HIS morning when I went to town I took an umbrella with me. Rare stuff. Thankfully it was small and I never needed to use it. Later, in the afternoon, I got caught in the rain during a jog, so I ran back home.

Now there’s some strong wind (not gale force, but strong nonetheless) and more rain. The city needs this. The grass everywhere looks like it’s dying.

Climate change is real. Check the food prices.

began ‘breeding’ shells or snails last year. There are now well over 100 of them. They seem happy. I need to feed them more and more over time because their total number continues to increase. To me, they’re nature near the desk. They have their little colony and they don’t interfere with anything. I’ve never seen even one that is dead… so far.

How could I have missed this hobby of adorable pets (creatures) all those years?

am glad that the new coach of the local team won the match – his first win for the team. If he’s anything like “Pep”, maybe he’ll be here for a decade to come and amass 500+ win.

Enzo will determine the future status of the team in this new “era”.

am a goalkeeper myself, so I was very curious after today’s match (Manchester City won) introduced the hitherto obscure Bettinelli. Up until now Bettinelli was just some face in the Web site, but the first one in the list:

He conceded no goal/s today.

have just caught a new article from Daniel Pocock, following that up with two of my own:

• 2026-08-05 ^14:04 The Establishment, Cambridge, Steve McIntyre & Debian suicide cluster
• 2026-08-05 ^14:27 Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Starts Spending Big Money in an Effort to Resist Lawsuit From Daniel Pocock
• 2026-08-05 ^14:45 How to Dehumanise a Triple National

Maybe one day we’ll know who’s spending like a million pounds on lawfare against my wife and I.

want to say this without any baseless assumptions made about my intent/ion (in saying so). Planet Earth is overpopulated. There, I’ve said it. I know few people (in person) who disagree, but many are shy to say so because there’s some guilt associated with the position, as if one advocates eliminating (or killing) billions of people.

Last weekend I spoke to my father about how police deals with death threats. Overcrowded nations, he explained, cannot keep up with most death threats. In the past, he said, when the global population was a lot smaller (when he was a kid in 1960 the number of people was a lot smaller; see population size graphs, in the 1960s there were 3 billion known humans, now we approach 10 billion!) the cops could more or less deal with all cases in a timely fashion. Now the police is understaffed, underfunded, and ill-equipped.

It bodes not positively (to say the least) for our future. Controlling “the masses” is getting harder and harder. Law enforcement isn’t keeping up.

N 9 days from now Clacton goes to the polls and can reject the incumbent bigot. I took a quick look at the BBC’s description of all the candidates and about half of them can be written off as a self-described (admitted) parody. Consider “Monster Raving Loony Party” and “Everyone is God Party”. No serious person would go by such names.

That leaves about 20-25 people who take themselves seriously and fancy their chances.

Independent candidates aplenty are not a bad thing. In a good democracy, the “Independents” would stand a chance of winning, and gaining visibility without a massive budget (from parties such as Labour) should be desirable.

Encouraging people to vote “Independent” will lead us closer to a democracy not controlled by big Money.