Yesterday saw the regular monthly community litter pick in Bristol’s Barton Hill, which takes place on the first Saturday of each month.
On a sunny but initially cool morning four of us turned up and spent an hour and a quarter clearing up Ducie Road and its council-owned car park, a regular dumping ground for fly-tippers, as well as a convenient repository for spent catering size nitrous oxide canisters.
The team dismantled one fly tip and bagged it up for collection by Bristol Waste along with our ‘swag‘, which will be collected – hopefully speedily – by Bristol Waste.
Alex, Steve and Ronit with the fruits of our litter pick. Image courtesy of Eric Green
With the inauguration of the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, it has been noticed that a certain level of authoritarianism – or even fascism – has entered American politics in The Felon’s desire to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.).
Of course, The Felon is not implementing his far-right agenda in isolation.
One of his biggest aides and pro-tem best buddy is the fascist known as Elon Reeve Musk, a man of capable of wielding vast wealth but very few brain cells. He is currently leading the charge to destroy US federal government departments in the drive for alleged efficiency; and is messing up badly, on account of which his approval rating in the USA is rapidly declining, but has yet to reach the levels seen in the UK.
The Muskrat is of course best known for being the man who invested in Tesla cars, which was incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. The Muskrat was only involved in the company’s first funding round, i.e. he just provided the money, not the technical expertise.
Partly as a result of The Muskrat’s overt fascist sympathies, The Muskrat’s popularity has been adversely affected.
Tesla car sales have also been affected by The Muskrat’s links to The Felon and his fascist sympathies too. As The Guardian reports, sales of Tesla in Europe in January 2025 were half what they were the previous year.
In addition to this, the Tesla factory on the outskirts of Berlin has been used as a screen for another action by Led By Donkeys (posts passim), whilst showrooms have been targeted by demonstrators and even defaced.
In London, fake Tesla advertisements showing a saluting Muskrat and claiming the vehicles – renamed Swasticars – go from zero to 1939 in 3 seconds have started appearing.
Finally, in other news, The Muskrat, who also hold Canadian citizenship via his mother, is the subject of a federal petition seeking to revoke his citizenship. At the time of writing it has over 237,000 signatures.
The non-corporate, contributive and sharing nature of free and open source software and operating systems is one aspect that has always made it attractive to your ‘umble scribe, who comes from a family where both branches have been left-leaning for three generations and possibly longer.
Linus has responded forthrightly – but mostly politely to someone who aimed the phrase “woke Communist propaganda” in his direction via social media recently and set out his political views plainly for all to see, as shown in the following screenshot.
Thank you, Linus, for your humanity, never mind the kernel.
Earlier this week, you ‘umble scribe received a text message after 10pm in the evening – never a good sign.
And so it proved: my old friend André Sparkfield, affectionately known as Onj, had passed away on Monday.
I first met Onj at a mutual friend’s house party some 30 years ago and was instantly attracted by his generosity and warmth.
That was before I really knew of his artistic and creative side, which was truly impressive.
Onj was a stalwart of the party and festivals scenes in the south west, providing decor for the likes of Bearded Fiend, Marcel Mouton, Mutant Dance and Tribe of Frog.
Onj and myself worked together every year for 15 years on Trinity‘s free annual fireworks party. I lit the bonfire, Onj lit the fireworks, usually by hand (a spectacularly dangerous looking activity, says someone standing next to and tending several cubic metres of flaming wood. Ed.) until he got sophisticated in the latter years and used electronic firing so he could appreciate his handiwork.
Onj lit up the night sky at countless gatherings and events; not least through his many incredible free fireworks displays over the years at Trinity. These spectacular shows captured the spirit of creativity, joy and community. Displays that stopped traffic, attracted thousands and served as a cornerstone of what makes a city like Bristol sparkle.
I can’t better Emma’s words.
Thank you for being my friend, Onj
Rest in peace, dear.
Update 13/03/2025: the celebration of Onj’s life was attended by over 300 people despite the coldness of the day. A great send-off for a great man.
