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Secrets and lies

“Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial enters its 16th day on Monday in New York with the potential for bombshell testimony as his former fixer turned prosecution witness, Michael Cohen, is expected to take the stand“, writes Victoria Bekiempis in The Guardian, 13 May.

It seems to have come as a complete shock to the media that, in a case where the defendant is accused of covering up illicit ‘hush money’ payments in advance of an election by falsifying his business accounts, the person who allegedly made the payments on his behalf and the individual who allegedly received the money are being called to be cross-examined in the trial.

‘Who you gonna call?’ became a well-known slogan in the wake of the film Ghostbusters. So, who the hell else do you expect to be called as prosecution witnesses in a trial of a case in which they are so deeply, individually implicated?

But ‘bombshell’? FFS, media, wake up. Go back to the original 2018 trial of Michael Cohen and you will find all the facts of the current case (except possibly the extent of the cover-up, 34 instances in all of falsifying records) were exposed then, on the stand, under oath – even the disappointing size and odd ‘mushroom’ shape of the presidential penis, and the spanking with Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ cover – possibly a forgery. Cohen is a nasty piece of work, but also comical, who formerly expressed almost filial devotion to his mentor, Trump, but later turned against him with some pretty damning evidence. He thus became one of the few members of his gang Trump never pardoned, describing Cohen as ‘a rat’.

(Incidentally, there is another possible offence Trump could be charged with, inasmuch as it is technically illegal in the US for an elected official to benefit personally from commuting the prison sentence of a convicted criminal, as Trump did with Manafort and Stone, both of whom agreed in exchange not to testify against the boss. In the case of Alan Weisselberg, former CFO of Trump Organisation, his refusal to testify against Trump over a tax dodge got him a 5-months jail sentence, which the Teflon Don could do nothing about as he was no longer in office – though the favour could undoubtedly be repaid at some later date. However, while the Framers could scarcely have foreseen that a serving President might act in such a way, so that the constitutional position is uncertain, the common law has generally persuaded jurists that the power of pardon is unconditional, albeit with certain conditions.) (Harvard Law Review)

A third key witness has, of course, been David Pecker, the former editor of celebrity gossip rag The National Enquirer (for some reason, my local convenience store here in West Wales stocks a few copies each week). Notorious for his willingness for a few dollars to bury stories about his friend, Trump, Pecker has been more forthcoming on the stand, and admitted that he, Cohen and Trump discussed making the payments.

Cohen has done much to rehabilitate himself through an endless round of good-humoured, mildly scabrous media appearances since his release, and, inevitably, a ‘crush and tell’ book. To most people, I suspect, he comes across as a loveable rogue – although if you had crossed his boss, you would not have wanted to meet him in a car park. Yet the speculation that surrounds his upcoming appearance as the star witness in the Stormy Daniels trial is all about his trustworthiness on the stand, an ex-con who admitted to witness tampering and tax evasion, perjured himself and lied to the FBI – how could you possibly trust his word against that of a former President of the United States, a man accused of telling only 35 THOUSAND lies while in office, and quite a few more since?

Something about beds and lying in them springs to mind. But The Pumpkin would be happy to believe Cohen’s testimony. Really, it would be for the best.

Stick around now, it may show

School’s Out for Summer

“’It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide,’” a group of 25 U.N. experts said in a statement last month. ‘These attacks are not isolated incidents,’ it added. ‘They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.’” In response, the Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that it has no ‘doctrine that aims at causing maximal damage to civilian infrastructure.’” (Guardian). In other words, it’s an accident – incompetence. Great. Palestinian civilian casualties from Netanyahu’s berserk rampage have now passed 35 thousand, 10 thousand more are still missing, presumed dead or spirited away to the IDF’s interrogation centres. The 10-year cost of rebuilding Gaza’s shattered housing and public infrastructure is estimated at $40 billion and rising (UN).

Blow up

“UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees says it has been forced to temporarily close its occupied East Jerusalem compound after what it called ‘Israeli extremists’ set fire to the perimeter following weeks of repeated attacks” (Al Jazeera). UNRWA’s aid activities have been disastrously curtailed following an accusation that ‘a dozen’ or so of its operatives in Gaza had taken part in the Hamas outrage of 7th. October. The accusation has yet to be shown to be true, and not just an example of Tel Aviv’s relentless self-exculpatory propaganda campaign.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera, the worldwide news agency sponsored by the UAE state of Qatar, principal broker of the peace negotiations, has been given its marching orders by the regime in Tel Aviv, claiming it is a Hamas mouthpiece. Nothing to do with reporting some uncomfortable truths, then. (See previous Post)

The agency has spent a lot of journalistic effort on examining the strategic advantages to Israel of eliminating the threats and inconvenience of Gaza; advantages that are both security related and economic; but have little to do with ‘self-defence’. For instance, we have previously referred to the existence of a potentially lucrative gas field off the coast, once the interest of the Trump regime, for which the Israeli government conceded 12 drilling licences to their own and US national energy companies within days of the Hamas breakout on 7 October last year.

Al Jazeera has pointed to three more reasons to shove the surviving Palestinians out into the baking Sinai desert. Plans exist, and have been publicly announced, both for a possible alternative to the Suez canal, from Eilat in the Red Sea to the Med., the shortest route being through Gaza; and for a high-speed rail link along the coast from Tel Aviv to Riyadh in Saudi Barbaria; serving, presumably, bin Salman’s futuristic linear city known as The Line, now under construction. And, as Trump’s former Middle East peace envoy, son-in-law and property developer, Jared Kushner has pointed out, the coastline of Gaza would be a magnet for tourism development.

In the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel temporarily closed down its Gaza-adjacent gas production rigs and pipeline facilities for ‘security’ reasons, although Hamas’ rocket crews seem to have avoided attacking those obvious targets. Such a move would be likely to deter international investors in the proposed development projects, unless the security threat could be lifted once and for all. The reasons for continuing a bombardment that has already flattened over half the built environment of this crowded little mini-state and made internal refugees of 70 per cent of the terrorised population seem speculative, but it’s the kind of persistent speculation that can easily get your news operation shut down.

GW: Your favorite weather gal, all in a whirl

USA: “There is the potential for another foot of rain to fall on parts of northeastern Texas next week, prompting renewed flooding, while other portions of the southern United States will see rising rivers and streams.” A storm tracking eastward from the Rockies will collide with a slow moving band of rain from off the Gulf… “Flooding problems could be made even worse as there will probably be too little time between the rain rounds to allow for waters to recede.” (AcccuWeather)

Afghanistan: “At least 50 people, mainly women and children, have been killed in flash flooding in the northern Afghanistan province of Baghlan. The number could increase in the coming days. Emergency personnel are still searching for any possible victims under the mud and rubble, with the help of security forces from the national army and police.” (From: Guardian)

Indonesia: The Guardian (12/05) reports: “Heavy rains triggered flash floods and caused torrents of cold lava and mud to flow down a volcano’s slopes on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, killing at least 41 people and leaving more than a dozen others missing…. Monsoon rains and a major mudslide from a cold lava flow on Mount Marapi caused a river to breach its banks and tear through mountainside villages in four districts in West Sumatra province just before midnight on Saturday.”

Hawaii: “A storm that had dumped more than half a foot of rain on part of the (tropical island paradise) will slowly spiral southward and keep the flood risk heightened into next week.” Several inches of snow is also possible at the peaks of the Big Island, blown by 75 mph winds.” (AcccuWeather)

Brazil: Southern Brazil, already reeling from deadly floods, is bracing for more disruption as “meteorologists warned of 12 straight hours of heavy rain Friday and more throughout the weekend. The death toll in the floods that have ravaged parts of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul has inched up to 113 … as relentless downpours sweep the region and spread to parts of neighboring Uruguay.” Many more are still missing. (AcccuWeather)

Tailpipe

“Venezuela is the first country in modern history to lose all of its glaciers after climate scientists declared its remaining glacier little more than an ice field. Humboldt Glacier has shrunk to an area of two hectares and has gone static. … The Humboldt Glacier, also known as La Corona, was the last remaining one in Venezuela after the country lost at least five others in the past century due to the effects of climate change.”

And more from AcccuWeather: there have been reports of tornadoes somewhere in the midwest, southern and even the east coast states of the USA every day for the past 14 days. “As of Thursday morning (May 10), there have been 699 preliminary tornado reports across the United States, well above the historical average of 549 through May 8, according to the Storm Prediction Center. There have been 129 preliminary reports so far in May, following 378 twisters in April.” So far it’s not quite the busiest tornado season on record, but the others have all ocurred within the last 18 years.

Suck it and C

“Mammoth”, a technological solution to climate change, has begun operations in Iceland. It’s a large-scale machine designed to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in solid form underground. As we continue to pump 38 billion tonnes of climate-changing CO2 into the air and rising every year, Mammoth will remove just 36 thousand tonnes. Better than nothing, but close to it. Much larger systems are under construction in Texas where, wouldn’t you know, the ultimate purpose is to use the gas under pressure to help void aging oil wells, wringing every last cent of profit from the tortured land for no environmental gain. No doubt th’ orl bidness moguls will claim it as some kind of green technology breakthrough.

Drowned and out

What has happened to the Floodlist website, sponsored by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts? Nothing has been posted since the 24th of March. Along with Climate and Extreme Weather News, Wunderground and the apparently defunct Copernicus site, Severe Weather Europe, your Old Gran has lamented the loss of numerous useful sources over the years. Maybe the weather is all over?

