move along, no dons here

Somebody told me there’s a trail of Russian dealings literally right at Mr Trump's feet.

They said that it started when, back in 1987, a Russian bought five of Trump’s condos in Trump Tower in one go. He was a Russian named David Bogatin and worked for some Russian oligarchs.

Suspecting fake news, I looked it up. It turned out to be true and Mr Trump was even at the deal closure in person. Now it all happened when the old Soviet Union had broken apart and the Russian mafia were taking their rake-offs from Russian state companies, like oil and transport.

They needed somewhere to park money as well as a way to launder it. Trump was one of the first to permit confidential buyers of his building assets. He wouldn't know anything about the other back-story.

Curiously, it is also said that the same Bogatin was later convicted as a gasoline bootlegger. I checked this too and and indeed the FBI did take back his five condos which were being used both to hide assets and from money laundering. Oh well, we live and learn.

I remember times in Russia when I’d see the small scale end of the gasoline bootlegging, with literally trestle tables piled with cheap fuel on sale in the street.

Now to keep things interesting, it turns out that Bogatin’s brother was also dicey and part of a $150m stock scam, working for none other than Semion Mogilevich, a tip-top Russian mobster, at the time expanding his empire in New York.

There’s no direct connection to Trump in any of this, of course. If he happened to sell some condos to a Russian mobster, it could just as easily have been someone else making the deal.

Something similar emerged when Trump Tower then became the host for another Russian mobster. This time Vyachelsav Ivankov set up as Moglivich's enforcer in another anonymous condo in the Tower.

Fair enough, but that’s not all. It turns out that the entire floor below Trump became used for illicit gambling and money laundering. Eventually the FBI raided it. Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, ran this operation and the FBI identified him as another Russian mobster linked with Semion Mogilevich.

Just because it's the floor below Trump's in one of his towers doesn't prove any link.

It's about now that Alexander Litvinenko, pops up. He’s the Russian intelligence agent who defected to London and was murdered by allegedly Kremlin agents with tea laced with radioactive polonium. I strongly remember this because I was one of the people British Airways called up for having used the same plane seat that Litvinenko had used. The relevant piece here is that Litvinenko linked Mogilevich with Putin, saying they had a good relationship since around 1994.

So now it's three times there's been a Russian mobster using Trump's tower to conduct business and each time there's a link an FBI most wanted mobster who is also a good relation of Putin.

I know, it's all circumstantial and coincidental. It’s just unfortunate that Moglevich’s name comes up in the background of Trump deals. Surely these mobsters are just using Trump’s organisation as an unwitting patsy? And treating Trump property as a kind of home away from home?

The same probably for Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, which was fined for money laundering under the auspices of Vyachelsav Ivankov. It was the biggest fine to that date, some $10 million, but could almost be regarded as a cost of doing business to the mobsters. Worse was Ivankov’s fate later, being gunned down in Moscow.

Oblivious to all of this, Trump's own business fortunes were struggling. At the end of the 1990s he owed billions of dollars and created that famous personal guarantee deficit of around $900 million, which became the basis of his ongoing tax write-downs "Because I'm smart", as he put it.

It was at the same time that Russia’s economy nose-dived and the oligarchs all needed to move money fast. A particular type of recipient became various lumps of Trump real estate, via Russian buyers and shell companies, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

It’s all circumstantial and just unfortunate that these things have been happening around Trump’s properties.

And I doubt Trump even knows anything about any of it. Oh No. Very No.

don & co?

That Trump/Russia/Election story is one where I'm thinking some of Trump's old faux-buddiness may have backfired. Like when he was pretending to know Putin before they's actually met.

It's Don Trump Jr that has let the Outlook out of the laptop, with his 4 page email release. To be honest, I found its contents mainly a disappointment, filled with dreary meeting time rescheduling. No wonder Don Jr has the nickname Fredo, like the problematic Corleone son in the Godfather.

I can understand the main point that there was ostensibly an offer from Russia to dish some dirt on Hilary Clinton to the Trumps, and that Donny Junior, Jared Kuschner and Paul Manafort were only too pleased to hear all about it in a meeting. Naughty naughty, getting a foreign power involved in the American election. Naughty, naughty, naughty, not ever mentioning it to (for example) the FBI.

It begs the question about how many other inconvenient facts are lightly buried in the current US president's dynasty,

Unpick more of the story and it becomes a desperate scrabble for pre-election information. Firstly, when Trump was bragging about his link to Putin during the election campaign, it was clearly made-up. A false fact; what's that usually called? oh yes, a lie.

