…then again [DOT 4/9/22]

& again...& again...

…so…here we find ourselves again…it’s sunday…you have better things to do…& so much of this stuff seems like you’ve heard it before

Despite long having been talked of as a likely future prime minister, Sunak struggled to shed the parallel with the man who helped bring down Thatcher but failed in his own tilt at the top job – before coining the famous political cliche: “He who wields the knife never wears the crown.”
[…]
Sunak supporters said that, in hindsight, he set too much store on winning over MPs and speaking over members’ heads to the general public; he had one eye on the real electorate he would face as prime minister instead of the roughly 160,000 people making up the party’s grassroots.
[…]
The scars of the leadership contest will be long-lasting. A Sunak supporting MP called culture secretary Nadine Dorries “feral” and admitted: “Nerves are very raw because of the way some people have behaved.” Another said the timing of the contest would be punished by voters. “We plunged this country into the unknown for so long while facing crises on multiple fronts – we can’t do that again,” they said.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/02/curse-of-heseltine-how-the-wheels-came-off-rishi-sunaks-no-10-campaign

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/03/the-more-tory-voters-see-of-liz-truss-the-less-they-like-her-polls-show

…& yet…chances are she’s still going to win…so…yeah…rishi’s not exactly my idea of a prize but does liz strike anyone as their first choice to deal with this kind of thing?

Britain’s next prime minister, widely expected to be Liz Truss, will be invited to join fellow leaders across Europe at a summit in Prague on 6 October to forge a European Political Community, a body dedicated to advancing security across the continent.
[…]
Speaking in an interview with the Guardian and other European media, [Charles Michel, the president of the European Council] said it was obvious the UK needed to be there. Michel said: “Even if we have discussions and difficulties on that [NI protocol] topic; in the broader perspective, there is no doubt that we are friends and that we need to continue to act together.”
[…]
As foreign secretary, Truss made a speech on Britain’s allies that avoided mentioning the European Union. During the Tory leadership race, she caused astonishment and dismay among British diplomats when she said “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the UK.
[…]
The invite to a gathering of European leaders on 6 October – immediately after the Tory party conference – contrasts with an earlier decision not to ask Boris Johnson to an EU summit that Joe Biden attended earlier this year.
[…]
While there have been concerns the European Political Community could simply replicate existing pan-European bodies, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Michel suggested leaders wanted an informal and “very flexible” body, resembling the G7 or the G20.
[…]
The invite to the Prague summit does not signal any change from the EU to the contested Northern Ireland protocol. EU officials are pessimistic about an upturn in relations from either candidate vying to be prime minister, especially Truss, the architect of a bill to unilaterally override the protocol.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/03/eu-to-invite-next-uk-pm-to-summit-on-new-pan-european-security-body

…no? …me neither, honestly…but then that’s something of an outdated concept these days, isn’t it?

The Brexit campaign group Leave.EU has gone into liquidation with its controversial co-founder Arron Banks appearing to write off a loan worth more than £7m.

Documents submitted to Companies House also reveal that the anti-EU lobbying group, which was fronted by Nigel Farage during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, has failed to pay tens of thousands in fines owed to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for breaches of data law.
[…]
In 2018 a referral was made by the Electoral Commission to the National Crime Agency claiming Banks was not the “true source” of the loan and that the money had come “from impermissible sources”.

The NCA found no evidence of criminality, concluding that Banks took a loan from an Isle of Man company he owned, which he was legally entitled to do.

…& I dare say is indeed legally entitled to do that…but if the company he owned had funds sufficient for him to lend himself upwards of 6million quid because someone who wouldn’t be allowed to give that kind of cash to that particular pack of shysters…well…I would have thought that might be pertinent information rather than an impertinent question…grand gestures typically don’t happen in a vacuum, after all

[Labour MP Ben] Bradshaw, who previously called on the government to investigate the possible role played by “dark money” in the EU referendum more widely, added: “The whole sorry saga illustrates the importance of robust independent regulation of political donations and campaign funding at a time when the Tory government is hellbent on emasculating the Electoral Commission.”

Last month the government published details of an “election power grab” that many said would undermine the commission’s independence.

Banks was the biggest backer of the Brexit campaign. In spring 2016, he gave £6m in loans to Leave.EU – a huge amount for a British political campaign – that reports have indicated were due to be repaid by the end of 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/03/leave-eu-liquidation-brexit-arron-banks

…I mean…is it me…or is there kind of a pattern with picking the shitty option?