Signs and apartments

“Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: a 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space (about 8′ x 5′) for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said. ‘She was homeless,’ said Brennon Warren, an officer with the Midland police department. ‘It’s a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign.’” (AP/ Guardian US). Maybe she was given away by the sound of her yelling at the printer?

The days of wine and neuroses

Twisting the facts #1

This is the year 2023, right? Wrong, it’s 2024, as I realised this morning after it came to me that a Post I posted a few days ago referred to the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. I had even imagined the Chief Rabbi, Dr Mirvis, telling us about that in his Passover homily on the BBC’s Today programme.

Somewhere, somehow, I had lost a year.

Oh dear, what else have I been writing about recently, that isn’t true? And why has no-one, all my faithful Spammers, Likers, Followers and Those No Longer Reading muh li’l bogl, written in to take me to task, sharply? Does it even matter? If a tree falls in the forest, etc.

I expect, to be honest, it’s because we’re all so used to being lied to nowadays by people we thought we could trust, that we no longer notice.

Let’s at least try to care.

Not for the ears of children

The judge and defense counsel at Trump’s ‘Stormy’ trial had to reprimand the ‘porn star’ for giving too much salacious detail during her testimony, asking if her account was even relevant. Turns out, it was because they feared American jurors might be offended by the sexual imagery.

It’s a theory

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (noted conspiracy theorist and son of the well-known assassinated president’s brother. Ed.) has gone to lengths to appear healthy and vigorous while campaigning for president. But he has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.” (NYT) Perfect material, then. What’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s excuse?

GW: Twisting the facts #2

CO2: Average 48-hourly CO2 as measured by NOAA on Mauna Loa in April was around 426 parts per million, although by May 6th Spring greens had gobbled some up and it was down to 422. On 26 April, an outlying reading measured 436 ppm. Globally, insured losses from weather extremes since 1980 are estimated at $2.6 trillion. I don’t ever again want to hear some moron from the Reform party of deniers telling us, climate-change mitigation is too expensive!

“We live in an age of fools” – anon. climate scientist, quoted in Guardian interview.

USA: “A volatile weather pattern will fuel more rounds of damaging storms and tornadoes endangering lives and property in the eastern and southern United States through the end of the week. (80 million people are at risk.)… Destructive thunderstorms and tornadoes have been reported as the latest round of severe weather endangers lives and property for the third consecutive day. … One of the most intense thunderstorms of the day erupted south of Nashville, spawning a large, damaging tornado. Elsewhere, severe thunderstorms are beginning to crop up over eastern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas, including around the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Storms that ignite over these areas could produce tornadoes and very large hail as large as grapefruits. …in the Carolinas, 130,000 utility customers were without power after severe storms moved through the Charlotte area….” Storm winds in places have topped 120 mph (BBC) Snowboarders meanwhile are enjoying waist-deep powder in Brighton, Utah. In May. (From an AccuWeather roundup, 09/05/24. There’s more… Lots more.)

France: Wine drinkers, buy Chablis now, while you can afford it.. The northerly growing region was battered by huge hail from a supercell storm on May 5th.

Atmospherics chatter

Meteorologists at AccuWeather are puzzling over a series of tornadoes that didn’t obey the normal rules when they touched down in Oklahoma yesterday. One of an unusual pair that descended simultaneously out of a storm near the town of Tillman looped back on itself and sped off in the wrong direction. A third tornado appeared to be spinning the wrong way around, clockwise. And the fourth one, the one that intrigued me most, was traced on radar extending 18 thousand feet into the atmosphere, when almost all tornadoes descend out of the base of the cloud, not the top.

That report piqued my belief in coincidences, because only last night I’d been watching a disaster movie on Prime in which freezing, super-spinning tornadoes start to trash New York as a result of the atmosphere being ‘split’ in two by global warming. Last year, it was noticed during a period of impossibly intense cold on Mt Washington, in New York state, that thanks to perturbations in the jetstream, the supercold stratosphere, normally 60 thousand feet above our heads, had descended into the troposphere to an altitude below the 6 thousand feet peak of the mountain.

These movies, which all have the same plot in which a discredited scientist sets off to rescue their wayward teenage children from the encroaching ice age/ comet/ earthquake/ unexpected volcano/ solar flares/ tidal waves/ burning skyscraper/ swarming bees/ all of the above, at the same time saving the world by firing off a nuke or two, are preposterously unscientific, not that most Americans would know it, but this one, made in about 2014, appears to have been uncannily prescient. Naturally, the rogue boffin whose warnings have been dismissed by NASA has a battery of rockets in his garage he can fire into the cloud to save the Big Apple. Only, a brief sequence at the end gives us a little nudge, showing the tiny precursor twisters kicking off menacingly across the pond in Paris, France.

Just when you thought it was safe to go play in the Champs Elysee… We have been warned!

Is this a record?

Back in, I think, January – I’m no longer much good at the ‘When?’ questions – a copy of The Beatles’ first long-playing album (ask your grandad!) was sold at auction for £4.2 thousand. A record!

Now, hundreds of thousands of copies were made and distributed in many countries, Indian pressings being especially valuable, so this encouraging result became a fit subject to make the news (again, ask your grandad). I was curious, however, as to why this particular copy out of all of them, found in a cancer charity shop in London, had proved to be so rare. Curious – and excited, as I still have the copy I persuaded my mum to buy me for Christmas from Harrod’s record department when the album was first released in 1963, amazingly in perfect, undamaged condition – no hiss, pops, jumps or scratches whatsoever. I was 13 at the time.

Well, of course, mine is a mono recording (‘monaural’ – grandad will explain) which, though they must have preceded the stereo version, are apparently less valuable. Also, a small number of the original circular centre labels were printed in black and gold, while mine has ‘Parlophone’ in yellow capitals blazoned across the centre. And, as the BBC excitedly reported, “It was in fact a first pressing from the original masters of the foursome’s debut studio album…” There were other tiny points of difference perceptible only to the most fanatical collectors, thus the best price I could find on e-Bay for one similar to my copy, with its similarly interesting, battered and grimy cardboard sleeve, was a derisory 60 quid. Some were on offer for far less. The story of my life.

But nothing explained what happened next.

In a fit of nostalgia, and because I could still not believe mine was so worthless after 60 years, while needing to find around £1,200 to book a week-long jazz workshop of the enjoyable kind I used to attend every summer before Covid, not too much to ask, surely, I plucked Please Please Me from the shelf yesterday, hoping it might somehow please me, and stuck it on the gramophone (Grandad, help!), where I was able to discover once again some of the most extraordinary harmonic compositions of their time. I had forgotten how original those guys were, between the pop ‘n’ rock tracks.

And then I felt something unexpected, a slight weight I had never noticed before, remaining in the otherwise empty sleeve. Peering inside, I found a relic of a much later date, a pristine CD recording of the album in a plain white paper packet, the centre label bearing a photo facsimile of the original album cover.

Now, research shows, the first CDs did not appear on the market until 1982, when I would have been 32 years old and well past the age of demanding Beatles records for Christmas. Indeed, the loveable moptops had split up in acrimony after their manager, Brian Epstein died in 1967 and Yoko Ono had arrived on the scene, to the discomfiture of Paul. And had I for some unremembered reason bought the CD separately, it would surely have been in a plastic CD jewel case, not in a plain paper wrapper that had clearly never been opened. And had I also somehow misremembered the year in which I acquired the vinyl album, well, by 1982 it would only have been the stereo version that was available.

Just what was going on?

I have worried about it all night. It put me in mind of the time my son, aged about 5, presented me with a napped flint core he had found in the garden, miles from the nearest chalk downs, a relic of the Stone Age, that was identical in every respect to one whose photograph he had seen in an encyclopedia the previous day, which was how he knew what it was.

Did Stephen Hawking really grasp the nature of Time?

The Department of Health and Social Care

In the good old days, for a time we here at the BogPo used to run a feature called ‘First paragraph, Last paragraph’. It was based on an observation that, whatever the looming social problem identified by independent experts, when approached for comment government spokesmouths would always put the most optimistic spin on their replies, often amounting to the most risible out-and-out denials.

We here at the BogPo could therefore not resist returning to our theme this fine morning, when the dear old Grauniad published an alarming assessment of growing medicine shortages at high street chemists. So egregious was the government reply, so inadvisedly callous, that as major users of NHS drugs to keep us alive we found ourselves praying for a general election next Thursday and the public executions of the entire Tory cabinet; following a fair trial, obviously.

First paragraph:

“In a major report last month the Nuffield Trust thinktank warned that drug shortages had become a ‘new normal’ and were being worsened by Brexit. Mark Dayan, its Brexit programme lead, said: ‘Nearly every available indicator shows that since 2021 we have experienced a once unthinkable level of medicines shortages…’ … Drugs that remain in short supply include insulin, which Type 1 diabetics need to take, and the liquid form of salbutamol, which is used to tackle serious breathing problems….”

Last paragraph:

“A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “There are around 14,000 licensed medicines and the overwhelming majority are in good supply. Supply issues can arise for a wide range of reasons and are not specific to the UK.”

Breathlessly, Old Bogler remarks: Oh, okay, so I’ll just take an aspirin to keep my damaged heart from failing again, absent any entresto at the pharmacy. That’s if they haven’t run out of anadin too. Cunts.