One of the film’s biggest song and dance tunes was a catchy little number sung by the two stars and entitled “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious“.
According to the song’s Wikipedia page, songwriters the Sherman Brothers have given several conflicting explanations for the word’s origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. At another time they are on record as having written the following:
When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. … The word as we first hear it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.
Scroll forward sixty-one years from Mary Poppins on the silver screen and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has become part of the English language.
Furthermore, as my social media timeline this week has revealed, the word itself has been parodied and used as a pun in connection with one person in particular, the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, who is currently dealing enthusiastically and vindictively with punishing political opponents, as well as dismantling the federal government as part of his mission to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.)
As part of the background to TV science fiction series Dr Who, which has graced TV screens since 1963, one learns that the planet Skaro, home of the Daleks, suffered a thousand-year war between two societies: the Kaleds and the Thals. During this period, many natives of Skaro became badly mutated by fallout from nuclear weapons and chemical warfare. The Kaled government believed in genetic purity and swore to “exterminate the Thals” for being inferior. Believing his own society was becoming weak and that it was his duty to create a new master race from the ashes of his people, a Kaled scientist named Davros genetically modified several Kaleds into squid-like life-forms he called Daleks, removing such “weaknesses” as mercy and sympathy whilst enhancing other behaviours such as aggression and the survival instinct.
The Daleks are just about the nastiest characters ever to appear on Doctor Who: they are portrayed as violent, merciless and pitiless cyborg aliens, completely absent of any emotion other than hate, who demand total conformity to the will of the Dalek with the highest authority. Your ‘umble scribe well remembers cowering behind the settee fifty-two years ago.
However, there are worse creatures in the universe according to your correspondent’s social media timeline.
In a poll by British science fiction writer Charlie Stross, the South African-born man-baby and best buddy of the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat, one Donald John Trump, is beating the Skaro aliens hands-down over the most evil incarnation of government.
AI, we keep being told is the next big thing in the wonderful world of information technology. So far most AIs out in the wild have been developed at great expense and require vast amounts of electricity to work.
Until now.
In the last week or so the AI world has been shaken by the latest version of DeepSeek, an AI developed by the Chinese.
The latest version of Deepseek (R1) provides responses comparable to other contemporary LLMs, such OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 despite being trained at a significantly lower cost—stated at US$6 mn. compared with $100 mn. for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023. Furthermore, Deepseek only requires one-tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. This caused a 17% drop in the share price of Nvidia, the main supplier of AI hardware.
However, DeepSeek is not without its limitations. As The Guardian found out, the DeepSeek chatbot becomes very taciturn and tongue-tied when asked questions which the Chinese government finds sensitive. When asked the following questions, the AI assistant responded: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
In addition, DeepSeek and other Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country’s “core socialist values”, that “incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system” or “endangers national security and interests and damages the national image”.
Besides its reluctance to answer questions the Chinese government doesn’t like, there’s another problem for DeepSeek – plagiarism.
The BBC reports that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has accused DeepSeek and others using its work to make rapid advances in developing their own AI tools.
Some companies clearly think ethics is a county with a speech defect in south-east England and that all is fair not just in love and war, but in business too.
The 1734 tale of “The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean“, better known nowadays as “The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk” in the version published in 1807, all hinges on Jack, the poor country boy and the hero of the story swapping the family cow at market for a handful of magic beans, much to the dismay of his mother.
What has a fairy tale about gullibility have to do with the current the Chancellor of the Exchequer, one Rachel Jane Reeves, who despite her qualifications from New College, Oxford (PPE) and the London School of Economics (doctorate in economics) appears to suffer from the same ailment as young Jack?
Well, Ms Reeves seems to have been sold a complete fantasy by her civil service minders in the advice given to her in respect of her proposed announcement later this week of a third runway at London’s Heathrow airport to counter any opposition, as reported yesterday in The Times.
The proposals for a third runaway at the capital’s main airport have long been a source of opposition and the latest incarnation thereof has drawn opposition from Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, London mayor Sadiq Khan and local London MPs Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick), Fleur Anderson (Putney), Marsha de Cordova (Battersea), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington) and Ruth Cadbury (Brentford & Isleworth).
