Okay. Two titles came close, but since Heyjude added three options, ‘The Dark Ides of March’ only beat ‘The April Halloween’ by one third of a vote. So we’ll have a final vote. I’ll run this for 24 hours (until 01:30 BST, 21st April (we’re on summer time in the UK)) so it has to be quick.
All the authors have responded to edits, I have begun assembling the book and just need a final title so I can send out contracts. Those who opted for cash get paid right away, those who prefer books won’t have to wait long now.
In the event the poll doesn’t show up (I haven’t tried this before), just put your preference in the comments.
The April Halloween
The Dark Ides of March
It’s nearly over. Then I’ll get back to my usual ramblings while I work on the next in line. I promised that the originator of the winning title would get a free book but since this was so close, I think both should get one. So you’re no longer deciding who gets a free book, just which title you’d prefer.
The title poll for Anthology 14 is still going, until midnight tomorrow (link opens in a new tab). I’ll have to add it all up manually though.
Okay. Lots of news about blood clots lately. I suspect it’s being amplified/fuelled by corporate rivalry but it’s a real effect. It started with the Oxford vaccine, then the J&J one, leaving the Moderna and Pfizer ones feeling smug. Until a study showed that those vaccines were causing more frequent blood clots – but that study comes from Oxford. There is definitely an element of ‘but their stuff is worse’ in all this but it’s irrelevant.
My father died suddenly in February 2020. It turned out to be a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in his lungs. This was before the Covid hysteria really got going and long before vaccines, so nothing to do with either of them. It’s still relevant. My father suffered multiple strokes in his old age. They left him barely able to walk although his mind remained as sharp as ever. Therefore blood clots, strokes, are in the family and I’m not taking anything that will increase my risk.
Especially not an experimental vaccine using a technique never before used in humans – and which has always failed in animal trials with horrible consequences. Blood clots are a recent issue with these vaccines, although that might not be entirely correct. There have also been cases of blindness, sudden death and many other adverse events. Let’s concentrate on the blood clots though, since this post could otherwise become a novel. I already babble on far too long, I’ll try to keep this one focused.
There is an excuse put out that ‘Ah but Covid also causes blood clots’. Of course it does. It’s the spike protein that causes the clots. We’ve known since very early on that in really severe caes the virus affects the blood. Now I’m not talking about those having to stay in bed for a few weeks, nor even most of those hospitalised. I’m talking about the ones put on forced ventilation in ICU. I don’t blame the doctors, they were treating a respiratory virus and when blood oxygen drops, the obvious answer is to get the ventilators out.
It turned out, and was soon realised, that ventilation was the wrong approach. It wasn’t lack of oxygen getting through the lungs that caused the problem. The virus was in the bloodstream and no matter how much oxygen you pumped into the lungs, the blood wasn’t transporting it. Because it was clotting.
So. Now we know that it’s the spike protein that causes clotting. And what do these vaccines do? They make your own body cells pump out the spike protein. The very thing that causes clotting.
To be fair, it wasn’t known that the spike protein caused the blood clots when the vaccines were first rolled out. Now that it is known, shouldn’t governments be stopping the use of this experimental stuff? Not a bit of it. They must have those vaccine passports and if they reduce the population in the meantime, they’ll see it as a bonus. An increasing number of medical staff are objecting but until their number gets above the level at which they can’t all be sacked, most will remain silenced.
The blood clot issue came to light when the 30-50 age group were injected. Some are dying within hours or days. Others are struggling with blood clots for some time. So why didn’t it show up in the older age groups, who were vaccinated first? Two possible reasons.
Maybe it did. But someone in their eighties dying of a stroke or a blood clot (as my father did) isn’t at all unusual. There would have had to have been a massive increase in the numbers dying and it wasn’t massive enough to be noticed – or maybe not so massive that it couldn’t be well hidden. By the way, if you still think your government is telling you the truth after this past year, then this isn’t the blog for you. I can’t help you and I’m not going to try.