Trump did have a link to Russia through his sleazy Miss Universe contest, which was staged in Moscow. His link included Aras Algarov, the property billionaire with whom Trump was discussing a Moscow Trump Tower. The link also featured Algarov's son, a wannabe pop star called Emin. Oh yes, Trump is in one of the pop videos.

All of this leads around to the hustler promoter working for Emin Algarov, a vodka-powered Fred Flintstone looking Brit named Robert Goldstone. He suggested that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya could help the Trumps, but was probably operating at both ends of the fixer meeting.

Goldstone implied that Veselnitskaya had damaging information. He also implied that she was linked to the Russian attorney general (not true). TIt all looks like meeting bait and certainly worked when Veselnitskaya turned up at Trump Tower.

Now there's some other murkiness here, because of a related case involving Veselnitskya and a real estate tax fraud uncovered by accountant Sergei Magnitsky. He was locked up by the powerful people he accused of the fraud and then mysteriously died in prison.

It triggered a bunch of US sanctions against Russia because of the way Russian corruption appeared to be swept under the carpet. That's when Putin got involved, responding with a cessation of US adoption of Russian children.

What I get from just this part of the story (yep, there's more) is that Trump and family are not particularly choosy about the folk they consort with in Russia. They're also not that bothered about disclosure when they sail close to the wind.

Let's wait for the next piece when Washington based Rinat Akhmetshin pops up. Supposedly a former member of the Russian military intelligence services (GRU) and seemingly operating a business lobbying on behalf of Russian oligarchs in Washington.

The ironic part is that so far it really doesn't show any direct Trump link to Putin, nor real inroads to direct Russian power, but yet a kind of reflexive desperation by trumpites in their actions.

Maybe that will change when the towering stories of David Bogatin and Semion Mogilevich resurface?

And just peeking at one of the money laundering cases such as Case 1:13-cv-06326-TPG Document 381 Filed 10/23/15 (there's several) is like a glimpse into a first draft script for a Hollywood movie.

terraforming for beginners

We've still another week or so in this barn, before we temporarily move to the railway terminus by the ferry. That'll only be for a few days because we are now on the latter stages of our building project.

I say that advisedly because today we've seen a huge down pour of rain. I haven't quite mastered the roof windows here and had them tipped just too far acting as mini chutes to let the weather cascade inside.

As for the journey to London. We are further away here, but there's some fast trains on whose route we've so far made four journeys. Even the Sunday service seems okay, although the local station doesn't open its catering until 8 am.

I'm less sure about some of the roads around these here parts. My car has those sensor beeper things and driving around many of the lanes they start beeping as if to say I'm too close to the edge. Friends with longer presence in the area tell me it's normal and that most cars have a switch to turn them off.

I'm still a long way from mastery of reversing that many around here seem to manage. They glance backward and then reverse at speeds I'd consider fast even when driving forward. It is a needed skill with all of the single track lanes. Of course, this is a consequence of us choosing temporary places away from it all. Roads and travelling should be far more straightforward in a few weeks.

We've also been watching the developments as the land around our planned destination is being remodelled by the Megaratheans. Slartibartfast would be pleased with the evolving results. There'll be a couple of new ponds and a diversion of the main stream. It's all looking rather brown at the moment, but will soon become a pleasant green colour, with added paths and foliage.

All part of a plan.

a proper eton mess

Well someone has to eat our ad-hoc and barn-prepared pudding.

The slow wifi means that its taking longer to get the news here. I'm seeing that elsewhere people are asking about a leadership election for the Conservatives. The spokespeople are all saying "No" although based upon prior 'definitive' statements, they might as well save the electricity and ink.

So cynically, just before Parliament adjourns for their extensive summer holidays, we get the vote for the great Repeal Bill. Not since Magna Carta did we get something quite so vast. A kind of negatively framed Summa Carta Libertatum to switch all of the EU legislation back to UK, subject to its inevitable illumination with twinkling costs and changes from numerous expensive experts.

Not forgetting that £8bn-£10bn per year that UK currently contributes to EU, which they won't give up without a significant fight.

Mrs Maybe is now making overtures to other parties for consultations, but mainly as a way to shove legislation through when some of her own party are iffy about what is happening. Done differently, this could have been a thoughtful way to handle Brexit, but now it comes across as desperate measures.

May's own leitmotif is off key, stuck in a groove, like a defective android. Strong and Stable/No deal better than a bad deal/unborn chicken voices in my head, etc.