A new paper predicts severe consequences for people, wildlife and the planet’s ecosystems if the widespread loss of trees continues. “Last year, we published the State of the World’s Trees report, where we showed at least 17,500 tree species, about a third of the world’s 60,000 tree species, are at risk of extinction,” said Malin Rivers, lead author of the paper and head of conservation prioritisation at Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). “Now we want to highlight why it matters that so many tree species are going extinct.
[…]
According to the paper, the world’s forests contribute $1.3tn (£1.1tn) to the global economy. Timber is the most valuable commodity, but non-timber products, such as fruit, nuts, and medicine, create $88bn in global trade. Of the fruit available for global consumption, 53% comes from trees.

Globally, more than 1.6 billion people live within 5km (3 miles) of a forest and rely on them for jobs and money. In developing countries, forests provide up to 25% of household income.
[…]
The large-scale extinction of tree species would lead to major biodiversity losses. Half of the world’s animal and plant species rely on trees as their habitat, with forests containing about 75% of bird species, 68% of mammal species and as many as 10 million species of invertebrates. Forest-dependent species have already declined by about 53% since 1970. “When we look at extinction risks for mammals or birds, underlying that is habitat loss, and habitat loss is often tree loss,” said Rivers. “If we don’t look after trees, there’s no way we can look after all the other life there.”

The extinction of a single tree species can significantly alter an ecosystem, causing a domino effect in its ability to function. When eucalyptus and dipterocarp trees are destroyed, for example, forests are more at risk from fire, pests and disease.

Forests provide 50% of the world’s carbon storage, so further tree extinctions would reduce our ability to fight climate breakdown. “The new thing in this paper is that it’s the diversity of trees that is so important,” said Rivers. “We’re showing that diverse forests store more carbon than monocultures. That’s true for many of the ecological functions, not just carbon capture, but providing habitat to animals, soil stabilisation, resilience to pests and diseases, resilience to storms and adverse weather. By losing tree diversity, we’ll also lose diversity in all organisms: birds, animals, fungi, micro-organisims, insects.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/02/tree-extinctions-species-wildlife-ecosystems-scientists-aoe

…so…you can guess how that’s going

Activists […] suspect that the prospect of Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in October’s presidential election has sparked a last-minute race to raze the jungle, with an unholy trinity of illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and gold miners intensifying their activities before his successor takes office.
[…]
A chunk of the Amazon larger than Taiwan has already been torn down since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, with an area nearly twice the size of Tokyo destroyed in the first half of this year.
[…]
“If Bolsonaro wins the election, he will push the Amazon rainforest very close to the point of collapse,” warned Astrini, whose projections suggested a second Bolsonaro term could lead to another 60,000 sq km of deforestation – an area almost the size of Ireland. “We are approaching a critical juncture.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/02/images-brazil-amazon-destruction-jair-bolsonaro

…lot of those knocking about these days

The Russian energy major Gazprom extended the shutdown of gas flows through its key Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany on Friday evening, providing no timeframe for a reopening.

The move came hours after G7 countries agreed to impose a price cap on Russian oil in an attempt to stem the flow of funds to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
[…]
Nord Stream 1 is the single biggest pipeline for gas from Russia to Europe and has the capacity to deliver 55bn cubic metres (bcm) of gas a year. Continued supplies through the pipeline are seen as crucial to prevent a deepening of the energy crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/02/nord-stream-1-gazprom-announces-indefinite-shutdown-of-pipeline

…& speaking of things getting unsurprisingly worse

We received yet more details Friday on the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago. One immediately stood out: According to the newly released inventory list, agents seized 48 folders bearing classified banners but which were nonetheless empty.
[…]
We’ve known for a while, through reporting by The Washington Post and others, that Trump’s document-retention habits left a lot to be desired. He often ripped up documents or even threw them in the toilet. The Justice Department filing says NARA cited the former as a particularly pressing concern.

“The NARA Referral was made on two bases: evidence that classified records had been stored at the Premises until mid-January 2022, and evidence that certain pages of Presidential records had been torn up,” it said. “Related to the second concern, the NARA Referral included a citation to 18 U.S.C. § 2071.” (That statute deals with the “concealment, removal, or mutilation” of government items.)

It’s not clear whether NARA’s citation of that statute relates to the documents received in January 2022 or at the end of the Trump administration, when NARA publicly confirmed it received documents that had been torn up. (The filing also doesn’t say whether there was any evidence Trump did this with actual classified documents, specifically.)