The other reason depends on immune response. The older you get, the slower your immune response. It’s the reason cancer is far more common in the old. The cancer grows and spreads before the immune system really gets to grips with it.
So you can picture an elderly immune system sitting around in its slippers, sipping tea, and saying ‘That’s a jolly naughty virus over there. I should get around to doing something about that’. Yes, it’s a British immune system.
The young immune system will go at an infection like an enraged mob of Visigoths. It will hit very hard and won’t much care about collateral damage. It’s focused entirely on destroying the threat. So you’ll get a much faster and much bigger reaction in a young person than an old one.
It’s the other way around with the actual virus. The virus is far more dangerous in the elderly. The vaccine is far more dangerous in the young. This might be due to the virus being an actual intact particle, so the immune system is attacking the whole thing, while the vaccines simply cause your cells to pump out spike protein. That could result in an overreaction to one part of the virus, rather than a more general reaction to the entire particle.
They have now started ‘trials’ on babies and children. Already killed a few. They aren’t going to stop though. I can’t even imagine how any parent could offer up their child to any kind of experiment, much less this particular one. But then, the disease of virtue signalling has been around a lot longer than Covid. I hope those running the trials have some heavy duty lawyers. Since children are likely to be far more harmed by the vaccines than the virus, the ethics of this are questionable at best.
Ah but you must have the experimental potion if you want to go on a holiday abroad, right? Funnily enough, getting the injection changes nothing. You still have to mask up, social distance, no meeting family or friends, absolutely no physical contact and… you still can’t travel.
This is because it has nothing to do with any virus and probably never did. It’s about imposing a New Normal where common tourists don’t go around messing up the playgrounds of the elites. Where the plebs are monitored and controlled and selectively bred for compliance. If you think that’s a conspiracy theory you’re already bred for compliance. This didn’t start yesterday.
Evidence of ‘vaccine shedding’ is appearing and becoming more common. Ah but the vaccines contain no viable virus, right? This is of course absolutely true. What they contain is the genetic code to make virus spike protein. Which will then bud off your cells as little balls of cell membrane covered in spike protein. Some of those will contain copies of the RNA needed to make more spike protein, and the spike protein allows the little blobs to attach to cells and insert the RNA….
No, they didn’t give you the virus. They gave you the means to make it yourself. In your own cells.
The vaccinated are giving it all they can about ‘stay away from the unvaccinated’ and I really think they should. I will happily wear any kind of indicator that I am unvaccinated so the vaccinated stay away from me.
It’s starting to look like the vaccinated are the dangerous ones.
Well, I think editing for the Spring anthology is now done at long last. I’ll start shipping them out tomorrow. For the contracts I’ll need a title so while the authors are considering their edits (and maybe making changes) we have a few days to decide on the title.
I have been all around the block on poll software. The one on WordPress seems to only allow three options so we’d have had to do it by elimination rounds. I don’t like that, I’d rather we all voted at once so I don’t have to split the options.
There are options for polls online but they want more information/access than I am willing to give. So it’s a simple list, put a vote in the comments, just a number will do (I check spam daily because the Spaminator gets overzealous sometimes, so don’t worry if it doesn’t show at once).
The winning title suggestion gets a free copy when the book is published. Unless it’s me or Roobee, in which case the one that gets the most votes gets the free book. I will go with whatever title wins this poll.
I have had to leave out a couple of options. Springtime for Handcock and Germoline, from Delcatto, raised a smile but I might risk a lawsuit from Mel Brooks. If you haven’t seen ‘The Producers’, you really should. A couple of others, while viable suggestions, I could not even begin to imagine a cover for. And that would have to be fairly fast.
This is the most relaxed anthology of the year. It has to come out in spring but it’s not tied to Easter so doesn’t have a tight deadline – and spring is currently on its second attempt at acutally appearing. I did consider holding back a couple of weeks and calling it ‘The Clotted Bloods of May’ but that might be far too harshly accurate, given current events. So that won’t be in the list.
Right, without further diddly-doo, here are the options. I haven’t put names to them, just vote in comments with a number or a title (one has two options) and we will close this at midnight on 19th April (GMT, aka PBT, Proper British Time).
