack’s Not So Flash

“The perfect metaphor for post-Brexit Britain: a chain of bog-standard discount stores where stuff comes pot-luck in crates.”

Tesco has opened the first of a chain of discount mini-supermarkets, branded ‘Jack’s’. The report in The Guardian says:

“Heavy rain and winds did not deter bargain-hungry shoppers on the opening day of Tesco’s new discount chain, Jack’s, with long queues to enter the store and the car park overflowing. At 10am on Thursday, the formal opening time, 150 people were waiting to enter the new supermarket in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. The store is Tesco’s attempt to fend off the German discounters Aldi and Lidl.”

They got a free cupcake, and a jute bag-for-life. Grateful shoppers apparently then took the empty bag along to Aldi, down the street.

“Or we could just stand in the street and chuck groceries at you…”

What the report doesn’t really explain is why Tesco feels it needs to go to the extra expense of adding another chain of convenience stores to its existing stable of, er, convenience stores – and why, just to compete with Aldi and Lidl, it has given it a patronizingly downmarket name, weakening its own famous brand, and briefed its store design team to make it look as completely shitty as possible?

Why not just reduce your prices? It’s the perfect metaphor for post-Brexit Britain: a chain of bog-standard discount stores where stuff comes pot-luck in crates; a lowering of horizons to adapt to a dysphoric new world of food banks; of scrimping and saving and making-do for the down-at-heel.

The founder of Tesco, Jack Cohen would certainly recognize it. The son of Jewish migrants to the grim East End of London in the early 1900s, his first shops did away with doors, to make them – as his Wikipedia entry says – more like market stalls: a dog-eat-dog environment where, after leaving elementary school at 14, he survived on his wits.

Welcome to the future.

 

 

GW: “Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath, ‘long about a Saturday nite”

Your old Gran thinks you’ve probably heard enough about Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut to last a month or two, as even the MSM (mainstream media) seems to have woken up to the synchronous superstorms as a sensational news story this past week.

So here are some of the less reported wild and wacky weather scenarios we’ve dug up from the litter of the past ten days:

Algeria: the city of Tebessa was underwater (12 Sept.) after flash-flooding during a torrential rainstorm washed away hundreds of cars. A child died and another is missing.

Turkey: 13th, a powerful storm dumped 147 mm rain in a day, caused flash-flooding in Bandirma, in the north of the country. Again, cars seem to have been the main victims. Is the planet telling us something?

Spain: the narrow streets of old medieval towns prove ideal for heavy rains to turn them into raging torrents. Several towns have been affected by flash-flooding since the 7th September. On the 14th, 50 mm rain fell on Malaga in under half-an-hour. Video has just been posted of a powerful storm that battered Granollers, north of Barcelona, on 7 Sept., felling trees and ripping off roofs. Intense rainfall brought flash-flooding to the city.

Climate & Extreme Weather News #136/ Indianfoodies website/

USA: as remnant hurricane Florence (42 dead) moves north, Virginia has been struck by destructive tornadoes – 1 dead. Up to 6 inches of rain flooded basements, stranded cars and prompted evacuations in two locations on the east side of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Monday night. There’s been severe flooding around Raleigh, Va. “Where these clusters of thunderstorms stall for a period of a few hours, localized flash flooding is likely, with rain rates of 1 to 4 inches per hour. If these clusters stall over parts of Iowa, southern Minnesota and southern Wisconsin, flash flooding might occur faster, given soil moisture remains high after last month’s flooding.” – The Weather Channel

Hurricane season news: Wunderground’s Bob Henson reports:

“…every ocean basin in the Northern Hemisphere is now running above average for accumulated cyclone energy … The Atlantic’s ACE is running 28% above average for this time of year, and the 10 named storms and 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic are both well ahead of average counts for this point in the season. … At least part of every ocean basin on Earth saw record-warm SSTs during August, according to NOAA’s monthly climate report issued on Monday.