But the Justice Department opted to include that detail in a full-throated filing, obviously intended to speak to the state of its investigation. And now there are some empty folders that only add to the many questions that surround all of this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/02/empty-folders-marked-classified/

…& at least as far as I’m concerned that’s just the questions it occurs to me to ask…which are probably just the obvious ones…& quite possible not the ones that are clever enough to possibly be telling in a different way to the stuff that just appears to read like admissions of guilt ranging for tacit to explicit

As I noted in this post, the government wrote their May 11 subpoena to cover all government records in Trump’s possession, not just those that had come from the White House and not just those that were in Florida.

Although the SDFL Motion indicates that FPOTUS directed his staff to conduct a review of boxes moved “from the White House to Florida,” the subpoena was not so limited, instead seeking “[a]ny and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings,” without limitation to where they were stored.

They clearly believed then that some of the documents Trump stole might not be at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, Evan Corcoran’s insistence on June 3 that he was instructed to search only the records that had moved from the White House to Florida may have exacerbated that concern.
[…]
The most innocent explanation anyone has offered for Trump’s theft of government documents — call it the Maggie Haberman theory of compulsive pack-rattery — is that Trump just kept making piles of documents, including both news articles and Top Secret government documents, on the dining room table where he preferred to work. Those stacks got put into boxes, and staffers kept swapping out the boxes as they filled up. That was the filing system employed by the most powerful man in the world.

That explanation does seem to accord with many of the boxes of the detailed inventory. In the inventory, the FBI counted every fucking clipping Trump kept, along with the dates. Over the last month, FBI Agents have cataloged 1,673 clippings, dating back to October 1995, that were stored with government documents. Every box has at least one press clipping; even Trump’s leatherbound box of treasures had almost 100 clippings stored alongside his Top Secret/SCI documents. And if you track the entire inventory by the date ranges of the press clippings, you see that those boxes overlap.
[…]
There are no clippings from the final two months of his Presidency — the months he plotted a coup.

And so if we adhere to the Maggie Haberman theory of compulsive pack-rattery, the most innocent explanation for Trump’s theft of government documents, there may still a serious problem. Because if every box in which Trump stored government documents should also have press clippings he read at the same time as those government documents, it means there would be no government documents at Mar-a-Lago from the period when Trump was plotting a coup.
[…]
And if the dates of the clippings in the boxes are any indication of the dates of the records in the boxes, then it suggests the FBI may still not have all the records Trump stole from the White House. Indeed, it suggests the FBI might still be missing some of the most important records, not just for the January 6 Committee’s work, but also for our understanding of key policy steps Trump took in that period, including developments in the Abraham Accords and possibly even Trump’s withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty (which happened close to the end of November 2020). This is the period, too, when Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller cut off briefings to the incoming Biden folks.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/09/03/the-fbi-seized-no-boxes-with-press-clippings-that-postdate-november-2020/

…I mean…there could be an innocent (or at least innocent-adjacent) explanation…but how big of a fool would you have to be to be betting on it where this lot are concerned?

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20 Comments

  1. There’s no Truss in Distrust!

    T.. R… U….. S…. S…

    Uh oh.

  2. Ah, yes, Michael Heseltine, forgotten but not gone. He entered Parliament in 1966 (think about that) and in 2001 was elevated to the Peerage. Do you know who took over his Parliamentary constituency? Why, none other than Boris Johnson!

    Although on the cusp on 90 Heseltine is one of the most rambunctious Peers, endlessly yammering on about what a huge mistake Brexit was. and three years ago recommended that Conservative voters back the LibDems, in order to deny Boris Johnson and the conservatives a clear majority and possibly the keys to Number 10. Remember, he’s a Conservative Peer and while an MP was in the Cabinet of both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Blair probably put him on the Honours list just to get rid of hm, or maybe his Conservative colleagues did.

    Nobody does politics like the British. It’s no accident that House of Cards was originally a British show that was subsequently remade by Americans decades later.

  3. One more thing. If you click on the first link, the Guardian’s “Curse of Heseltine” piece, and scroll down, you’ll see a photo of Michael Gove, Rishi’s wife, and Rishi’s mother. Not only does Rishi almost exactly resemble his mother, they look to be the same age. It’s deeply unsettling, like a British farce where a male actor portrays both the main character and his own mother who makes occasional appearances just for laffs.

  4. …can’t imagine why you might think of the original house of cards at a time like this

    …well…ok…so I definitely can…but

  5. So, trump conveniently filled his stolen boxes in chronological order? And it ends after the election? Buck bet says he buried those new “missing” boxes with his ex wife at Bedminster.