Dull Days in Cliche

STOP PRESS (28 Apr., 2024)

Once again, Donald John Trump has been branded as ‘unindicted co-conspirator #1’ in a criminal trial. The MSNBC Daily reports: “A grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted 18 people – including key Trump aides and allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Boris Epshteyn – for their involvement in an alleged ‘fake electors’ plot to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.”

Yet for some reason, around 70% of Republican voters still believe him when he says it was Biden who ‘stole’ the election from Trump! (CNN poll)

(Incidentally, why has Meadows not been imprisoned for deliberately lying about his address on a voter registration form four years ago in North Carolina? Pamela Moses got six years and a day for making an honest mistake over her voter registration in Tennessee, but then, she’s Black, and he’s just puce.)

Nice try

Rightwing ‘news’ network, AON, has been forced to give up an attempt to suggest that Stormy Damiels had a sexual relationship with Michael Cohen, who then extorted the money from Trump’s election funds without Trump knowing, when their only ‘source’, her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, denied ever telling them that. AON has also had to pay out $millions to Dominion, the voting machine company they claimed had rigged the 2020 election on behalf of the Democrats – a theory still believed by millions of Trump supporters despite a similar fate befalling Fox News last year. (MSNBC)

The Witch/Liar Project

Given that the Washington Post factcheckers called Trump out over no fewer than 35 THOUSAND untrue claims during his four-year reign as the worst President in US history, with the possible exception of his genocidal C19th hero, Andrew Jackson, The Pumpkin has been wondering why the media never questions those obsessive and inflammatory statements he makes outside the courtrooms of the Union every day, whining that what is happening to him is a ‘witch hunt’ cooked up by the Biden administration and its weaponised court officials.

His current trial just getting underway in Manhattan on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal personal payments made illegally with campaign funds is invariably presented in the news as a single charge, of ‘paying off a porn star’ – as big a lie in its own way as Trump’s delusionary claims that he is the most persecuted President in history, a myth in which he has clearly come to believe. It is not illegal to pay off porn stars! I do it all the time.

For a start, it was Trump who began the process of ‘weaponising’ the justice department, with his futile attempts to prevent publication of the Mueller report into his campaign team’s interactions with Russian intelligence agents. A process that included firing numerous senior investigators and legal prosecutors, as well as installing a complaisant Attorney General – and Trump who packed the Supreme Court with conservatives and installed over 200 new circuit judges with lifelong tenure, many of them inexperienced or incompetent, who had expressed loyalty to him.

Then, this trial in fact began six years ago with the conviction of his former lawyer and bag-man, Michael Cohen on various charges, including tax evasion and lying to the FBI, when ‘Individual One’, as Trump was labelled in court, was branded as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’, after Cohen had outed his former boss under oath as having ordered him to make those disguised payments. Not to one ‘porn star’ who had broken her non-disclosure agreement to announce that she and Trump had had a not particularly memorable one-night stand at a golf tournament, but to two women, including a Playboy centrefold, Karen McDougal, who admitted to a six-months long affair with the coiffed sex-pest while his wife was giving birth to their son Barron.

(A third woman, Playboy model, Shari Bechard, was allegedly paid $1.6 million to keep quiet about an abortion, responsibility for which was claimed by a Republican fundraiser and friend of the President, Elliott Broidy, although few people believed him. Again it was Cohen, Trump’s lieutenant, who arranged the payment.) The Pumpkin was delighted last night when the BBC’s north America editor, Sarah Smith, usually as supine as her predecessor John ‘Sopoor’ Sopel, finally gave a brief shout-out to McDougal after weeks of pretending that the luridly named Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) was the sole recipient of Trump’s generosity; although today, all the coverage was back to misleading normality.

Given the genesis of the case against Trump, it can hardly be described as a witch hunt inspired by Biden, who was still several years away from having any influence in the matter. While, let us not forget, Biden has himself been the genuine victim of a real witch hunt inspired by Trump, that led the President to commit yet another federal crime by witholding Congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine unless President Zelinskiy agreed to instigate a phony case against Biden and his son Hunter on corruption charges. Another instance of ‘transference’, a habit of which many psychiatrists have accused him.

Though impeached and found wanting by the lower House of Representatives, thanks to the refusal of the Senate, Republican controlled at the time, to even consider the overwhelming evidence against him, Trump has been empowered to protest his innocence of absolutely everything, and to claim that the incredible total of 91 criminal charges he is currently facing are the fantasies of a hidden ‘Deep State’ that conspires against his agenda to make America great again; while it must be obvious to anyone half-awake that his openly declared policies amount to installing a self-serving kleptocratic regime behind the walls of an isolationist and backward-looking autocracy, its criminal behaviours freed from the constraints of the almighty Constitution.

But no, here we are again, idly watching the dispiriting process of normalisation of a deranged old egotist, conducted by an amnesic media on both sides of the pond; the room, emptied of oxygen.

Fucking cheek department

* Hang on, how many articles? *

• “You’ve read 2152, to be precise. That is an awful lot of free, independent journalism! 

• “It is clear that you get an incredible amount of value from our reporting, all for free. We’d like to humbly suggest that, since you are one of our most engaged and prolific readers, it would only be fair to support us financially in return.”

Uncle Bogler responds in kind to this astonishing ad hominem assault by the Editor of The Guardian – a newspaper whose owners, the Scott Trust, are sitting on a cash pile approaching one billion pounds:

Dear Ms Viner

I don’t know how old you are, if your secret agents let me live I’ll be 75 in October. Working in a newsroom, aged 20, I started reading your paper in 1970, anyway before you were born, and have no idea how many paid-for daily editions I must have bought over many years after that, supporting ‘independent journalism’ out of my hack’s meagre wage.

Eventually I switched to the digital edition, which is in theory supplied free of charge. After a while I felt you should get something in return, so I signed up for a subscription at £8 a month, about the same as I pay the New York Times and the Washington Post.

(One of them will have to go!)

Last August you demonstrated in the clearest possible terms that your journalism is far from ‘independent’, when you suspended the nation’s greatest political cartoonist, Martin Rowson, caving in under pressure from a Jewish lobby group over a preposterous allegation of antisemitism. The butt of his humour was quite clearly directed at Boris Johnson*.

No sooner had he been brought back from the sin-bin – his acerbic wit much muted – than you sacked that other brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell, for submitting a cartoon you didn’t even publish, again making the ludicrous assertion (based on a complete misreading of the text of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) that it was antisemitic, before any of the Tel Aviv mafia had even had a chance to exert pressure on you.

He has never returned.

Until he does, you can make whatever importunate demands you like on my pension. Splitting my own infinitives with gay abandon, I would like to humbly suggest, you can go fuck yourselves.

Independent, my arse.

(PS: don’t imagine that scrolling through your headlines looking desperately for engaging content is the same as actually reading the articles.)

• The Rowson cartoon actually showed a diminitive figure, that of Mr Richard Sharp, bearing a bag of cash towards a much larger figure, Johnson, squatting toad-like atop a pile of treasure. The story being that Sharp might be assumed to have acquired his influential position as Chairman of the BBC after assisting the prime minister to obtain surety for a loan of £800 thousand from an acqaintance. Mr Sharp just happens to be Jewish, not that anyone would have known; the Board of Deputies of British Jews objected to the caricature, whose prominent nose, they said, was an antisemitic trope. Oddly, no-one has objected to the faintly obscene depiction of Johnson as a naked fat man with a forked tongue. Mr Sharp later resigned his post.

A sense of irony

And while you’re shuffling disconcertedly in your chair and thinking, hang on, this bloke’s a closet antisemite, it might be a good time to enquire whether the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has any sense of historical irony?

It’s hard to imagine he has, when he kicked off his Passover ‘Thought for the Day’ on the BBC’s Today programme by instancing as an example of Jewish fortitude in the face of adversity, this week’s 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto during World War Two.

It’s a historical event which I have had the temerity to argue in a previous post has precise and uncomfortable parallels with the liquidation of Gaza and its Palestinian population, walled as they have been into a confined and overcrowded area with not enough food, water, medical supplies, autonomy and life opportunities by an occupying power exercising overwhelming and seemingly indiscriminate punitive force in the face of the people’s futile resistance to such oppression.

Or ‘self-defence’, as the generously American-resourced Netanyahu regime explains it, as after six months of attritional bombing the corrupt prime minister fighting for his political life writes his blackened name in rubble and the deaths and maiming of many thousands of children.

We witnessed last week, for instance, the death in her incubator of a newborn baby girl, rescued by emergency cesarian section from her dying mother after the entire family were killed in an Israeli airstrike, glibly explained away by one or other of the paid army liars* as an attack on a Hamas terror cell. Within a day or two, the waters had closed over the news as fresh atrocities supervened.

Which is in no way to pardon the gruesome ultraviolence with which that resistance ultimately manifested itself on 7th October, 2023; the sometimes lethal amateur rocketry over the years, or prior acts of terrorism in the 1970s by, for instance, the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But it does not help to invent a lie, that the Hamas excursion was somehow a one-off event, isolated in history, entirely characteristic, and not rooted in 75 years of Palestinian resistance to an unjust occupation creating a two-tier state that, itself, was born from the partial ethnic cleansing of the native population and the ongoing illegitimate seizure of land by hyper-religious ‘settlers’ claiming divine authority.