(The Carolinas are still struggling with the aftermath of Florence, which broke all State records, dumping up to 33 inches of rain before moving north. Rivers are still rising, and the city of Wilmington (pop. 120,000) may be cut off for a second time since the weekend, requiring emergency supplies to be helicoptered in.) (Wunderground)

Nigeria: Mrs May’s raindancing has done the trick… 100 people have died during two weeks of intensive rainfall. Many areas have experience localized flash flooding, (while) wide areas of the country now face flooding from the country’s major rivers after long-term rainfall in Nigeria and river catchments in neighbouring countries caused the Niger and Benue rivers to rise to danger levels. (Edited from Floodlist report)

Office workers in Hong Kong thought they’d been hit by an earthquake.

Philippines: Over 70 dead and 50 missing after 135 mph Supertyphoon Mangkhut clipped the north of Luzon island; widespread crop and property damage. At least 4 people died after the storm made landfall again 80 miles from Hong Kong, where it blew the windows out of high-rise office blocks and rained papers off the desks. As of 17 September, Mangkhut had dissipated into a tropical depression and will continue to weaken. However parts of south west China and northern provinces of Vietnam could see intense rainfall and strong winds. (edited from Floodlist report – also, see CEWN #126 for video)

UK: Remnant Cat 1 hurricane Helene continued weakening rapidly along its forecast track, out of the Azores and up the Irish sea… feared windspeeds and rainfall totals failed to materialize over Ireland and western Britain. Unrelated, Storm Ali is, however, heading in off the north Atlantic 19 Sept. with forecast windspeeds of 80 mph. (Various sources)

Update: First of the season, Storm Ali brought winds gusting in the Scottish highlands to 115 mph. 2 people were killed, a woman in the Irish Republic when a caravan blew off a cliff; a workman in Northern Ireland when a tree fell on him. A number of people were injured by flying debris. Thousands of homes in Scotland without power.

A second storm is forecast for tomorrow, 20 Sept, further south, bringing up to 4 in. of rain and possible flooding to Wales; and another for Sunday 23rd. The words ‘atmospheric river’ have not passed the forecasters’ lips, but that is what the map looks like as the fragmented jetstream winds (175 mph) ferry a belt of rainstorms eastwards across the Atlantic through northern Europe.

Climate news:

“Bad things can happen when you’re talking about a storm this size. It’s called Mother Nature.” – So ran a tweet from the chump-in-chief, Trump, warning Carolinians to evacuate ahead of H. Florence. Think Progress website has a report of new research he won’t want to hear:

“The authors of a bombshell new analysis, ‘The human influence on Hurricane Florence,’ disagree (that it’s just ‘Mother Nature’). They find that human-caused global warming has supercharged the atmosphere so much that it is boosting the very worst of the projected rainfall totals by more than 50 percent. (And they were talking about 18 inches, not 33…)

“ThinkProgress asked coauthor Dr. Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) whether ‘your analysis allows us to say the storm is more than just Mother Nature?’ He replied in an email:

“‘Indeed. The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!’”

Local news:

After waiting until a quarter past one for the rain to ease off, Hunzi and I took the plunge before his bladder exploded.

Almost literally plunging: the brief lull ended within a few minutes and it came bucketing down again. Luckily I had my golfing umbrella, that I use to deflect passing traffic. Only my left sleeve bore the brunt.

On the way we passed the nearby river monitoring station, where I now realized why workmen had been so busy the past couple of weeks.

The new river level gauges they’ve installed will give the management authority an extra 6 feet to play with.

Should they need as much, I fear for my neighbours across the street, whose houses are 3 feet below road-level and were flooded out in a 2-day storm, June 2012. The rise in river level was down to a mistake at the hydro-power dam upstream, not to Mother Nature, so it hasn’t happened since. But….

There’s Something They’re Not Telling Us….

 

Yellowstone News: The Blessed Mary Greeley reports, the Steamboat geyser, biggest in the park, has gone off yet again – that’s the 19th time this year (17 Sept). Normally 1 or 2 times a year, if at all, the frequency is now roughly every 4-5 days and getting shorter, with longer and more violent outwellings.