1 Dark Spring
2 The Cold Spring stories
3 The Dark Rites of Spring
4 The April Halloween
5 The Lies of March
6a Hopeless Springs Eternal
6b Hopeless Springs Infernal
7 Slinky and the Weak Spring
8 The Common Cold Spring Anthology (Covid edition)
9 Time for Dead
10 Dante’s Spring
11 The Ghosts of Spring
12 Spring Daze: Stories of safe and effective insanity
13 The Dark Ides of March
14 The Awokening
15 Clout is out
16 Tulips and other variants
17 Spring Tied
Okay, just comment with a number and I’ll add them up manually. This is the first crowdsourced title for an Underdog Anthology, but if the daft lockdowns continue it might not be the last. Ideas for covid-related titles are getting thin – we’ve had ‘Tales from Loch Doon’, ‘Mask-Querade’ and ‘Coronamas’ already.
The cover image will work with the title. The choice is yours.
Okay, I plan to put up a poll in a day or so (assuming I can work out how) to have a fair assessment of which title is best. I’ll go with the winner, no matter what (unless it is Anthology McAnthologyface or similar) and I’ll abide by the decision.
Ah, it seems Prince Philip has died. That’s a terrible shame, he was mere weeks from his 100th birthday and his telegram from his wife. I would have loved to see his reaction to that.
Mrs. Queen and Snarky Phil are the only monarchs I have known. Mrs. Queen was on the throne before I was born and it will be hard to believe she is no longer on it before I die. Considering my whisky intake, she might be. I’m not sure I want to see the reign of Charles III, having done some research into the first two. Although I might be able to train some of the next batch of Roundheads. It’s not entirely unlikely, Cromwell was 45 when he led the Ironside Cavalry at Marston Moor. I’m older but I drink and I know things.
I have been a staunch supporter of Mrs. Queen but she is the last of the royal family in my mind. I cannot support Charles and his ridiculous green agenda. Spike Milligan was right about him. I see no improvement in William and I expect George to be indoctrinated into the Cult of the Green God too, if he isn’t already. After Elizabeth II, the royal family has no purpose anymore. They certainly have no royalty about them.
Prince Philip was a great man. A man with no filters, he said what was in his mind and sometimes he set off the perpetually offended with his off-the-cuff remarks. Those weak and feeble people like to forget that he actually fought in the second world war, in the navy, against real and genuine Nazis. It meant they would not be validated in calling him a Nazi even though they don’t want to realise what it actually means. It means… them.
There will never be another Phil the Greek. None of his offspring come close. Perhaps he didn’t put enough in. Certainly Charles appears to be a bit of late-pull-out spillage. Maybe Edward, the one who has gone quiet, will rise to replace him. We can hope. In the end… I suppose… it really doesn’t matter.
Mrs. Queen has lost her rock, the man who was her constant support throughout her life. It is common in these cases, even in much younger couples, for one to follow the other into whatever comes after. And they were so very close. I really don’t think she can last much longer, I think her grief will call the Reaper to her. They were together for so very long, his absence will feel like a knife into her soul.
I don’t want Mrs. Queen to die. I really don’t. It’s not just a royalist thing, it’s also a selfish thing. I see what is coming under Charles III and I’d rather she outlived me. And the jug-eared twat too. Although it seems he has infected his son with the same shite.
Traditional Britain has nothing left. When the Queen goes it all goes. There is no continuity.
The Royals have spent all this time keeping Britain intact. None of their successors believe in that. They all want the opposite.
Working on it. Delayed by birthdays (my son’s and mine), shovelling snow, keeping the heating system going, bringing an 18th century chimney back into use (with landlord’s help of course) and having my copy of OpenOffice now crashing every time I try to open a file. At least that’s free to reinstall. Most submissions come in Word but a few come in OpenOffice which is actually just as good. Almost, but not quite, entirely compatible.