It was hardly what the founding president, David ben-Gurion, can have envisaged when he declared in front of the United Nations in 1948 that the nascent State of Israel was to be a secular nation that welcomed all peoples and all religions.

It’s a story that demands a sense of irony, to be honest.

• Liars? In 2023, a Palestinian woman journalist working for Al Jazeera was shot through the head while covering a protest in the occupied West Bank, involving unarmed demonstrators at a road block. A UN report concluded: Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” when they shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, violating her “right to life”. The IDF claimed, falsely, that she had been hit by crossfire. The death toll among Palestinian and foreign journalists in the Gaza operation to date is 108. A military spokesman stated: “We do not target journalists”.

A propos, the British-born US commentator, Mehdi Hasan, writes in a Guardian Comment: “Since the horrific 7 October attack, the far-right Israeli government and its army of propagandists have deceived and fooled Western politicians and journalists not once or twice, but multiple times. There are almost too many lies, distortions and falsehoods to keep track of.” (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/02/israel-gaza-lies-western-backers)

Quite.

Cunning linguists

Whoopee! After years of receiving two or three Comments a day written in Turkish, a language I’m afraid I don’t understand, all of them adverting (apparently approvingly) to a long-ago Post I wrote entitled ‘Your average Tory CUNT – ‘Conservative and Unionist Neo-Thatcherite’ – I have finally received one in English:

• “Thank you for being a part of our blog community! Your presence and engagement make all the difference. We’re grateful for the opportunity to share insights and knowledge with such a wonderful audience. We hope our recent post added value to your day and perhaps even sparked some new ideas. Your support fuels our passion for writing. Please continue to share your thoughts and experiences with us. Together, we can make this space even more vibrant and enriching. Thank you for your ongoing support”

It took me about three seconds to realise, they’re using AI text generation. Who are these shadowy folk, describing themselves as ‘Webturka’? And why me?

GW

And just space to squeeze in a quick global warming report:

SE Asia, 40-45 degrees C. pretty well everywhere.

Brazil: 75 towns inundated, casualties, after ‘torrential rain’ in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. A dam gives way, killing over 60.

USA: 100 tornadoes in a week, whole communities razed, at least 5 dead, more storms forecast. Northern California braces for 2 feet of snow. (See http://www.accuweather.com/en/videos/catastrophic-tornado-causes-major-damage-to-downtown-area/66a60451-8430-49c2-be27-0894eb3ee247)

China, too, has been experiencing destructive tornadoes.

Once more the sunshine turns to rain

(Post under construction)

What’s that funny smell?

The following quote from an article on openDemocracy.org appeared in the BogPo in September 2022, in a Post entitled With Ripeness to the Core (At the time, I was into naming posts with lines from poetry… not sure why. UB)

• “Tim Montgomerie, a former adviser to Boris Johnson, wrote on Twitter that the budget (it wasn’t a budget, it was a fiscal event. Mind your language. Ed.) was a ‘massive moment for the IEA. They’ve been advocating these policies for years,’ he said. ‘They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.’ Truss is particularly close to the IEA, having founded its parliamentary wing FREER in 2011 and hired its former communications director Ruth Porter to run her campaign, later rewarding her by making her deputy chief of staff.” (openDemocracy.org)

I continued: “Porter is far from the only apparatchik to have emerged from behind the shiny black door to the warren of lobbying rats’ nests that is 55 Tufton Street, and entered the revolving door of Number 10 as a libertarian policymaker. …

“Members of the Tufty Club are all sworn to the code of omerta when it comes to their sources of funding, but it’s clear from what can be discovered that their enormous influence on the right wing of the Tory party, and on its incarnation in the form of Liz Truss, aka “Mary O’Leary” and (her Chancellor) “Mr Potato Head” Kwarteng, derives from oil and tobacco ….”

As I have written elsewhere, these ultra rightwing, quasi religious ‘think tanks’ owe their funding ultimately to obscure US foundations like the Atlas Network, which claims to be behind some 450 pressure groups worldwide. Also, the Templeton foundation., which, like most of these shadowy groups owes its genesis to the PR campaigns involved in the tobacco wars of the 1960s and ’70s. And of course, the gaslighting Koch brothers. (People still call them that, although David Koch gave up his carbon content to the atmosphere in 2019). For years, Truss has been an invited speaker at several offshoots of these agitators, here and in the USA.

Which is all a preamble to explaining the fervour with which La Truss got to her hooves in the Commons the other night to furiously decry in her inimitably adenoidal, dull-witted fashion her own party’s futile idea to stop the nation smoking cigarettes by introducing a progressive ban on sales to anyone born after 2009 and each year thereafter.

As if their older mates can’t still buy fags and pass them around.

Opposing any measure intended to save 80 thousand lives costing the NHS £17 billion a year is a no-brainer, as far as the libertarian wing is concerned. The ‘individual’s right to choose’ immediately became, for a day or so, yet another divisive issue in the never-ending culture war perpetuated by the Tory right. (That was before Sunak’s tame ideas inventor came up with another bright idea, to fix the economy by driving people signed off sick back to work, through the simple expedient of having a bureaucrat assess their state of health, rather than a GP.)

Briefly interrupting his own, highly lucrative speaking tour of the USA, Baris Johnson also weighed in, adducing Winston Churchill’s addiction to large Cuban cigars as a reason not to ban tobacco – which the Yanks probably thought was funny, although here we all got rather bored with Baris’ Churchill fetish and his pathetic World War Two tropes a long time ago.

And, of course, there was no proposal to ‘ban’ tobacco in the first place, as the fat fibber knew perfectly well. Only a rather complicated notion to squeeze out smoking over a period of decades by progressively age-limiting sales year by year. But it kept him in the headlines, just in case anyone had forgotten he ever existed. While Truss, Prime Minister for all of 49 days before the party dumped her in embarrassment, has got a book to plug, offering herself as the only leadership candidate intellectually equipped to avoid the complete collapse of western civilization by 2035.

If it’s not the ‘disgrace’ of imported cheese, it’s the faint stink of rotting lettuce that precedes her. Perhaps if she weren’t also calling in her book for an end to any regulations aimed at mitigating climate change*, civilization might limp on for a few years more without her.

*DeSmog, 19 April

The Not-so Hidden Persuaders

Don’t the commercials drive you up the wall?

I honestly cannot say I have managed to switch to any TV programme on Freeview that looks even faintly interesting without immediately and every three minutes thereafter being plunged into a weird world of air fresheners and funeral plans. (Have you noticed, they speed up the intervals between breaks during the last half-hour of whodunnits, when they know you’ll be hanging on grimly to find out who the murderer was?)

For a start, the ad industry seems to be petrified of accusations that they’ve been promoting too much racial purity. No ad is complete now without black and asian actors, and actors with minor facial disfigurements, making for some very weird on-screen relationships. The ratio of interracial marriages is surely far, far smaller than they lead us to believe. There’s one household depicted with a skinny white husband who does the laundry, a fat black wife who fantasises about life beside a swimming pool, and their interracial daughter whose best friend is chinese. All celebrating a laundry tablet (‘Keep away from children’… Yes, thanks, I try to).

Ask any white person what proportion of the population is black or asian and they will guess, about 35 per cent. Actually, it’s less than half that – 14 per cent. But in adland, we’re over 50 per cent. Okay, it was well time for an adjustment of the balance, but they’ve gone crazy with totally unrealistic colourblind casting. Just settle down, okay? You’re not the National Theatre. You’ll seldom find an ad without a winsome dog in it nowadays, either. I’m especially fond of Moose, the dimwitted old Boxer who wonders why his master is permanently glued to his phone, checking his credit rating.

Then, writing as someone who spent 15 years working as a copywriter and creative director, there are tropes that annoy me even more. Commercial directors remind me of circus elephants, all trailing one another around the ring, holding the tail of the elephant in front – all earning a no-doubt substantial living from sniffing one another’s farts. CGI ads, for instance, in which cars and buildings morph into Rubik cubes and women magically rearrange their wardrobe space to accommodate more handbags, or leap through walls to buy cars feature prominently. All great ideas, the first time around the ring.

Far too many copywriters are breaking the number one rule, as far as I was ever concerned. You should never begin a script “At so-and-so, we…” It’s patronising, for a start, and everyone knows it’s not true, the words are being spoken by an actor. It also doesn’t make a lot of logical sense. You generally deliver the product or service at the point of sale, not in the back-office. You should addres your consumers respectfully as ‘you’, not ‘we’.

Then, most infuriating of all, are the ads where the actors start dancing manically around the living room after sniffing some supposedly potent air or laundry ‘freshening’ product, managing to obtain a delivery of junk food, or having their plumbing fixed. Ads with dancing housewives, plumbers and builders were an idea that was already a cliche by the mid-1990s, but the admen just don’t seem to be able to let go of the concept, making normal people look like lunatics suffering from St Vitus’ Dance. ‘Forever chemicals’ are a relatively new environmental concern, but I have wondered why one in two people, as the plangent charity ads tell us, will test positive for cancer in their lifetime. Give me a lingering odour of curry and wet dog fur any day, rather than a floral bouquet concocted in the satanic mills of Unilever’s marketing labs.