That's the problem with recent actions. They say one thing but then scrabble for any nearby straw to clutch.

Everything is as wobbly as a layered trifle that failed.

Some ingredients are being rescued but others just left to sink to the bottom. Instead of red lines we're seeing pink blancmange.

The uncertainties provide good cover in the negotiation because no-one will be able to tell the full outcome, particularly if a couple of maraschino cherries are divertingly placed on top of what will probably be renamed as an Eton mess.

Post Referendum and the recent election, we should have been able to see a way for UK Parliament to reinvent itself. Some chance. Even the startup sequence was delayed and fusty. The old party system is failing. The self-interested cooks are too busy arguing about the free booze to really worry about recipe. Some mould-breaking is required, perhaps from the newer entrants.

And alongside, in walk the Americans with a very, very big Trumpian offer. Very big. What's that old saying? If it looks to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

misdirection and dismemberment

That new Polly Toynbee/David Walker book about the state we're in makes for interesting reading.

I'd add an extra dynamic now, whilst the conjuror's art of misdirection is being applied alongside a tory ideology.

The misdirection comes from the lies of the Referendum campaign and simplified bullet points of the recent election. Now that a temporary parliament has been formed, we can expect the main stories (notwithstanding recent major tragedies and incidents) to be about the Brussels shenanigans.

Behind it all we have a few statistics indicative of the ideologue-led agendas running quietly behind the scenes. We could regard the UK as a system, which runs with a state budget of around £772 billion over a year. It is currently spending about £56bn more than it raises.

It was this overspending figure that Osborne was trying to reduce to zero and then to start to pay back the national debt. The excuse was about prior overspends, but the real reason for a temporary hike of the figure to £156 bn was the bail-out of the banks after their disgraceful and largely unpunished casino antics.

Osborne wouldn't liken the UK debt to a household borrowing for a house. But there's a clear point to be made around a mortgage. You don't have to pay it all back in one go and sometimes the cost of money is actually quite reasonable. Those with a doctrinal dismemberment agenda can step around this thinking to one of just reduction of the size of the state.

I can think of people like Osborne/Oliver Letwin/Cameron/Gove who are all a part of this small state agenda. Written into their thinking is the Tory target to reduce the state from its 1997 size of 45% past its current 39% down to 36% by 2021. Easy headlines for at least a few of the (increasingly outdated) newspapers. Much more about 'me now' taxation rather than 'we together' as a continuum.

I've just watched that docudrama about the tawdry Theresa vs Boris inner circle boys' club voting for their leader last year. May was portrayed as a surprisingly opinionated, directive person, compared with what we've seen in the few rare glimpses of her when not running to a robotic script.

If she is as aware as portrayed, then she'd be another one to add to that 'small state' grouping.

Where it all becomes damaging is that the headlines of state attack are so easy to write. Bloated mandarin departments? Why, yes, Minister, etc.

So Brexit generates the chance to rewrite everything, and it is provided to the henchos of the government departments, because those actual departments lack resource, skill, scale or whatever. So in step the parastatal organisations from the Big Four and beyond. Lobbied-up friends of the Cabinet. They get paid whatever happens and can create shedloads of interns to red-ink everything. Hoteliers at the gold rush.

It becomes activity rather than results and is a large outcome from the front-line negotiations.

A couple more numbers. The UK GDP is around £1,943 bn, with the total national debt at £1,638 bn so we can see that currently the UK runs at 84% National Debt as percentage of GDP. The population continues to rise, and at 65.8 million in late 2016, it has added 7.6 million over the last 20 years.

The question becomes whether a larger state needs more investment to run properly? I'd say it does. That's another part of the misdirection of the citizens by politicians. As well as using the parastatals to analyse and organise for the government departments, increasingly these helpers also run and award the contacts for the stuff that needs to get done.

This is further diffusion of the State into private companies. Who runs the systems that the biggest departments use? Welfare? Health? even parts of the tax system?

Get closer to the public's awareness and spot other organisations that became private. BT. Utilities. Railways. Most of London's transport. Some of these haven't gone too well.

There's a big element of fat cattery around many of these systems. They're also increasingly run by offshore interests.

Quick examples of de-stating include Arriva (German Deutsche Bahn) buses and trains nationwide, non emergency ambulances. Arvarto (German) local taxation and welfare, waste management. NHS already uses VirginCare and Care UK as well as stock market listed multinationals including UnitedHealth Group, Acadia Healthcare, Circle, Capita and Interserve.