It just doesn’t feel like Spring. It did for a few days, the daffodils even started coming up but they’re all flattened and frosted now. I don’t know how well they’ll survive. I’m just glad I didn’t start planting anything outside. Winter didn’t end, it just took a long weekend off.
Anyway, RooBeeDoo and I are working on edits. I hope to send them all out this weekend. Then contracts, payments, and finally publication.
I’m still stuck for a title. I’m thinking something spring-related because I’m running out of Coronaplague related ideas and this nonsense looks like it’s going on for a while yet. They can only sell vaccines under emergency authorisation. If the emergency ends, they can’t sell any more vaccines. So the emergency isn’t going to end.
Incidentally, emergency authorisation for experimental (yes, they are) vaccines only works if there is no effective treatment, hence the debunking of all effective treatments. Boris has said that we need to get a vaccine passport to prove we’re safe to be around in a crowd, yet on the same day he said two fully vaccinated people can’t meet indoors because the vaccines don’t guarantee protection. Apparently the ‘passport’ does. So why not skip the vaccines and just give us the passports?
Anyway. They aren’t giving up on this crap any time soon. So I need to get a title that maybe hints at the farce we’re living through but still leaves options open for at least the next three anthologies.
So far, options include ‘Dark Spring’, ‘The Cold Spring Stories’, ‘The Last Rites of Spring’, ‘The April Halloween’ (most of the stories are fairly dark this time, not too surprising under the circumstances) and any suggestions will be welcome.
I shouldn’t expect you to do it for free. Come up with a title Roobee and I hadn’t thought of and if we use it, you get a free print copy.
On Easter Monday, the man we think is in charge of the country will announce his plans for ‘covid passports’. Yes, this is the same man who very clearly stated, mere weeks ago, that his government would never countenance the idea of covid passports. Multiple government ministers made the same statement. They all lied. The contracts to produce the passports were already in place.
We shouldn’t really be surprised at this. This is, after all, the government who wanted us to stay locked down for three weeks to flatten the curve and protect the NHS. The same NHS which is now little more than an experimental-vaccine delivery service. This is the government who told us their emergency covid laws would only be for six months. Anyone still believing a word they say is, frankly, nuts.
Boris’s announcement is already pointless. It has, as is the normal procedure with government now, already been leaked in full. His threat to make everyone show a covid passport to enter a pub has been ‘abandoned’ and there is much relief. Cries of ‘we beat that one’.
No you haven’t. This is the same game they played when they threw all the smokers out of all pubs and clubs, starting in 2006. Don’t you remember? Look at the list of ‘exemptions’ –
Remember when the smoking ban came in? It was originally not going to apply to private clubs or to pubs that didn’t serve meals. They were to be allowed to choose whether to ban or allow smoking. Do you remember what (entirely predictably) happened?
The pubs that were facing a compulsory ban demanded a ‘level playing field’ so their smoking customers would not simply move to another venue. The government ‘caved in’ to this demand because it was what they were planning all along anyway. Incidentally, the smokers largely moved to ‘shed pubs’ in each others’ gardens, or to the kind of ‘smoky-drinky’ gatherings I was involved in – because nobody was allowed to have a smokers-only club that would exclude all nonsmokers for the sake of their imagined health.
So, expect to see cries from theatres and nightclubs of ‘not fair!’ and ‘level playing field’ and ‘why do we have a restricted customer base when pubs don’t?’ And then the government will ‘cave in to demand’ and do exactly what they had always planned to do. Then, just watch those green lines turn red one by one. Restaurants and hotels next, then I think trains. Not that many people can afford to travel by train these days. We once looked at the cost of taking the train from Aberdeen to Wales, and it was cheaper to book a week’s holiday in Greece.
If Boris gets so much as a fingernail-hold on this vaccine passport it will expand rapidly and it will not end. What’s that? He said it was only for a year? Well, of course it is. Then you have to renew it by getting another vaccine. A year later you have to renew it again. Soon there will be an ‘administrative charge’ and then VAT on top. You want freedom? No problem, we can sell you a licence to be free. It lasts a whole year, then we can sell you a new one. You just have to roll up your sleeve.