Finally, and quite unspeakably, are the cut-price cremation ads, aimed at people of my generation. I’m not sure I would look so entranced or giggly while contemplating a cheap funeral with my spouse or my workmates, but there they are, the happy couples, all dying to save a bob or two by signing up today. Next to the one with grandad precariously perched on a ladder while the younger ones discuss cremating him, I worry particularly about the little girl, creosoting her elderly neighbour’s fence while her dad rabbits on about how happy grandma will be to get cremated. Everyone knows, creosote is lethal. Except, obviously, the morons back at the agency.

What year is this?

Here in good old Blighty, it’s the year 2024. King Charles is on the throne, Labour are 20 points up in the polls, girlies are screaming, fainting and crying… why? Because Taylor Swift has a new album out, and it’s a surprise 31-track double helping of cathartic teenage angst!

In Louisiana, USA, however, it’s still 1824. MSNBC reports:

• “A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers.”

The move echoes various attempts by other state legislatures of the Republican persuasion to enable employers to exploit children to the max:

• “A Washington Post report last year noted some state GOP officials also eyed proposals to allow kids as young as 14 to ‘work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and shield businesses from civil liability if a child laborer is sickened’.” (MSNBC)

Nor would an employer be obliged to check a child’s age.

Rolling back child labour laws is very much on the agenda of the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based ‘thinktank’ that is also lobbying to defund social service programs, food stamps and Medicare for the poor. The FGA has a variety of wealthy funders, including (to the tune of $18 million a year) the Ed Uihlein foundation, which reportedly is linked to the Kochs through the Donors Capital Fund, which granted more than $300 million to rightwing groups advocating for ‘smaller government’ between 2002 and 2010 (DeSmog).

We in the civilized world should all be sickened. What the Hell is Trump’s America going to look like in five years’ time, the Mines of fucking Mordor?

In a word…

Aren’t you sick of those crass made-up words that join parts of other words together, of which ‘Brexit’ is only one egregious example? Names like ‘Brangelina’ once united Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. ‘Bikelash’ abbreviates motorists’ views of cyclists. I feel sure you can think of more examples*.

The latest, apparently, is ‘sailcation’, meaning a holiday cruise. You can blame whoever writes the ads for Imagine Cruises for that one.

Yeuch. Give us back our beautiful language, you bastards.

• An enormous list of such heinous neologisms can be found at http://www.gpb.eu/2023/05/neologisms-new-words.html. It includes one of my own, actually – ‘Covidiot’ being someone who refuses to take precautions against the pandemic. But it hasn’t picked up ‘chardonnayfreude’ – the secret pleasure one takes in the downfall of a footballer’s wife or girlfriend. Give it time.

Finally, a few weathery words from your Old Granny:

USA: AccuWeather is warning of dangerous storm conditions developing across a huge swathe of the American midwest. “During the first half of May, the bulk of the severe thunderstorms and tornadoes will likely focus on the nation’s midsection, including Tornado Alley. The areas at greatest risk include Dallas, Austin, Oklahoma City, Kansas City and St. Louis. A shift in the pattern during the second half of May will increase the number of severe storms and tornadoes farther east and in the Plains.”

Mid East: The United Arab Emirates is still mopping up after countrywide flooding brought about by a rainstorm that delivered 18 months’ supply in 36 hours – over 250 mm. ‘At least’ 4 people were drowned, along with thousands of cars, and over 700 flights at Dubai airport were delayed. Baked ground and a paucity of storm drainage systems were blamed.

Pakistan: “Unseasonal rainfall has lashed Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past few days, killing more than 100 people across the neighboring countries.” (AccuWeather) More rain is forecast for the coming week. The monsoon season isn’t normally due before June.

Tailpipe

UK: The country’s airline industry is once again set to breach guidelines on CO2 emissions, thanks to the Covid bounceback. “Several airlines are already emitting more than ever before, according to analysis from the campaign group Transport & Environment (T&E) based on UK and EU carbon reporting and other flight data.” They include Ryanair (13% more) and Jet2.com up by 26.3%. Despite BA being perennially the worst of the lot, “BA, Ryanair and EasyJet have announced continued planned expansion of between 7% and 9% for 2024.” (Guardian)

La Terra Trema

AccuWeather also reports: “Hundreds of people in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province were evacuated Wednesday after multiple eruptions of the Ruang volcano. Most of the island’s 800 residents were evacuated to nearby Tagulandang Island amid fears it could trigger a tsunami.” Later the evacuation zone was widened to include 11 thousand more people. Photo by BPDP Sitaro.

Don’t Mention the Weather, #2. Or the War…

Thought for the Day:

Hello, friends. Have you noticed, how often everyone says “to be honest with you” nowadays? I suspect it may be a defensive reaction to the growing dishonesty of public discourse.

Well, hi once again – Bogler surfacing.

A few interesting things

One, it hasn’t stopped raining for more than a day in the last 18 months, here in Boglington-on-Sea and across the wider UK – according to the Met Office the wettest 18 months period since records began, 4.5 million years ago. No, sorry, little mix-up there. Since records began in 1836. The 4.5 million years refers of course to the NOAA’s reading of the CO2 level currently. A record 11 named storms have swung in from the Atlantic since last autumn, over Scotland and up into the high Arctic, bearing lots of warmer water; the fear being, that the warming Arctic ocean could release billions of tonnes of planet-heating methane.

Meanwhile, March was the tenth straight month in which global temperatures have set new monthly records, according to the EU’s Copernicus program. There have been unseasonal <40-degree Spring heatwaves in many places, notably Japan, India and East Africa. While rising, for several months record ocean temperatures have had scientists muttering into their beards that this is crazy, off-the-scale impossible. Despite the record warmth, my joint electricity and gas bill last month was five times what it was in October 2022. You can’t win.

The signals from the other end of the world are even more alarming. Of the Antarctic, The Observer reported at the weekend that a seriously worrying anomaly had just surfaced in a paper from the University of Tasmania:

• “On 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth. According to their instruments, the region that day experienced a rise of 38.5C above its seasonal average: a world record.

The reason for these developments is most probably because the world has warmed by 2.76 degrees since 1900 – way over the 1.5 degrees permitted by the authorities. (Large number has been adjusted for various factors, courtesy of the Arctic News website yesterday, but warming nevertheless is well past the limit set at the Paris COP.) The suspicion must be, we are in a new era of rapidly rising temperatures. The last time it was this hot, sea level was 75 feet higher.

And the effect of all this? Well, a warning of higher bread prices has gone out from HM government, as UK farmers are reporting a likely 15 per cent loss in wheat output, owing to flooded land. Other outputs, especially dairy, are likely to be affected. This matches the 15 per cent loss of all agricultural output in continental Europe, that will undoubtedly accompany this summer’s inevitable heat and drought, as it did last year. We are apparently to rely on imports, assuming Lord Cameron can end the war in Ukraine.

Compensation for farmers will, of course, be paid; while those who do not have enough to eat now will have to make do with less. Fortunately, the denatured bread in my local convenience store is so unpleasant, I can blow the 8 per cent increase in the state pension this month on extra vodka to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Happy daze.

STOP PRESS

USA: Violent storms have caused massive damage in Texas and Louisiana; many parts, also in Ohio, have flooded; while at Augusta, Georgia, a storm warning has delayed the tee-off in the Masters until the Thursday afternoon. Tornado warnings are out everywhere in the midwest and on the east coast. Further south, a severe drought means that water “restrictions or rationing measures will be put in place for Bogotá, Colombia residents and dozens of towns and municipalities surrounding the capital.” (AccuWeather)

Africa: AccuWeather reports: “Zimbabwe has joined other southern African nations in declaring its drought a national disaster, following earlier declarations by Zambia and Malawi.” Thanks to El Nino, February in parts has been the driest for over 100 years. According to Oxfam, millions are facing critical food shortages. As the cost of aid needed runs into the $billions, and the war in Sudan shows no sign of easing, “The situation risks spiraling into an ‘unimaginable humanitarian situation.'” – Another one.

(More follows)

RIP, Hunzi, 14

My beloved, gentle Hunzi (as he is known on this bogl) went to join the Kennel Club in the sky on Easter Monday. He’d had another attack of a neurological condition known as vestibular ataxia, and just lost the will to go on. The condition causes a sensation not unakin to massive vertigo, a complete loss of spatial awareness, so the animal loses co-ordination of its legs and blunders around, falling over a lot. This made peeing and pooing a problem, as I could barely drag him out of the house and across the road, although bless him, he tried his best. He recovered from the last bout in October, but this time after two weeks we both had to agree, enough was enough, and he went quietly and peacefully, even dare I say with relief. I’m still waiting for his ashes, so he can be set free on a Welsh hillside, where – a Border Collie – he should have been running around all his life, instead of having to live in a tiny suburban cottage on a thundering main road with a depressed old man shouting at the TV. Poor love, he always thought I was shouting at him. I never would have.

‘Trump, Trump, Trump the boys are marching‘

According to a national poll, 57 per cent of US Republican voters agree that, when re-elected President, Donald Trump should be allowed to run the country without referring to Congress or the courts, with total dictatorial powers.

Steve Benen writes on the MSNBC website:

• “He also suggested he should be allowed to commit crimes without consequences … (and has) signaled an interest in seizing control of government departments and agencies that have historically operated with independence, enacting radical anti-immigrant plans, using government powers to crack down on journalists, and hiring right-wing lawyers who would be positioned to help Trump politicize federal law enforcement and exact revenge against his perceived political foes.”