    • …if I follow it right it’s sort of semi-chronological in the sense that the piles he stacked up have the clippings interspersed through them so you can kind of assume certain “strata” were laid down after/around the date of the then-recent clippings

      (…as opposed to the ones from the 90s that were presumably his favorite souvenirs of something or other)

      …so the fact that there are empty folders might imply there are still unsurrended docs that the subpoena required him to return which he hasn’t given up…but that isn’t a certainty since he misfiled them all over the place…just extremely likely because that’s his MO

      …the fact that there aren’t any boxes with clippings later than november 2020, though…assuming he didn’t suddenly change a habit the staff had failed for four years to break him of…seems to at the very least strongly hint that he’s hiding stuff from the run-up to jan 6th in a way that is explicitly an obstruction of justice…& thus criminal?

    • You know what is actually going on here? Hoarding. It’s no different that some old retiree in a trailer park that’s sitting in mounds of old newspapers. It’s just an old man with dementia that against all sanity got elected president, and was surrounded by a cadre of enablers who handed him safety scissors to keep him happy during “executive time.” Just like they do at Sunset Villages in Boca.

      My mother used to do the same thing. She’d pile up newspapers that she was going to get around to “reading” until we’d pitch a fit and throw them out. Then she would clip the crossword puzzles, saying that she was going to get around to doing them, and save piles of those.

      Of course, crossword puzzles are not top-secret documents. I’m beginning to strongly believe that various individuals paid visits to the storage boxes and stole what they wanted, leaving the folders behind, knowing that the old man with dementia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

      • My 96 year old mom does the same thing with newspapers and has for 30 years or more.  That & freezing things that she never will unfreeze.  My sisters would throw out stuff and get the wrath!  I never thought of that as an angle on the Trump thing though I guess it is possible.  I would much rather believe treason though & still would be mighty surprised if much of those docs have not fallen in the hands of the Saudis and Russians.

        • …I think it might have a different root for what I think of as my grandparents’ generation…in a way that maybe starts out as something that makes sense but gets out of hand later in life

          …mine never really forgot rationing…or the whole “make do & mend” thing…so if you had space & it could be repaired or might be useful you hung on to it rather than throwing it straight out

          …& there was something to it…pretty sure a bunch of the tools that get used in the garden at my aunts & uncle’s places (along with some my folks have) are older than me & they don’t need replacing yet

          …so it was never odd to me that both sets of grandparents had a chest freezer…even if you dug to the bottom it was all stuff they had plans for & got eaten in the end

          …but when they were in their later years…then it got like the sort of thing you describe?

      • …that tracks, certainly…& part of this has seemed that way for a while but there’s the context thing that still sets off all the bells for me?

        …the man (like a great many of his supporters/acolytes/fellow intellectual incompetents) thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he’s been getting away with behaving the shittiest way possible in any & every situation for as long as he can remember & thinks it’s a virtue

        …he’s always known that the only reason he gets away with it is that he has “things” (mostly money in the simplest sense but the things he thinks “are” stuff often “represent” stuff since he can’t actually appreciate them)…it’s why he has tacky dimestore decor that costs so much he could have lived in a home where nobody noticed the furniture was IKEA because MOMA was jealous of the stuff on display…he has no taste for the same reasons he has no understanding of why things like NARA & the PRA exist or why intelligence data requires informational hygiene

        …he might just about grasp that big data sanitizes/anonymizes stuff to the extent that that takes away exactly the shit that grifters like him rely on to do the hard work of finding people dumb enough to fall for his snake oil sales pitch…which ought to make it implausibly dumb to not get that same relationship exists with the way he treated those documents

        …leaving aside the part where he clearly does understand it as clearly as he understands anything… literally everything he’s said & done positively screams cognisance of guilt…he’s asking people to believe he’s that fucking dumb…but that they should still take him for a genius & support his every whim while covering his ass against all consequences

        …sorry…didn’t mean to go off on a wall of text but there’s just so much wrong with the man it’s hard to keep it short sometimes

        …anyway…to swing back around to your point…the alarming context for me is that he kept the shit because he knew it was high-value to someone…whether in a direct transactional “the saudis would pay big bucks for that” or “I owe the saudis a bunch but they were asking about this exact shit the other day (what a lucky coincidence) & they said they’d consider it such a favor they’d maybe put us on their golf tour if we could let ’em take a look” is only really different to me in the sense that the former doesn’t require him getting played like a fiddle by a foreign power…both require enablers of various sorts to actually get it done…& that’s the part that’s costing me sleep?