It’s not a ‘covid passport’. It’s a ‘vaccine passport’ now. Who believes it will only apply to Covid once it’s in place? Flu will be immediately added (incidentally, I’m pleased I didn’t accept a flu vaccine this year, since flu has apparently been eradicated). More will follow. There will be a whole mass of experimental ones that, like the current Covid vaccines, only have emergency approval. They cannot be used if the emergency ends. Therefore the emergency can never be allowed to end.
The vaccine makers are loving this. No need for expensive trials, they simply get emergency approval and the rollout is the trial. You have to accept it if you want a normal life, and don’t worry if it kills a few, there are still plenty of customers left. Oh, and ignore those doctors who say there are cheap and effective treatments available, we’re just going to fire them all. Who needs doctors anyway, when you can be vaccinated against anything now. One more thing… you can’t sue the vaccine makers. They are above the law now.
Yeah, I know, it’s too far-fetched to be true. Like the machine-gun-carrying drones, the medichip and the brain chip I wrote into Panoptica. I didn’t expect those to appear in real life quite so fast. Way too far-fetched. A few months back, so were vaccine passports. A few months before that, lockdowns were sure to end soon. In March 2020, it was just three weeks to flatten the curve. What do you think you’ll be accepting as ‘normal’ a year from now? Internment camps for the unvaccinated? Hell, there are many who would accept that right now.
The vaccinated believe that the unvaccinated are a danger to them. Which can only mean that the vaccines actually increase your risk of infection. No other vaccine has been stuck with this kind of propaganda, and in normal times, at least a few of these people would have questioned this. These are not normal times. People have been scared into believing that anyone unvaccinated is infected. Despite the WHO proving, in a massive trial, that asymptomatic spread simply isn’t a thing. Yet the UK government keep up this ‘one in three people are asymptomatic spreaders’.
And… the vaccines don’t stop you catching or spreading it, they just reduce symptoms. So if there is now any asymptomatic spread it’s in the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated. There is a much bigger problem with a vaccine that reduces symptoms but doesn’t stop spread, but I’ve already written that into a short story. It’ll be on the blog when the next anthology is published, in a week or so.
I find that if I put all these concerns for the future into short stories, nobody accuses me of being the New Icke. It’s just fiction, right đŸ˜‰
So, the Suez canal was blocked by a container ship that apparently tried to go up it sideways. There are many theories, including ‘they did it on purpose’ and in the current climate I really can’t blame anyone for thinking that.
My own theory involves a mass raid on the rum ration. In support of this theory, I reference the satellite tracking data which shows the ship’s course before entering the canal. They had ‘drawn’ an enormous penis at sea just before entering the canal. I think the crew were plastered.
The news ran with the quite accurate assessment that it would affect world trade, since without Suez, ships would have to go all the way around Africa and that’s a very long way indeed. They also ran with the panic-inducing ‘Worldwide Toilet Paper Shortage!’ which is, well it’s the stuff toilet paper generally has to deal with. China is not the sole manufacturer of toilet paper and even if they were, that stuff weighs so little it could be transported overland easily by train. You could even pack a transport plane full of it and make very little difference to its overall weight.
I don’t understand the whole ‘toilet paper’ thing. If there really was a looming disaster, toilet paper isn’t the first thing I’d be thinking about stocking up with. Canned and dried food and fuel for the generator would be top of the list. Running out of toilet paper would be inconvenient but hardly life threatening.
The news seems to think it’s the primary basis of civilisation. No toilet paper? We might as well go back to the caves, folks. It’s all over. People have very strange priorities.
Anyway, the ship is floating again and is now out of the narrow part of the canal. Rumours that it was loaded with trafficked children and nuclear devices are fading now. They were starting to get interesting. Especially the ‘Evergreen’ stuff.
Evergreen is the name of the shipping company. The ship’s actual name is ‘Ever Given’ which has to be the crappiest name for a ship ever devised. I guess the ones who named it were drunk too.