Obviously, he would like the 91 criminal charges against him to go away. His fans have called for the judges in those cases and their families to be murdered. And, as we know, he has called on Putin to freely attack any NATO country that does not pay for US protection. He has never understood that NATO is not one of his golf resorts.

Maybe if he is again robbed of the election by the Deep State, international Jewry, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats there’d be a job for him here, leading the Reform party. In the meantime, the GOP is endorsing a rumor that Joe Biden has been chartering hundreds of planes to secretly fly in more undocumented migrants, or ‘animals’ as Trump calls them. Many people believe it.

Something is wrong with the American brain

What lies behind Donald Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the war in Ukraine?

Well, amid the collective fog of amnesia surrounding his previous presidency, it may have been forgotten that his second impeachment trial in the House hinged on a phone call he made to the tyro president of that country, threatening to withold $390 million of military aid (illegally) unless Zelinskiy agreed to initiate a phoney prosecution of the Bidens, pere et fils, on trumped-up corruption charges.

Being made of stronger stuff than his previous occupation as a comic TV actor would suggest, Zelinskiy rightly demurred, while Trump then denied that he had ever asked for ‘a favor, though‘, releasing a sanitized transcript of the call protesting that it was ‘safe’. In a safe, more like – the actual text is still held in an impenetrable Top Secret vault. He then set about persecuting the officials who had witnessed the call; while despatching his trusty henchman, Giuliani, dripping hair dye, along with Parnas and Frumin, two Ukrainian-born suspected mafiosi, to Kyiv and beyond to try to obtain the support of local oligarchs in stirring up the campaign against his rival.

Next, he devoted much time and attention toward efforts to divert responsibility for the widespread campaign of helpful disinformation put out by the Russians in the runup to the 2016 election, together with blame for the supposed mislaying of an imaginary server containing 30 thousand incriminating emails apparently deleted by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, claiming it was Ukraine that was behind it all. Trump usually comes to believe his own lies after he has repeated them often enough.

Meanwhile, he had appointed Paul Manafort to run his election campaign, a dodgy PR man who had some years previously been instrumental by devious means in getting a pro-Moscow kleptocrat, Viktor Yanukovitch, elected as Ukraine’s president. After massacring about a hundred unarmed demonstrators in the Maidan square in Kyiv, Yanukovitch, we recall (or maybe not) was spirited out of the country by night in a convoy of cars organised by Putin, bearing with him, it’s said, $27 billion in State funds. After spying for the Russians, Manafort was sentenced to seven years in jail for financial crimes, only to be pardoned by his friend, the Lord of Misrule.

Now, still in the blackmail game, Trump has called for all US aid to be suspended, and for Zelinskiy, though, to cede the Crimea and any territory currently occupied by the Russian invaders to his friend, Mr Putin, in exchange for an overnight end to the war.

This he has sworn to achieve on his first day in office. No desire for vengeance there, obviously. Just good statesmanship. Plus, of course, a burning desire to finally be allowed to build an enormous tower block and Trump hotel in Moscow.

The Ego has Landed

Republican support for renaming Dulles Airport after Donald Trump is growing. Democrats are offering to rename a federal prison in Miami instead. (MSNBC)

Don’t mention the weather

As domestic eyes focus on the extraordinary victory of the veteran George Galloway’s entryist campaign in the Rochdale by-election following the withdrawal of the Labour candidate, and foreign coverage attempts to penetrate the fog of war in Gaza, where yet another Israeli army outrage against starving civilians is being glibly explained away, I imagine you’re not exactly concentrating on the world’s worsening weather.

February is not normally known as a wild month in either hemisphere but it may be worth noting that it’s been the wettest ever recorded across most of the UK, mainly mild also – farmland in the breadbasket of Lincolnshire has been underwater since October. (February last year by contrast was the driest ever.) I must say, I have never seen weather maps like those featured behind the TV presenters this past six months.

In California, a blizzard is forecast to dump over 100 inches (8-ft 4-in.) of snow in the high Sierra, while wildfires continue to range over a million acres in Texas. Several people have died, caught up in floods in southern France. And in Australia, wildfires are once again threatening vast areas of Victoria state, with the city of Melbourne in the, er, firing line. Temperatures there are soaring into the 40s C and thousands of people are under evacuation orders.

Normally one of the driest countries in the world, the former trucial state of Oman has had flash floods with ‘near golfball-sized’ hail and a year’s worth of rain in one night; while after one of the driest Februaries on record, mountainous northern Italy and the French border are on high alert for avalanches after half a meter of snow fell overnight, with more forecast. Several villages and ski resorts are cut off by landslides. ‘Thunderstorms and winds of more than 60mph (100km/h) triggered landslides in the Liguria region on Italy’s north-west coast. A tornado struck off the port city of Savona, and waves of more than four metres were recorded in Capo Mele.’ (Guardian)

Meanwhile, marine scientists are continuing to express horror and alarm at the rapidity of the rising temperature of the world’s ocean, the North Atlantic in particular, for which no single comprehensible reason can be found. El Nino and a worrying loss of reflective cloud cover are often mentioned. Arctic News has also pointed to a disturbing rise in the surface temperature at tropical latitudes, where the average is now 1.3C above the 1979-2001 period.

And then to Antarctica, where the so-called Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites, is said to be melting out at a rate of knots, threatening imminent collapse (well, maybe by mid-century), with a corresponding threat of three-quarters of a meter of global sea-level rise.

Farmers across Europe have responded with outrage against a range of Government-inspired environmental and economic measures and are blocking roads with their slow-moving tractors – in Britain apparently with the approval of Prime Minister Sunak, although in an impromptu party political broadcast he attacked environmental protesters – ‘mob rule’ – once again for holding up the traffic. Neither the Tories nor Labour is now unequivocally committed to Net-Zero pledges.

Yet more evidence has emerged, of the blatant market manpipulation by the energy companies since the 1970s, that has possibly fatally delayed the move to a lower carbon economy. Nevertheless, many governments have lost the support of the farmers. Most disturbing of all, however, is the return of climate denialism and Net-Zero aversion, launched on a wave of disinformation or, as US climate envoy John Kerry puts it, ‘lying’, by increasingly popular ‘populist demagogues’ whose political star appears to be rising in many countries due to hold elections this year.

You have been warned.

Gaza is more than just culture wars

I was pleased to send a Comment to Guardian readers last week, concerning the Rochdale by-election. I don’t suppose the Moderators let it through, but we always try.

As we know, the Labour candidate, a Mr Ali, was ordered by HQ to apologise for making disgraceful racist remarks about the Israeli government, in private (or so he thought – it never is nowadays), and having done so, was promptly deprived of his and Labour’s chance of winning the seat the following week when Sir Keir Starmer had second thoughts supplied to him by the Conservative media and fired him altogether.

As the result, an even more virulently antisemitic candidate mopped up the Labour vote. But, of course, this unhappy episode was not in any way designed to protect Britain’s tiny Jewish community against antisemitic tropes, neoNazis and synagogue-burners, but sat firmly in the recent tradition of scrubbing the party of any hint of leftwing tendencies prior to the General Election, which Sir Keir believes he can only win by joining the Conservative party.

Sadly, he’s not wrong. The polls are consistently showing Labour 27% ahead of the Tories, whose muddleheaded Spring budget has gone down with voters like Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

But look, I pointed out. Mr Ali has been roundly denounced in all corners of the media, left and right, for indulging in the heinous conspiracy theory that the Israeli government somehow ignored or even encouraged the appalling events of October 7th last. Yet the New York Times, hardly a hotbed of Hamas supporters prone to believing six impossible things before breakfast, reported on 2nd December last year:

• “Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.”

Nevertheless, elements of the army had been watching Hamas fighters drilling openly for two years with increasing alarm, while their reports to senior officers were being dismissed. I think we have to say, this was not just another ‘Pearl Harbor’ day. They knew.

There are, of course, a number of ultra-nationalist headbangers in Mr Netanyahu’s war cabinet, the synagogue and the military, who are fully and openly committed to ethnically cleansing the last of the Palestinians, shoving them out of Gaza and the West Bank into the Sinai desert or even the sea, their choice; while at the same time pretending that that is what Hamas is hoping in some unlikely way to do to the entire, well-armed and US-protected state of Israel, thus justifying a plea of self-defence. A Hamas atrocity that was sufficiently brutal and at least in part successful would certainly suit their purposes.

Then, there’s a reason I’m inclined to believe this, it’s never mentioned, but there is a very lucrative opportunity awaiting whoever ends up in control of the Gaza strip, and that is the massive natural gas field just off the coast, that the Palestinians have been unable to exploit.

Leaping back to 2017, the newly installed and comically dysfunctional Trump regime included one George Papadopoulos, an alumnus of the climate-change denying Hudson Institute and a lobbyist (energy advisor!) for Houston-based Noble Energy. Trump was later to dismiss him in his breezy way as a complete unknown – ‘probably the coffee boy’. But George was one of seven Trump associates who did gaol time in the wake of FBI investigations into links with Russia, and has since disappeared below the radar. As The Pumpkin has previously reported, in 2015 Trump disclosed 17,800 shares in Noble Energy, which was later to bid for a pipeline project to send Gaza’s gas reserves to Europe, via Cyprus, bypassing Ukraine.