20 Sept: Part of the Norris Junction area of the park has been closed to visitors, as another geyser, Ear Spring (‘A normally docile hot pool’), has been chucking superheated steam, rocks the size of bowling balls and discarded junk 30 feet into the air. It hasn’t erupted since 1957. (US Geological Survey newsletter)

Other, normally quiescent geysers are also showing unprecedented activity. Groundwater temperature has increased to 206F. USGS also reports, a new geyser has formed near Old Faithful, and an 8-foot diameter area around it is ‘breathing’, ie the ground is rising and falling by 6 inches – every 10 minutes! (This is perfectly natural, apparently. Although no-one’s noticed before. Think: boiling porage…)

 

Censorship news:

‘Dutchsinse’, alias Michael Janitch, the St Louis-based earthquake forecaster, looks like he’s been finally shut down by a concert party of USGS and international geo-agencies who have put out a joint statement claiming he’s just a big fat liar. Your Old Granny, who has sat through many of his three-times daily roundups at agonizing length, has to say there’s no evidence of that. A more painfully honest truthsayer would be hard to find.

He actually has a better-than 80 per cent record of accurately predicting timings, locations and magnitudes of quakes to within reasonable self-set tolerances, based on a simple theory of mechanical pressure distribution across plate boundaries that the experts say is scientific bullshit, as: “you can’t predict earthquakes”. The problem is, he can – and does; without pretending to have supernatural powers.

So what is the point of milking taxpayers to maintain those official agencies, if the best they can manage is to tell people there’s just been an earthquake or a volcanic eruption somewhere – something the people on the spot might have noticed for themselves? What purpose does that serve? What good do they actually do? Oh, right, they measure things. And attack anyone they don’t agree with.

The point is, surely, that as a US citizen Janitch has a 1st Amendment right to promote his theory and telecast his analysis free from libellous censorship campaigns by aggrieved parties? He invites subscriptions, but his website is provided free of charge, with no paywall. So he’s not cheating anyone – and he’s right far more often than chance. Given his extensive global following, unlike USGS and the other agencies he may in fact have saved lives.

Veteran Yellowstone watcher Greeley, although unqualified as a geologist, is clearly serious in her intent and fairly clued-up, basing her analysis on years of reviewing publicly-available ground monitoring data; although she’s been predicting an eruption at any moment for the past five years at least.

I hope I’m not being unfair, because the data are becoming faintly alarming.

She may believe, but she doesn’t preach; it’s not her fault most of her followers seem to be on their knees night and day, wailing and gnashing their dentures – some unfortunately praying for the volcano to erupt soon, an event the Parks Department estimates could immediately cause 23 million casualties, so they can meet Jesus. That’s a heck of a line even for a good book signing.

If Greeley, and some less informed YouTube supervolcano doomsayers piggybacking on her website; also many less credible phenomenologists, are allowed to carry on promoting their end-of-the-world, second-coming scenarios and conspiracy twaddle, how is it that a knowledgable, intelligent and serious amateur like Janitch, however controversial his ideas, can be forced off the internet by vested interests?

Is it purely because they find him embarrassing – especially at a time when science itself is under attack from corrupt and irresponsible, unqualified politicians led by a climate-change denying US President, who really ought to know better?

Perhaps we should be told. My conspiracy theory is, they’re afraid he might one night forecast some truly terrible event, information over which they would have no control and that might cause mass panic when it came true.

Just sayin’.

 

 

 

Walkies-talkie… School Shooting News… Russia hour… Would you like to meet my hero?… Bidness on the Cheep… uSwitch if you have to… GW: and the Beast Goes On.

Foxy

Foxier

Walkies-talkie

“The scientists found dogs were more likely to want to spend time with the speaker who had used both “dog-directed” speech and dog-related content. … This suggests that adult dogs need to hear dog-relevant words spoken in a high-pitched emotional voice in order to find it relevant.”

…there are no plans to carry out the same tests with cats.” – BBC News

Just as well. They’d think we were idiots, getting all squeaky and emotional over cat-related content.

They already do.

 

School Shooting News

Trump crony, billionaire Dick’s wife, Betsy DeVos, the fully unqualified, Bible-Truther Education Secretary of the USA (Imoji: wry smileyface throwing up), went to Florida the other day to case the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, scene of a massacre, for a photo op.

Ms Carly Novell, the editor of the school’s newspaper Eagle Eye, said she was allowed to photograph DeVos, but not to accompany her on the campus tour.