This word ‘Evergreen’ has popped up in all kinds of situations. It’s very popular. The new railway being built in America (California, I think) is the Evergreen Line. And, of course, it was HR Clinton’s code name when she was in the government. I don’t really see the point of giving them code names it they’re just going to tell everyone what they are, but… *shrug*.
To me, Evergreen refers to trees that don’t lose their leaves in winter. That’s the only definition in my head. The holly, fine, but I don’t think pine trees should count. Every year the drains and gutters are choked with pine needles and every spring the first cut of the lawns is like going through a pine cone and dead branch minefield. They drop stuff all over the place.
But I digress. There is certainly some link in this whole Evergreen story and I fully expect it’s making someone, somewhere, a hell of a lot of money. Legitimate or nefarious? I have no idea.
I expect we’ll find out eventually. Meanwhile, the Suez canal is open again and all those ships – which probably aren’t carrying any toilet paper deliveries at all – can get through now.
I still don’t think it was deliberate. If I wanted to block the Suez canal I’d have ‘accidentally’ sunk that ship sideways in it. It would have taken a lot longer to get that out.
I have a seriously long post in the draft pile. It wanders around a lot, it’s about how everything is a cult now and you’re either in it or you’re a heretic. There’s no middle ground. Could end up as quite an essay if I can untangle it. So here’s a quickie*. Book info first, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs if you’re not interested in that.
*Definitions of ‘quickie’ are open to interpretation here
Mark Ellott’s novel ‘Ransom‘ now has a new cover. It was one of the first to be published on Leg Iron Books and I was never happy with my first attempts at that cover. Mark now has an actual professional involved and the cover is far, far better.
There is also the next book from Wandra Nomad in edits and the 14th Underdog Anthology under way and there’s one from Gastradamus… and more. One of the reasons I’ve been a bit out of touch lately.
Another is Twitter. A few days ago I put up a very simple tweet that basically said ‘I’m a retired microbiologist and I’m not having the Covid vaccine’. Well, that started a war of sorts and my follower count increased by over 2000 overnight. I’m still tracking them down to follow back. It could take a while, apparently there is a limit to how many you can follow in a day. So I started a war and raised an army in 24 hours, entirely by accident. Well, these things happen.
Should I start a cult? I don’t think so. I don’t want to be a leader, I don’t want people to do as I tell them. I want them to think for themselves. And I don’t want to be famous. I’d quite like to be rich, but I really don’t want fame. I have neither so I guess I’m halfway to my goal.
I have noticed a distinct polarization between the vaxxed and unvaxxed. To the extent that I, who has taken so many vaccines you could rip my arm off like a stamp, am now branded ‘antivaxxer’ because I don’t want to take part in an experiment.
“Oh but polio, TB, tetanus, so many things are under control because of vaccines, this is just one more.” No it isn’t. No mRNA vaccine has ever been approved for use, no mRNA vaccine has ever been widely used in humans. This is entirely new and it’s also entirely experimental.
Incidentally, none of the Covid vaccines have formal approval either, and none have completed safety trials. They are released under emergency licence only. End the emergency and they can’t sell any more vaccines. These vaccines have not passed experimental trials. This is the experiment. It’s you.
Which is the real reason they’ve just extended the ’emergency’ for another six months, and why they’ll extend it again afterwards. I don’t think these vaccines will ever get full approval so the government (several of whom have big financial stakes in all this) will have to keep lockdowns going forever. Booster shots are planned for October, they’ll need to extend the ’emergency’ for another six months so they can baptise more of the cult with the Holy Syringe of God Knows What.
I see this ending in one of two ways. Politicians in the stocks, or… Panoptica.
It’s already falling apart. Mad Hancock was challenged in parliament on how many his vaccines had killed or seriously disabled and his answer was… bluster. Bozza’s crap about a ‘third wave’ was just to keep everyone scared so they’d take the vaccine. It is emerging that the threat of ‘covid passports’ is to get the young vaccinated so they can go to the pub. Well, vaccinations were supposed to let you travel, right? Summer holidays are banned. You took the injection but you’re going nowhere. Do you really think you’ll be going to the pub? You really think they’ll keep their side of the bargain? After this last year, you still believe that? Really?