The project never happened as it was rejected after a long battle in the Israeli courts. Noble was snapped up for a song by energy giant, Chevron. Having some time ago come independently to the conclusion that gas reserves may be behind the Israeli right’s overly murderous response to the events of Oct. 7, your Uncle Bogler was amused to stumble across the following report from Al Jazeera, a news agency funded by the Qatari state, posted on March 6:

• “Today, the war in Gaza is serving as a convenient cover for another theft on a grand scale; this time Israel is seeking to plunder the maritime offshore gas reserves that are the property of the state of Palestine.”

The story contains further distressing details of looting of valuables from abandoned Palestinian homes by IDF forces, over the historical resonances of which we should perhaps pass, but continues:

• “In late October, the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure announced that it had awarded concessions for natural gas exploration to Israeli and foreign companies in zones that significantly overlap with the maritime borders of Gaza….Needless to say, Israel as an occupier has no right to award licences in areas that it does not hold sovereignty over…. Palestine is a party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and has declared its maritime boundaries in accordance with these principles.”

But if Palestine no longer existed?

I’m not sure under the circumstances that British politicians should be self-indulgently maxxing out on their internal ‘culture wars’ by making this an issue of ‘extremism’ versus ‘policing’ and nothing else. There are perfectly good reasons for suspecting the intentions of part, at least, of a criminal regime in Tel Aviv, that have nothing to do with a hyperbolic debate about whether or not the Jewish community of North London need live in fear – anymore than should the Palestinians of Gaza, over 31 thousand of whom have already been killed.

http://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/6/israel-is-pillaging-not-just-gazas-cities-but-also-its-waters

RIP Environmental scientist, Stephen Salter, inventor of the Salter’s Duck wave-energy generator, 85. In recent years he advocated a ‘cloud brightening’ programme to reduce temperatures in the Arctic, by spraying sub-micron water droplets into the air from specially designed ships, and worked on devising ways to capture oceanic methane emissions from a warming Arctic ocean. Here’s hoping there’s a special service in Heaven, perhaps a bulletin board headed: ‘We was right all along’.

The Editor writes…

Your Uncle Bogler continues to be plagued with various health issues requiring endless, mostly inconclusive investigations and, in view of the likelihood of his being arrested for expressing certain politically unfavourable opinions, has felt it prudent mostly to keep the lid shut on his li’l laptop. In any case, there is too much, not too little, news to be found anywhere you care to look. There is little that remains to be added.

Here we go again, I hear the trumpists crow again

Is anyone safe in Trumpworld?

Yes folks, The Pumpkin stirs and opens one lazy, pink-tinged eye for the first time in many months, alert to a new era of Trump requiring attention. The Duke of Orange has secured over 50% of the Repugnican vote in the caucuses of the ancient state of Iowa, minus 30 degrees and knee-deep in snow. Tunes are being rapidly changed as the obvious reality becomes clear: despite, or more probably because of, the 91 criminal charges, he’s all set for a second term.

Americans must surely have the shortest memory spans of any race on the planet. As instanced by the following story on the AccuWeather website:

• “Snow drought over: NYC and DC blanketed by biggest storm in two years…”

Voters having seemingly forgotten in those two years that he was widely acclaimed during his period in office at home and abroad as the worst president in US history; and that his own niece Mary, a clinical psychologist, published an entire book on his dangerous sociopathic narcissistic tendencies, nevertheless the Mango Mussolini is apparently considered preferable as the leader of an increasingly unhinged free world to the relatively sane, if far too old, Holy Joe Biden; who, to be fair, hasn’t done such a bad job.

While, as for the 80-year-old Biden showing signs of senility, have we really forgotten the now 78-year-old Trump not recognising his own wife? Twice? Or the time he wandered offstage during a press conference, and had to be brought back to sign whatever deal it was he and the other ‘world leader’ had just negotiated? His inability to negotiate an umbrella, or stairs? His endless, compulsive lying? His paranoid obsession with cleansing the office of President of every last trace of his predecessor, the Black Man, Obama, and his imagined nemesis, Clinton?

His offensive disdain for the military, branding veterans and the dead alike as ‘losers’? And those incomprehensible ‘word salad’ speeches and interviews, in which he incriminated himself more often than not? Or ‘Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV’-gate, when he claimed that five words he was able to remember (wholly incorrectly) from the Toronto standard dementia test were proof he was a ‘strong and stable genius’?

Not to mention the Mueller report, with its ten specimen charges of obstruction of justice; the two impeachment inquiries (a record), or the huge and exhaustive, but virtually unknown 5-volume investigation in 2018 by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee into his wild accusations against the FBI over ‘Russiagate’, that concluded ‘Trump and his associates’ were the greatest threat to national security in modern times?

Following which, the chairman, the venerable Republican Senator Richard Burr, found himself being accused of illegal insider trading’. Is all forgot?

Surely, no-one is safe in Trumpworld. For He will undoubtedly wreak vengeance upon his enemies.

“A fuckin’ loser” (Mary Trump)

It might make the 6 o’clock news, it might not. But after suing the New York Times and three of its financial reporting team for $100 million over a series of articles in 2018 exposing him as a crook and a tax cheat, Trump has lost the case and been ordered to pay the defendants $492 thousand, plus legal costs.

It seems his niece Mary was the principal source of the stories. Families, eh?

Meanwhile, he continues to defy the power of judges to jail him for contempt. After a series of ‘objection, your honor’ moments from counsel in his defamation trial brought by the writer, E Jean Carroll – a case resting on further defamatory comments he allegedly made after losing a previous defamation suit against him, when jurors decided that on the balance of probability he had raped her in a department store changing room – the judge was forced to remark:

• “I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial,” Judge Kaplan said. “I understand you’re probably very eager for me to do that.” Mr. Trump threw his hands up. “I would love it,” he said. (NYT)

Judge Kaplan’s heavy sarcasm rested on the curious fact Trump boasts about, that every time he deliberately runs into further legal jeopardy his poll ratings shoot up. He has kept up a barrage of abuse of court officials on his antisocial media site; but, despite it leading on occasion to death threats against his persecutors, the courts seem curiously reluctant to apply the ultimate sanction of a custodial sentence that anyone else would receive, preferring to milk him of a few thousand dollars each time.

Not only does this louche behaviour reflect a disturbing trait of cynicism on his part, a total disregard of the rule of law as it applies to himself, it presages a dark period of actual fascism in America and the assumption of dictatorial powers over the institutions that currently provide the checks and balances that supposedly keep the citizens safe in their beds at night; the ripping-up of the almighty Constitution.

And yet he towers over all more moderate candidates of all parties in the race to the White House. Thus it was in 1933, Germany’s fatal turning point in history, when a nation tired of being, as they saw it, ignored by the political establishment chose as their new leader a failed artist with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, an iconoclastic street-thug, gang leader and Jew-baiter with a fondness for murdering his political enemies, to somehow become the legitimate national figurehead in a hubristic march to ultimate destruction.

It is no longer enough to return to the good old days of lazy journalism, when Trump was branded as a simple made-for-TV clown and permatanned fake business mogul selling baseball caps to the faithful. There is a new spring in his step – why, he has even adopted a more articulate way of addressing the masses, even joining-up words, as you might have noticed had you been listening.

Be very careful what you wish for.

The Royal wee

I see my old schoolmate, King Charles is to go into hospital next week for a transurethral resection of the prostate, and will be unavailable for duties for several weeks thereafter. It’s a common operation in old men whose wine-rich lifestyles and galloping about on polo ponies predispose their prostates to swell up like balloons, trapping their water-pipes, badgering their bladders and causing them to wear embarrassingly bulky pee pants.

Sometimes, cancer is involved. My GP advises me not to worry – most men in their 90s will have been living with prostate cancer for at least ten years without too much harm done. Most will have died of other causes well before the prostate finally kills them. The Palace is quick to announce that the 75-year-old Charles has the version, BPH – benign prostatic hypertrophy.

Once again, The King and I are joined together by fateful circumstance – the only difference being, I’ve been waiting more than five-and-a-half years for my operation. I wonder idly if he too has been having to pee painfully and occasionally bloodily through a tube into a bag?

No wonder he was so peevish at the coronation.

The curious case of the monster babykiller, Part 4

I have bogld extensively about my non-expert intuition that the Letby ‘babykiller’ trial verdict was not a sound one. To add to the mounting evidence indicating her possible innocence, the BBC’s Panorama programme has turned up yet another indication that the true ‘killer’ is the NHS; and that, in reality, no crime was committed. Evidence that never made it to court before Nurse Letby was convicted and given a whole of life sentence on the basis of circumstance, innuendo, misunderstanding of the ‘science’ and the obvious anguish of the mothers’ testimonies, whch quickly led to confirmation bias.

Two midwives based at a special unit in Gloucestershire are being investigated after identical mistakes were made, leading to the deaths not only of two neonates but also of seven mothers. In each case, lack of staffing and poor communication have been held to blame. One nurse has already been suspended.

BBC News reports:

• “Midwives say a poor culture and staff shortages at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust have led to baby deaths that could have been avoided. … Concerns about two staff members, both midwives, had been raised by colleagues at the Cheltenham Birth Centre after another baby died 11 months earlier. …In the first six months of 2023, the trust was short of more than 50 midwifery staff on average.”

The hospital trust had failed to take action after the death of the first baby, that could have avoided the death of the second, after the nurses failed to have the birthing mothers transferred to the main hospital according to protocol in what were clearly medical emergencies.