        …even in the best case scenario where actually there’s nothing as big as it sounds involved because they fobbed him off with the nat-sec equivalent of a fugaze…the people that steered him to whatever decision compelled him to add them to his horde & then moved this shit around all over both during & after his term…that’s a lot of people who should have known better

        …& it’s those…the mcconnell/barr/bannon/miller/kushner type of assholes who aren’t dumb enough not to know all of it for what it is & was but lit the fuse & filled their pockets while the fireworks went off & people weren’t looking because they didn’t care if they were defective & ended up setting the whole place on fire & burning it all to the ground so long as they could get more than they deserved out of the back end

        …those are the people trying to strip the bus we’re all sharing for parts while we do our best to keep the wheels from falling off & steering it at least vaguely in the general direction of the road we’d like to be on

        …trump himself is like a magpie that thinks it’s a bald eagle…actually magpies are pretty smart…probably smarter than him…in lord of the rings terms he thinks he’s smaug the great & terrible dragon on top of his horde (the stuff he shouldn’t have kept from his time in the white house being trinkets & treasure like everything else)

        …but he has a lot more in common with smeagol?

    • You’re … uh … welcome?

      That’s why your comment about ghost candidates with the same last names made me laugh. Of course we have them — you New Yorkers taught us everything you know about rigging elections.

  6. More on Liz Truss. She appeared on a Sunday morning chat show today and was interviewed by the show’s presenter (details not really important.) After the interview other members of the show (think like “The View” and Joy Behar pulls someone aside into another area for a one-on-one) returned to the group. One is a comedian named Joe Lycett who I was introduced to through another British show I really got to love via Youtube, Would I Lie To You. He was enthusiastically clapping and calling out, “Fantastic, Liz!” Chit chat followed.

    On Janet Daly’s (another panelist’s) claim Liz Truss is ‘stronger than you think’

    ‘Fair play, Janet. I think the haters will say that we’ve had 12 years of the Tories and we’re sort of at the dregs of what they’ve got available and that Liz Truss is sort of the backwash of Conservative MPs.

    ‘I wouldn’t say that because I’m incredibly right-wing, but some people might say that.’

    I’m 99% certain Liz Truss is going to be announced as Britain’s new Prime Minister in less than 24 hours.

  7. Barbara Ehrenreich died a couple of days ago. She was a fantastic writer, in large part because she was so free from BS. She always let reality drive her framework, and she chose subjects like the working poor which needed that kind of approach.

    She was an extremely clear and organized writer, but again didn’t let her method dictate her results. If an issue was complicated — which poverty or womens rights often are — she didn’t see her job as waving away the complexities, but instead cataloguing and prioritizing the  issues in the best way possible.

    This ís a nice collection of interviews with her:

    https://freshairarchive.org/guests/barbara-ehrenreich

  8. I hope no one hits all those documents with a blacklight. I imagine the results would be disturbing.

    But I do hope they get a drug sniffer doggo in there to check them.

    • See my comment to Yellowbird above about dementia and hoarding.

    • Solar vacuum tubes have always been more efficient than solar panels, but they were also more expensive. But solar manufacturing costs and new manufacturing innovations have brought the cost of solar vacuum tubes down. Naked Energy’s spec sheets don’t state the cost of these, and I suspect they’re still a bit too pricey for individual households. But these could be a real game changer for bigger properties like hotels and hospitals, and maybe in the future, with further innovation and price drops, they’ll become the default choice for household solar.

      It sounds like they have the same issue of a lot of renewables — they just need production on a much larger scale to get the price per unit way down.

      The challenge is big private capital is addicted to chasing the next iPhone where the price doesn’t drop much if you create demand for a billion units and the returns are huge. Solar generally represents slow but steady returns, and that’s yucky to VCs.

      Public investment is the answer, but the GOP and fossil fuel industries are dead set on blocking public investment by hook or by crook.

      I think the recent bill from Biden and the filthy hippies like AOC and Sanders is too little cash, but the good thing is that it’s still a ton of cash, and that will help push power to other side of the ledger. The more demand and investment there is, the greater the political power there is in expanding even more with another bill. It’s not like the oil industry ever stopped coming back for more after they got one bill through.

  9. Crankypants TERF JK Rowling just published a new book where some youtube content creator gets doxxed by evil social justice warriors over her ableist, racist, and transphobic content and then gets stabbed by those evil SJWs.

    But you know, she totally didn’t Mary Sue herself into a book because she feels it’s unfair how she’s been treated.

  10. After a year, I got a haircut from a professional as opposed to the amateur in the mirror.  It feels a hell of a lot better than myself doing it (one of the few benefits to being nearly bald.) Sadly, the trimmers I bought at the beginning of the pandemic were the best investment I made the entire pandemic.

    However, she trimmed a lot of areas I didn’t/wouldn’t do like my ears and eyebrows.  On the bright side I look a lot less scruffy and I got a massive discount on the haircut because it wasn’t much work.  I still tipped nicely (18%).

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