UK Power Networks is owned by Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings,40%, Power Assets Holdings (Hong Kong), 40%, and The Li Ka Shing Foundation, 20%. That's only one of the UK power networks, but includes what was once known as the London Electricity Board, the Eastern Electricity Board and the South Eastern Electricity Board.

The unbundling occurs everywhere and the remaining big targeted sections of the pie chart comprise Pensions, Welfare, Education and Health.

It brings in the next point, which is euphemistically referred to as 'externalities'. That's the stuff that operates alongside the service or product and becomes an area for cold-hearted spreadsheet action. Examples include training, pension plans, pollution management, social costs of closures.

So it'll be time to watch the left hand whilst the right hand is waving around, although unfortunately recent evidence suggests it is easier to understand the illusion.

barn

So we've 'upped sticks' from the woods to move to the barn.

We have a rotating cast of players here, also joined by livestock ranging from chickens to alpacas. The alpacas have pointy ears whereas llamas are the ones with the banana-shaped ears if you're ever not quite sure what's in the field.

I'm told that jinksy llamas also make good guard animals for a herd of say, sheep, whilst alpaca are relatively timid.

I'm also one fence short of the herd here, so although the friendly dog comes around whenever the gate is left open, the rarer livestock are kept contained.

Our friendly weather folk have told us there will be thunderstorms today, but I'm mainly seeing the clear blue skies and sunshine. Just right for sitting on the grass for a leisurely read.

lazing on a sunny afternoon

Still swanning around in the forest, although tomorrow morning it's time to move on from the shack to a barn. It's a fair distance away and I'm already mostly packed ready for the journey.

This afternoon deserves some sunny downtime, and maybe even a trip to a nearby pub.

a very loud noise in the woods

Even in this temporary home in the woods there's obvious signs of adjacent civilisation. None so dramatic as the sound of a flight of jet planes passing by at low altitude.

I'm used to hearing planes and helicopters going about their business, but on Thursday afternoon it was different because the initial low sound just kept getting louder and louder.

Wham.

I looked around the sky but couldn't see anything. I wondered why a jet plane had been allowed to fly so low.

Then, a few minutes later I heard a similar more distant sound, increasing in volume. I looked up to my right just in time to see a diamond grouping of planes banking in a curve which would disappear behind me.

This time I was aware that the sound level stayed constant and I realised that they must be turning behind me in a loop.

Sure enough, another ten seconds and I saw a block of tightly formed planes zoom through a hole in the trees and then a few seconds later a second smaller grouping.

This time I could see the planes clearly. The Red Arrows, which I assumed were at the end of a circuit from a display. No smoke trails, so it must have been the outer reaches.

I checked their calendar. They should be at Goodwood, but apparently the cloud cover was too low. Perhaps this was a substitute fly-past? Still a wow-inducing experience. They should be flying past again today in about ten minutes. This time I'll be prepared.

*Update: They just flew past on the way to their show, but were above the clouds.

walkaway

I've been reading Walkaway for a few weeks now. I originally picked it up at the Hay Book Festival, when I was browsing the book tent on Utopia day. I like Cory Doctorow's writings in Boing Boing and had previously read a gift copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Doctorow deals in ideas and themes and indeed there are some continuities between the two novels. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom there are themes around increasing virtualisation, a set of people known as the Ad-hocs who keep traditional Disney running and the concept of rebooting humans after death.

In Walkaway, the ideas are extended and writ large in a post-scarcity world. Normal folk live in a place called 'default'. There's the zotta-rich at the top of the pyramid and they can do anything. Then there's the walkaways who slide off the edge of the world into their own self-fabricated zone using the exhaust products/feedstock from everyone else.

It strikes me as a thought experiment with characters. I'd almost, in systems engineering terms, call them actors, because as walkaways, they have a curious lack of dimensional depth. Almost like a set of artificial intelligences talking amongst themselves. It also leads to some protracted debates, which is really Doctorow's device to provide depth of exposition on a topic.

Voices in head, anyone?

When I attended the Utopia debate at Hay, I was reminded of my own impressions of the problems of any Utopia, which go right back to Thomas More and the critiques of Plato's Republic. There's the emergent need for rules and then their unintended consequences. Share stuff, don't own it. But who lives closest to the share shack? And five days at Glasto is very different from a year at Twin Oaks.

So there's inevitable flaws in Doctorow's world. It's all very well to build a happy hippy community using fabrication mechanisms that can recreate anything, but what happens the day the bad guys decide to take it over? Walkaway, obviously?