We recall the testimony of one mother at the Letby trial, who stated that the nurse had seemed indifferent to the plight of her newborn baby, who appeared to be in pain. The nurse told her not to worry, she had called the doctor…. There’s a curious echo, then, in the BBC’s report:

• “Jasper’s health had deteriorated within minutes of being born at the Cheltenham Birth Centre, but his mother Laura White says the midwives did not seem concerned. One of the midwives gave him air but Laura says she wasn’t panicking and ‘quite happily passed him back to me’. But baby Jasper needed urgent medical attention and there was a 50-minute delay in transferring him to the neonatal unit in Gloucester. He died just 11 hours after being born.”

And, just as with the Letby case, the Trust chose subsequently to ignore the whistleblower, another midwife, who pleaded with her bosses to look into the problem, claiming that working practices at the unit were “like a game of russian roulette”.

Sadly, the bullet in the chamber seems to have done for one postnatal care nurse in particular. But it’s okay, as according to the Daily Mail and the rest of theh slavering rightwing media pack playing their culture wars game, she is enjoying a luxurious life in prison, with an ensuite bathroom, and is even allowed books and a key to her cell.*

*For security, in case she is attacked. Not a point emphasised by the ghouls of the rightwing press.

There is of course no suggestion that any criminal intent surrounds the Gloucestershire deaths. Merely incompetence and a desire on the part of the hospital managers to cover up their shortcomings. And despite the BBC and other investigations, not one appears to have made the connection between the 13 deaths of neonates in the NHS every day, the disastrous state of our midwifery service and the seven babies Letby is supposed to have murdered in an entire year.

Something is profoundly wrong.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68094350

Format: an apology

I confess, something has gone awry with the formatting of this Post and I cannot for the life of me understand how to repair it. I note that WordPress now claims to have an AI component, changes have been made once again while I slept to the editing protocols and I am completely at a loss to know how to operate what used to be a perfectly practicable word processing program.

We shall just have to make the best of it.

You need hands

By way of an apology for yet another hiatus in my stream of consciousness, I have lost the use of my right hand, which displays two of my three typing fingers, as a result of some mysterious ailment one of my GPs has guessed is some sort of infection, for the second time in the past month. It has been jolly painful and the antibiotic has made me feel really rotten, to no practical effect.

Normal service, your Old Uncle promises, should be resumed in a few days.

In the meantime, your correspondent is busy absorbing the news, reported in The Guardian, 04 Dec., that Baris Johnson ordered staff to draw up plans for an SAS-style raid on a facility in the Netherlands, to seize a quantity of Covid vaccine he thought was more rightfully ours.

Now that’s what I call getting the Big Decisions right.

Good god, is it Christmas already?

Uncle Bogler writes:

Like many people, I’m suffering from a condition it is almost certainly illegal even to mention publicly. I can no longer bear to watch the news from Gaza and have become addicted instead to property makeover shows and ‘Place in the Sun’-style fantasies on daytime TV, in which comically insular and tragically badly dressed middle-aged couples with appalling taste in decor and an overweening sense of entitlement, seduced by leggy sirens and chirpy sales blokes, dream of escaping on inadequate budgets from their dreary northern towns to hideous coastal developments in Spain. Provided there is a large enough pool to accommodate the many ‘family and friends’ they envisage with a low degree of probability will be constantly visiting!

I place bets with myself on which ones will be back in the UK within the year. It does not appear to occur to them that that wonderful open roof terrace with the distant sea vew between tower blocks will give them third-degree burns in these globally heated, 45-degree summers. Or that the desirable olive grove behind the finca will soon be burning fiercely, if it hasn’t succumbed to Xylella fastidiosa.

One woman decides a house is not right for her, because of a cracked floor tile in the kitchen (most kichens, being about five years old, will ‘have to be replaced’). Another, contemplating the sparkling sea from her balcony, decides there are too many trees between her and the water, even though none is in the way. ‘It’s too green…’) An impossibly entitled young man feels bedroom three is too small, even for their baby. The couple have visited ‘over 100’ properties already, in a des res area where properties are being snapped up ‘within hours’, and are still technically homeless. Front runners, though, are the couple who object to the colour of the chair covers. They remind me of the prospective buyer of my little cottage, who demanded to know why I didn’t own a sofa.

This new obsession has unfortunately led to some delay in getting round to posting last month’s Boglington Post, for which I hereby hope to slowly make amends. Assuming, that is, that the re-election of Mr Sanchez does not precipitate a barbarous new Spanish civil war.

I’m not sure I can survive another one.

The Letby case

Further to my several Posts passim questioning the safety of the convictions of ‘Britain’s worst serial killer’ of newborn babies, nurse Lucy Letby, new evidence has been obtained by a BBC team investigating neonatal care in NHS hospitals, that to my mind casts further doubt on the trial outcome.

Except that no-one has even mentioned that there might be such a problem. None of this new evidence has been linked in the media with the Letby case, over which silence has descended, although there is to be an appeal against sentence next June, and a further trial on one count of injuring a baby. It is as if we have thrown away the key out of respect for the grieving parents. The natural desire to find someone to blame for every tragedy is not really what is meant by Justice.

First, I drew attention to the startling news, not admitted during the trial, that police were investigating some 1700 other cases of unexpected neonatal deaths or injuries at two Nottingham hospitals alone, for which Letby could not possibly have been responsible, however evil she was adjudged to be, as she had never worked in the hospitals concerned. Birth is a risky business: some 13 neonates die in our hospitals every day. One could only conclude, I suggested, that the corridors of the NHS must be rife with baby-hating serial killers.

http://www.nursingtimes.net/news/hospital/police-announce-investigation-into-nottingham-maternity-cases-07-09-2023/

Then, I relayed a Guardian story that the Royal Society of Statisticians had prepared a report in advance of the trial, presenting an opinion that was never tested in court, that the cluster of seven baby deaths and other injuries for which Letby was convicted on circumstantial grounds and in the face of mounting media prejudice was a statistical ‘blip’ technically too small to be relied on in evidence.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/03/lucy-letby-inquiry-statistical-evidence-used-in-trial

It also appears from an earlier Guardian report, that the Letby case is not unique. A male nurse, Ben Geen, is serving life-plus for apparently killing and injuring patients at another hospital, based on statistical ‘cluster’ evidence alone:

• “Ben Geen, 34, is serving a 30-year sentence after being convicted in 2006 of injecting patients with a variety of drugs in order to “satisfy his lust for excitement” when reviving them. There were no witnesses to the crimes, but Horton General hospital in Banbury identified an “unusual pattern” of respiratory arrests, which the prosecution said could only be explained by a member of staff deliberately harming patients.”

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/15/statisticians-respiratory-arrests-trial-ben-geen

Does that ring any bells?

Now, the BBC Panorama team has found that some 67 per cent of maternity units in the NHS fail to reach safety standards set by the College of Midwives. Care Quality Commission inspectors had found that staff at a majority of hospitals across the country – too many to list – were profoundly alarmed at the shortage of trained midwives and obstetricians, the strains that overwork were placing on nursing staff. Seven per cent of units were said to pose a high risk of avoidable harm. Doctors had been warning for years that a disaster was inevitable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62569344

A story that was followed just two days later by a BBC radio File on 4 report, that neonates were dying or becoming brain damaged in their hundreds because of poor communication between hospitals and parents for whom English is not their first language, owing to a shortage of interpreters. It is beginning to look as though the NHS itself is the ‘serial killer’, and not any overworked and stressed individual.

Needless to say, none of this evidence was made available to the jury. Had it been – had the defence been doing their job – I seriously doubt it would have been concluded that there was necessarily foul play in the case of the Countess of Chester hospital, that mistakes and incompetence and cover-up were equally likely factors. ‘Context is key’, and on that basis Lucy Letby, 33, should perhaps not be spending the rest of her life in gaol with no prospect or hope of parole.

Blind prejudice and high emotion, and a misunderstanding of the science appear to have been the principal motivations leading to her conviction on 14 counts, each carrying a whole-life sentence. The case urgently needs to be looked at again.

Meanwhile, a public inquiry has been formally opened, with the usual aims of ‘learning lessons’, bringing closure to grieving parents and ensuring it ‘can never happen again’, etcetera.

As we have seen, it happens 13 times a day, with or without the aid of monsters. Hearings are not due to begin until next Autumn.

Tailpipe

it’s a corker!

“According to the International Organisation for Vine and Wine (OIV), an industry group, global wine production is set to fall to its lowest level since 1961 this year, hit by soaring temperatures and extraordinary flooding. Fueling that decline are expected drops of 12% and 14% in output in Italy and Spain, the world’s biggest and third-biggest producers in 2022, respectively. Other major wine producers, including Australia, South Africa and Chile, are expected to suffer drops of between 10% and 24% in output … as floods, wildfires, droughts, and fungal disease have hammered vineyards.” (AccuWeather)

Take a breather

Atmospheric Methane levels are now at an annual average of 264% – approaching three times – as high as they have been calculated to have been in 1750. The highest hourly concentrations are regularly recorded over the shallow Arctic ocean, where millions of tonnes of methane hydrate are stored on the seabed in frozen clumps, known as clathrates. “…as sea ice keeps growing in extent, this seals off the Arctic Ocean from the atmosphere. This makes it harder for heat to get transferred from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere and increases the danger that more heat will reach sediments located at the seafloor and cause methane to be released from hydrates….” Globally, CO2 is over 154% of its pre-industrial level. (Arctic News, 17 Nov., based on NOAA data)