And the complete fantasy bought by Ms Reeves? As justification for airport expansion, she is on record as saying the third runaway is justified because of recent aviation fuel innovations.
“Sustainable aviation fuel is changing carbon emissions from flying.”
The only drawback to her argument is that there is, of course, no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel. As reported by The Guardian in 2024, a paper on sustainable jet fuels from the Institute for Policy Studies found that expectations for these were not realistic. Chuck Collins, co-author of the report remarked as follows:
To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities.
It’s a huge greenwashing exercise by the aviation industry. It’s magical thinking that they will be able to do this.
A further study by The Royal Society in 2023 found that over half of the UK’s agricultural land would be needed to produce biofuel to meet the country’s existing aviation fuel demand.
Not only is Ms Reeves indulging in greenwashing, there's an accusation of hypocrisy on the charge sheet too. She was prepared to argue against the expansion of Leeds Bradford airport near her Yorkshire constituency due to concerns about air and noise pollution.
As The Times piece helpfully points out:
In 2020, Reeves objected to a new terminal for the Leeds Bradford airport near her constituency, arguing that it “would significantly increase air and noise pollution” and “undermine vital efforts to ensure that Leeds upholds its commitment to become a carbon neutral city by 2030.”
The Morning Star is one of Britain’s few left-wing news publications.
As such and unlike other media outlets, it can be guaranteed not to be overly sycophantic where the person of the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat, one Donald John Trump is concerned.
Today’s front page needs no further comment.
Make America Grate Again
Needless to say, the Morning Star’s front page did not make it into the shots of national newspaper front pages provided each day by Sky News and what passes for BBC News. Too close to the truth perhaps.
The closest any of the major papers came to criticism was the Daily Star; and it didn’t hold back.
The dishonourable member for Clacton, one Nigel Paul Farage, has a reputation that stretches way back to his days as a member of the European Parliament of raking in his salary and not doing the work that supposedly comes with the job of being an assembly member in a representative democratic institution.
Indeed, as The Guardian noted over six years ago: “His voting record while a member of the influential European parliament fisheries committee is utterly dire – over three years, he turned up to one of 42 meetings“.
He is now treating the gullible burghers of Clacton with the same contempt. He has not so far organised a single surgery for constituents citing spurious “security” concerns, on which he later backtracked.
Furthermore, he seems to spend more time away from the House of Commons than actually in it, which might just be understandable given the frog-faced grifter earns far more money outside than his already generous MP’s salary of £91,346, according to both the press and his register of declared financial interests.
We are all aware too that the western shore of the North Sea can be a dismal place in the heart of winter; and Nigel definitely thinks so too, as he’s just decided to put the whole of the Atlantic between himself and his constituency, as he has posted the photo below on his on-off pal Elon Musk’s apology for a social platform.
The reason for this outflow of talentless right-wing (ex-)politicians? The inauguration in Washington tomorrow of the disgraced 47th president-elect of the United States, the disgraced former 45th president, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat, one Donald John Trump.
The actions of both fake man of the people Farage and Lettuce Liz remind your ‘umble scribe of moths circling a lit candle…
In other news, Farage’s party colleague, the perma-tanned Richard James Sunley Tice, the ‘businessman‘ whose smile would be gleaming as he stole your granny’s savings, is now splitting his time between his original constituency of Boston and Skegness and his new bailiwick of Dubai.
On a sunny but initially cool morning four of us turned up and spent an hour and a quarter clearing up Ducie Road and its council-owned car park, a regular dumping ground for fly-tippers, as well as a convenient repository for spent catering size nitrous oxide canisters.
As part of the background to TV science fiction series Dr Who, which has graced TV screens since 1963, one learns that the planet Skaro, home of the 
In the last week or so the AI world has been shaken by the latest version of 
What has a fairy tale about gullibility have to do with the current the Chancellor of the Exchequer, one 