DeVos spoke briefly with reporters after what she said was “a very sobering and very inspiring visit” and contradicted the students’ account of the meeting:

“There were a number of student newspaper reporters who walked around with me (she fibbed) and they are obviously very interested in seeing what adults are going to do about this whole situation,” she said. (BBC News)

P/Matronizing cow. Did your English teacher never chide you about the over-use of ‘very’ when amplifying your adjectives unnecessarily for effect?

ADULTS??? Fuck you!

Meanwhile, after the teenage survivors finally persuaded the Florida assembly to introduce a modest law restricting the ownership of military-grade assault weapons only to alt-right psychopaths over 21, the National Rifle Association announced that it is suing the representatives for damages. Can you get a sicker species than Americans?

Yes!

Kleimenov: a talking facelift made from Leonid Brezhnev’s old hair and a soggy ginger biscuit (BBC)

Russia hour

Botox-faced frat-boy and Putin bumguzzler, w/anchor Kirill Kleimenov had some words of comfort on the Russian government-controlled Channel One’s flagship Vremya news program, for ‘retired’ double-agent Sergei Skripal, who with his entirely innocent daughter Yulia was sprayed with nerve agent and found paralysed in a Salisbury, UK park at the weekend, both now on life-support:

“The profession of a traitor is one of the most dangerous in the world,” Kleimenov opined, (with complete journalistic objectivity. Ed.) – adding that few who had chosen it had lived to a ripe old age. … warning anyone planning to defect: “Don’t choose Britain as a place to live.” – edited from BBC News

I’m assuming that sentiment also goes for the other spies Skripal was exchanged for?

And would anyone not assume from his choice of kind words, that Kleimenov was merely confirming what all his colleagues were embarrassedly trying to deny, that this was indeed a Russian hit, aimed less at Skripal and more at the voters? And that, given the directorship of Channel One is Kremlin-appointed, on the assumption his script was cleared with official Komplianz, the message probably came from further on high?

Britain prepares an ICBM in retaliation.

Wittily, Kleimenov referred to another 13 incidents of Russians who have died in suspicious circumstances in Britain in the past few years: “Maybe it’s the climate, but in recent years there have been too many strange incidents with grave outcomes there.” Ho ho, our terrible English climateski…. Have you ever been to Moscow, comrade? If it’s not fucking freezing it’s a sweatbox. And if the Big Blini don’t like you, you’re dead regardless. (Killer pun there, too. “Grave” outcomes!)

No words were naturally forthcoming to memorialize the nine or so Russian citizens based in America, involved with or having knowledge of the cyberattacks on the US election, including the UN ambassador, who mysteriously suffered heart failure and fell from roofs shortly after Mr Trump was trampolined into office last year. Even true patriots take their lives in their hands when you work for this lot.

One of the Polonium killers, two blundering FSB goons who left a radioactive slime trail across London in 2006 before poisoning another traitor, Putin’s old KGB mate Alexander Litvinenko, also managed to think up a wry comment of his own. Dmitry Lugovoi, now an MP, remarked: “The English suffer from phobias.” Yes, we’re a bit phobic about dimwitted mafia hitmen sneering at our national aversion to murder and causing mayhem on our streets and in our tearooms, actually. Especially from kulaks whose asses our North Atlantic convoys saved in 1941.

So comforting, these moral certainties.

On the other hand, it seems odd. Why choose exile in Salisbury, of all places, agreeably ancient county capital of Wiltshire, home to major defense industry contractors Qinetic, the Ministry of Defence tank ranges, close to the notorious Porton Down biological warfare establishment and RAF Lyneham (from where our troops embark for Afghanistan) and within an hour’s drive of our key naval establishments on the south coast?

You’d think he’d have been keener to vanish in Soho. Unless of course he knows something about Trump’s collusion? What, was he a connection to Christopher Steele?

I don’t suppose we shall be told.

 

Would you like to meet my hero?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVfcfej5JYI

 

Doing Bidness on the Cheep

“Fast-food chain KFC has returned to its old supplier after suffering chicken shortages that forced it to close hundreds of outlets. Last month, the chain experienced widespread distribution problems after it decided to switch its logistics contract from Bidvest to DHL.” – BBC News

If you have to ask what’s in it, you’re probably a paramedic.