Or at a more basic level when the zottas gamify their cars with better firmware and can outmanoeuvre other vehicles. Or like Orwell's inner party can switch off their home telescreens.

Along the way there's the reboot/uploading theme - putting one's consciousness onto a system. It's been popularly explored in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror series, with checkpointed versions of self screamingly relegated to the chores or neural network in a jar type San Junipero era-hopping.

I guess it's an interesting idea to re-examine at different points in one's real life too. I'm reminded of a favourite 1970s Roy Harper love song:

We're just spinning leaves in the flight of a dawn, little girl. Falling through an eternal horizon of time. But as we lie here I'd like to think that all we've got will be ours forever.

Don't you think we're forever.

But in a different frame of mind I'd think of a gloomier Jeff Mangum's two headed boy:

All floating in glass. The sun it has passed. Now it's blacker than black. I can hear as you tap on your jar. I am listening to hear where you are.

Whew. So Doctorow is dealing with complex stuff that arcs from Plato into the future. He's had to build a world or two to make the story and then throw in ideology and economic theory.

A tall order, particularly for a prolific and on-trend writer. Even in the time since this was written, some things have moved along. Remember it's a published 2017 book, but there's almost an over-emphasis on 3D printing and other once zeitgeisty concepts.

There's oblique humour in amongst the geekish descriptions and dialogues. In a proper game-playing moment a Hunger Games style blimp appears and rescues some of our protagonists from a particular point of conflict. Time for a jump-cut fast forward to allow the machine to reset.

Weirdly, it was the frequently crashing AI called Dis, with her existential crises that propelled me through the middle section of the book. I guess the portrayal of Dis didn't have to try as hard as some of the others, with their multiple names and thigh-slapping backward references to storybook characters.

I'm glad to have read it, although my reading process changed to speed-reading for the later part of the book. Still, I suppose one day we'll be able to upload the entire content in a matter of minutes.

Here's Roy Harper.

hole truths

My improvised internet connection in the woods is a kind of pay-as-you-go deal. Much better than the train-of-thought jarring slowness of the prior official set-up, which also couldn't get a phone signal.

I rigged up this alternative and started with a modest payment but have already had to increase it because of the mysteriously large amounts of data being processed. It's probably linked to all of the social media tracking data that now gets added to everything in order to try to sell me a toaster.

And despite all the trees around, I couldn't find one that looked like the magic money tree of the conservatives (like on their logo) and instead have had to resort to a more conventional means of top-up.

It makes me wonder whether that Northern Irish negotiation missed a trick? Instead of just taking the £1 billion, they could also have made it some sort of pay as you go deal. At this rate, there will already have been half a dozen 'confidence and supply' votes by the end of today. Mrs May could regard it as a triumph based upon 'cost per defended majority vote' which is already rapidly reducing.

But of course it won't be classed that way because the DUP money wasn't a payoff. Oh No.

It also means Mrs May can continue a little longer with her non-specific hole digging project, aided and abetted by the newly muddied boots of that popular and well-known environmentalist Mr Gove. Is it just me, or has Mrs May deliberately decided to field her most annoying cohorts for television and radio interviews?

In related news, our own hole-digging project is proceeding apace. A couple of small ponds and a meandering brook should do nicely. We can regard it as a goal-oriented outcome, although currently a work in progress.

old checkout laser scanners won't spark

I moved my loyalty cards from physical wallet to iPhone ages ago, using that Stocard App. It presents the relevant bar-code and/or image of whatever card is required at Point of Sale.

It can work fine, but some stores are half-hearted in their support of loyalty technology. Sparks at Marks and Spencer is a case in point.

Stocard will work in some M&S locations. In others it won't scan at all. A well-trained assistant will key the Sparks number manually, but other times it gets ignored or I get referred to the service counter.

Today I was in a larger store. The iPhone image worked fine in one area, but a few minutes later wouldn't work at all. I surmise that only the hand-held scanners can read the card image.

I'm reassured that I'm still beta testing the future.

tales from the riverbank

I'm still in the forest and this time able to catch a photograph of the heron that landed on the back porch a few days ago.

I wasn't sure that I'd be able to upload the picture because my internet connection is as slow as olden-days dial-up.

I didn't really expect to be able to temporarily live in the woods without technology. Instead, I've assembled my own makeshift wi-fi node connected at 4G speed.

I know, it's hardly Robinson Crusoe.