ECORDS were being promised and are now being delivered. Last night we saw our local team (across the road from us) winning the league again, having already won the League Cup and the Community Shield. In 5 days from now we shall see if FA Cup is added to the trophies cabinet, making a first-ever treble of this kind.

Not the first time

Manchester City won the league half a dozen times before, but over the past 8 years it happened 50% of the time. Here they are as recently as last year.

An attitude thing

I was never a crazy Manchester United fan. Sure, they’re local, but the attitude was always a tad different and City was the ‘underdog’. With young talent like ‘Insane’ Sane, how can anyone not like City?

Compare that to the pretentious London clubs, where some players’ heads are too big even for the coach/manager.

Liverpool made victory even sweeter

I’ve long cheered for Liverpool because it’s a sweet, passionate club with a lot of tradition. For a number of decades it receded to ‘underdog’ status, but not anymore. It has defeated City more than any other club in recent years, so seeing their incapacity for actual trophies is always amusing.

‘Pep’ and Jürgen are another matter. Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp, like his German club, are somewhat of a Nemesis to the legendary Guardiola, based on their track record. Thus, any time we see Klopp defeated there’s a tinge for sympathy for Guardiola, who conquers his worst fear.

And so, here we are the morning after. Will City get the perfect ‘cabinet set’ this year? We shall know on Saturday…

VERY MORNING I wake up to an unknown weather; I do get my forecast from the command line, but it’s not always reliable. There’s also reliably-aggregated (historical) data; or data points that, no matter one’s views on the subject of global warming, speak for themselves.

Extreme weather is becoming more frequent. Sometimes the poles ‘travel’ down south and the poles themselves can heat up like never before; there’s a lot more to it than melting icecaps (media likes to focus on sea levels) because unpredictable weather and erratic seasonal patterns harm farmers and crops, threatening famine (or soaring food prices); this makes mass migration and war more likely. Probably more likely than rising sea levels (this can cause floods and stronger storms, like the ones just experienced in the US south, notable for their fatalities).

War, suffice to say, further contributes to warming, especially if and when nuclear weapon are used, not just produced.

The above photo was taken in February back when the temperature reached nearly 20 here. Yes, 20 in Manchester. In February. That’s winter.

I’ve lived in this city for nearly 20 years. Last month was the first time I bought fans.

esterday, for the first time in months, Manchester City returned to the top of the league’s table (and not because it had played an extra game). The team is now in a good position to secure a third trophy, the most prestigious of all (league/PL), and is well positioned to advance further in the Champions League too. What remains other than those two prestigious cups is the FA Cup, which has no major teams left it in except Manchester United and Manchester City. So this can be another interesting year with Manchester taking all the trophies (Community Shield included) and maybe Manchester City alone will net them. It also seems increasingly likely that the northwest (England) will secure the top 3 spots in the league for the second year in a row.

At the start of the season it seemed highly improbable that Manchester City would break yet more important records; it never won a Champions League either; didn’t even reach the final. Time will tell what can happen (over the next 3 months)…

It is a good time to be a Manchester City fan and Manchester United too seems to have found solid new leadership.

Poulsen made a name for himself by burning Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. How can this conflict in media be overlooked? Unless it is a political apparatus.

The people who proudly frame Assange, intentionally making claims they know to be false so as to ‘punish’ (or scare) Ecuadorian officials close to Assange

Pence and Moreno agree to facilitate the extradition of the asylee

OYCOTT the Guardian has been a thing or a meme or a hashtag for a number of years if not decades, but I only really started bycotting the publication (entirely) back in November after it had libeled Assange one more time — the last straw. It wasn’t the first time and it’s clear what they’re hoping to achieve, even at the expense of the publication’s (yes, as a whole) reputation.

I took a break from following and covering Assange affairs — and by extension Wikileaks — about a month ago. I changed my mind after the media had once again brought up Trump Jr. and Roger Stone, exploiting the fact that they were contacted/responded to around the time of the US election in 2016. It was a mistake to respond to them as those eager enough would distort any form of contact, establishing that as a “connection” or “collusion”. Each time RT or Sputnik contacted me (several times each) I did not even respond. They invited me to TV interviews, but I know how guilt by association works, so I very rarely take photos with anyone or appear on other people’s platforms (it gets one stigmatised).

At the moment there’s an unfortunately effective effort to isolate Wikileaks and discourage people from associating with it (let alone consider submitting leaks to it). But yet worse is the fact that Assange quite likely lives in the embassy (the Ecuadorian Embassy in London) on “borrowed time”. Seeing how the press constantly libels him for purely political purposes has taught me what I need to know about averting bad publicity.

I used to communicate with Julian Assange and I have a good/amicable relationship with his mother. She is a passionate supporter of her son’s work, but it breaks her heart to see him broken physical, emotionally and perhaps (ultimately) mentally.

When the media connects Wikileaks to Russia it conveniently overlooks all the Russia-hostile tweets from Wikileaks and even the Russian leaks. It likes to mention RT, noting that some series with Wikileaks staff in it was licensed to RT about a decade ago (it had appeared elsewhere too, not just RT). When the media connects Wikileaks to Trump it typically boils down to Trump operatives who falsely claimed to be associated with/connected to Assange. They’re liars, frauds, and crooks. Their appalling character is a liability to Wikileaks, but they enjoy all the media attention. It adds value to them.

My guess is that within a year or two there won’t be much left of Wikileaks (new material) and Assange will be somewhere in the US, likely behind bars because fair trial is not possible. Exposing the rich and powerful isn’t easy. Wikileaks will always be proof of that. It shows what happens when one becomes affective at lawfully challenging/exposing empire (nonviolently too).

ARGE football clubs such as Manchester City (MCFC) are owned by billionaires to whom human rights may not mean very much. Manchester City is a great club that we support, but it is digitally a disgrace, Adobe Flash and Microsoft aside (their Windows-powered site has always been terrible, slow, and inaccessible to many). But today I found out that it is actually a lot worse. The awfulness goes well beyond the site itself.

They are spying on people, selling their data, spamming them without prior approval, then making the “unsubscribe” form intentionally broken. I tried it in 3 mainstream Web browsers, on 3 different PCs, and the buttons are not clickable. It’s usually not a coincidence; slimy companies like these do not want people to opt out and definitely not delete their accounts with associated data.

Manchester City has a really large turnover; there’s no excuse for this sellout to a malicious ‘industry’.

eonie Brinkema, appointed by Bill Clinton, works in a kangaroo court; it’s widely notorious for a rubberstamping-like behaviour in a variety of deeply political cases. “No one should have to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information,” said a letter to the editor yesterday, highlighting the nature of what some whistleblowers had done and got punished for. In exchange for them exposing crimes they got treated like criminals and this is more or less the job of Leonie Brinkema, protecting criminals by putting in prison those who spoke about these crimes. I don’t know Leonie Brinkema personally and it’s not even simply to find a simple photo of her face (drawings are out there and she looks a lot more furious in them).

It is expected that if (or when) Julian Assange gets ‘kidnapped’ and ‘shipped’ to the US Leonie Brinkema will be the sociopath who sentences him to death (or prison until death) for merely exposing the crimes of people like those who appointed her. What a crazy world we live in. They call it “justice”, but to those who set this court up it’s “just us”.