What is the matter with British management? What did the bread-encrusted baboons at KFC Central think would happen if they fired a specialist food distribution company they’d worked with for years and instead hired a bloated global conglomerate of self-employed Amazon parcel couriers owned by the German post office to keep their outlets supplied with crummy chunks of raw animal torture-porn, just because they were cheaper?

The move damn nearly destroyed their business, with an outburst of social media opprobrium and thousands of ironic memes online, fights breaking out and street protests requiring probably a couple of million poundsworth of reputation management PR to get them back on course. Who knew KFC, with their repulsive ‘buckets’ of fried chicken aimed at grossly obese, piss-stained sofa-dwelling slobs with tattoo’d necks and calf-length shorts, were such a national institution?

But apparently The People cared. (Then they voted… and you know, DHL could just be their salvation, having developed systems for managing customs controls.)

This crazy nonsense of ‘best value tendering’ must stop soon. It’s destroying businesses, jobs – lives.

We’ve just had the Carillion disaster, where a hairy-assed housebuilding firm gets huge government contracts to run cut-price prisons, military housing and hospital services into the ground so the directors can stuff their sagging back pockets with wads of taxpayer cash, gaily spewing out profit warnings until the business hits the wall. Wikipedia notes:

The liquidation announcement had an immediate impact on 30,000 subcontractors and suppliers, Carillion employees and pensioners, plus shareholders, lenders, joint venture partners and customers in the UK, Canada and other countries.

But what the hell, the directors got paid.

This kind of shit killed my little business in the 1990s, when companies with no sector experience or creative expertise started throwing in spoilers to separate us from our clients, adding no value whatever and driving our margins down to the point where we couldn’t pay the staff.

There is really something to be said for contracting people who know and care about what they’re doing.

For loyalty.

 

uSwitch if you have to

Yet again we had a contract. I would pay them £70 a month, in advance, for my minuscule usage of electricity and gas. We would review the amount again after six months. Five days later, their computer emailed me, demanding £130 a month: “to avoid surprises”.

How they work out your bill.

It was probably the seventh time in two years OVO had tried it on, and I finally hit the ceiling. I am paranoid about my use of energy, living much of my life in the cold and dark, wearing two sweaters in bed and going about by the light of a small hand-torch. My piece of ‘real estate’ comprises two rooms downstairs, 12′ x 12′ sitting-room and only slightly more spacious kitchen/diner, and two up: bedroom, bathroom and 7′ x 9′ boxroom, where my son was kept folded until he moved out.

In the small back yard is this, muh Li’l House on the Prairie, as I call my exotic shed. I spend 80 per cent of my life out here, using the actual house only to cook and sleep and you-know-what. Although I mostly pee in the yard, I get so little warning.

Subsisting thus, I could not possibly be using so much energy, but no-one seemed willing to address the question I kept asking them: if I spend only £22 a month on gas, including 27p a day ‘standing charge’, when gas heats all my water and cooks my meals, how would anyone imagine I can also be using £94-worth of electricity just to sit here alone, by the light of a single LED lamp, writing this stuff on a laptop I keep pouring wine over?

Attempting furiously to switch to another supplier, saving £176 a year (how do they know?), I set up the new account using a number they gave me. The next day they emailed to say my existing supplier had objected, so we could not proceed. I would have to phone my existing supplier and then when the problem had been resolved, call them back.

There were some arrears, it turned out. Actually an improbable amount I had overlooked, fondly imagining that ‘balance’ meant plus, not minus. I cleared the outstanding debt immediately and obtained permission to switch. The next day I went back to my new supplier and, in person over the phone with a charming Irish lady called Maggie, spent half an hour setting up a new account with a new number – the first number now being inoperative.

And the following day got an email saying there was still an objection and they couldn’t switch my account.

So I phoned my old supplier again – they were beginning to sound quite sympathetic – and there genuinely was no objection. At least not from my old supplier.

The objection, it turned out, now came from my new supplier.

They were telling me I couldn’t have two account numbers, so they had cancelled both and I was to phone again and set up my account for the third time, with all the same information, the same tariff and contract, the same bank details, that I had verbally already signed – and be given a new number.

A typical IT manager in the Independent Energy Sector.

So sorry, but no.

The UK Energy Supply sector is broken. Competing with the overcharging “Big 6” companies, there is a plethora of tiny indie operators selling “green” energy and other attractive-sounding deals. But just wait until you try to sign up with one. You will never have another moment’s peace of mind. Nothing is as advertised, nothing real.

Their systems have been designed and are operated on the cheap by a heap of groaning IT baboons, who have consumed far too much fermented fruit for their own good. Or ours.

To quote the children’s story character, Catweazle the Incompetent Wizard:

“Nothing works.”

Postscriptum: A day or two after this Post appeared we read in The Guardian that a record number of consumers have been switching supplier this winter, largely owing to exorbitant bills.

How they manage it I don’t know, but it seems they’re choosing the smaller suppliers. Caveat emptor, is all I can say.

 

Russia’s “Cold Snap”: Sakhalin Island (Denis Sergeev/Siberian Times)

GW: and the beast goes on…

Australia: “Several rivers have burst their banks in North Queensland after 4 days of heavy rain. Disaster areas declared. Many areas have recorded 500 to 700 mm of rain during that time. This is the fourth serious flood event in the state in the last 2 weeks.”

New Zealand: flooding at Hawkes Bay. Vanuatu battered by Tropical Cyclone Hola, bringing torrential rain.

Albania: “Heavy rain and melting snow have caused flooding and landslides over the last few days. Shkodër County in the north west of the country is the worst affected area where the Drin and Bojana rivers have overflowed. Local authorities there said that 2,285 hectares of land were under water.”

Thailand: powerful cyclonic storm strikes Sakon Nakhon. Flooding in Bangkok. Extensive flooding in Indonesia, Bangka Belitung & Cirebon.

Brazil: Many central areas continue to experience unusually heavy rain, thunderstorms and flash-flooding in cities.

Argentina: huge storm trashes Villa Gesell on the northern coast with 140 kmh winds.

USA: Storm Quinn – the third Nor’easter this year and the second in a week – dumps three feet of snow and knocks out power on the east coast. State-wide states of emergency declared in New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia battered. North of the border, Canada however seems to be basking in a warm spell. As again are California and the southwest…

USA: March 10, temperature in Austin, Texas hits 34C, 94F. 2 die as hailstones the size of baseballs batter Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas. Wunderground reports that, OVERALL, from September to March the USA has had a drier and warmer winter season than average. Although they have to admit, there has been record snowfall. And record flooding. With another freezing spell and another storm forecast for the East this week (Accuweather).

Portugal, Spain, France: Storm Felix brings wind, torrential rain, damage and flash-flooding to a wide area.

Kazakhstan: Heavy rainfall above river ice-jams causes extensive spring thaw floods. Many evacuated.

Africa, India, China: heatwave with temperatures “more like May/June than March” continues across a broad swathe of the globe. Temps in S. Sudan hit 48C, 118F. Floods in drought-stricken Malawi. 16 killed when lightning strikes a church in Rwanda.

Arctic: “The situation is desperate”. In February, 260 mph moisture-laden high-altitude winds split the polar vortex into 4 parts. The jetstream was looping and broken. Feb 25 the temperature at the North Pole was 1.1C, 34.1F  a 30C anomaly. The mercury hit 6C, 42.8F in northern Greenland; 8.9C, 47.9F in Hudson Bay. That’s before the sun has even risen above the horizon.

Sea ice extent was at record low for the time of the year and is due to start receding toward the summer about now: driven by gales and big waves, 5-metres thick sea ice between northern Greenland and Svalbard had given way to open water by Feb 27. Peak sea surface temperature near Svalbard rose from 12.4C, 55.4F on Feb 23 to 15.6C, 60F by March 2 – a 26F/16C anomaly above the 1981-2011 average. The rise was accompanied by a measurable methane release. March 1, CH4 levels as high as 3087 ppm were recorded, getting on for twice the global concentration averaged in 2015 (NOAA).

Floodlist/ Climate & Extreme Weather News #101/ Wunderground/ thehumptydumptytribe/ Arctic News, 3 Mar/ CEWN #102

 

Life, the Best Medicine…

I found a note shoved through the door this morning, the postman hadn’t been able to deliver a parcel.

I know. It was my new doorbell…