Oh you’re going to get a Covid passport? That conspiracy theory that multiple government ministers, including the Prime Monster, repeatedly told us was never going to happen? Well, now it’s going into a trial phase. Don’t have one, you can’t go to the pub.
I don’t give a foetid dingo’s kidney. I, along with everyone else who likes a smoke with a drink, was chucked out of pubs in 2006 (Scotland) and 2007 (England and Wales). Why would I care about being excluded from somewhere I was excluded from fifteen years ago? How much further excluded can I get?
As for shops, screw them. If they want to restrict their sales that’s their business. I can get everything online, the last year has taught me that, and delivery charges are far lower than the cost of petrol to go there myself. You want to stop deliveries? I live on a farm. I have a massive garden. I can grow my own food and keep chickens, and hunt rabbits, deer, pheasant and partridge through the bloody living room window. Seriously. I don’t need to leave the house. They come to the garden. Rabbits have actually burrowed into the lawn again this year. I have space to keep a cow for milk and I know how to pasteurise. It’s not hard.
A few years ago I lived in a top floor flat with four rooms. It was a very nice flat but I’m glad I wasn’t in there when all this crap arrived. I might have eaten the neighbours by now. So yes, I do understand how all this impacts those who aren’t as lucky as me or who didn’t prepare. Cut off my water and sewage? Pah. Water comes from a well and sewage goes into a septic tank in the woods. I’m not a bear but still I shit in the woods, if only by proxy through a pipe. The rhubarb in the soakaway is doing very well too. Cut off my heating? I have a fire and a massive supply of wood. Cut off my electricity? I have a generator.
If it came right down to it, I could manage with little to no electricity. Sure, the central heating won’t work and neither will the ovens, The gas hob is powered by bottled propane but if that failed, one of the fireplaces still has the swing-out pot holder. I could party like it’s 1699.
But I have descended into rant. Deep breaths, a quick swig of the Juice of Calm (yes, it looks and smells and tastes like whisky but it’s the Juice of Calm, just trust me on this) and we’re back to as normal as it ever gets.
Okay. There is currently a container ship stuck sideways in the Suez canal. Previous tracking of that ship’s course suggests the entire crew had used up their rum ration for the year. This has now been touted as ‘a worldwide toilet paper shortage’. Here we go again. Yes, you’re all going to die but you’ll get to the afterlife with a clean arse. China is not the only source of bum hygeine. We make this in the UK too. There is also the old-days version of a peg on a string hiolding cut up squares of newspaper… Any of them will do, although they are all so full of shit already they might not have room for more.
There are theories that it was a deliberate blockage and given the insanity of governments now, I can see where that comes from but it looks to me like something a drunk crew did. An ‘oh bugger’ moment. We’ve all had them.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. You played a good game boy, but the game is over. It’s the old witch game now. You are witch or witchhunter, there is no neutral. You belong to the cult or you ae a heretic and must die. Given that choice and surrounded by the cult, are you braver than a tenth century peasant faced with the same choice? Do you really believe those people were all that different?
No, it’s the same. The Mob is active once again against the witches, except this time the witches are those who don’t believe in magic. It works either way. You are split between believers and heretics in so many things now. Covid and vaccines are only the new game. It’s a game we have played from the beginning and still hardly anyone knows the rules. It will not end until you see it.
That’s going to be a short story title for sure. Heck, it should have been a 1960s thriller series. If I could travel back in time… I’d be too young to write it.
So we have the One True Disease now and everyone thinks it’s instant death. Nobody’s much bothered about cancer or diabetes or anything else at all. Just the One True Disease that will kill us all.
Except… well over 99% of those who get it make a full recovery. And then we play with percentages.
Covid kills around 0.3% of those who catch it, with a mean age of 82. The younger you are, the lower that percentage goes. Strangely there are no percentages available on so-called ‘long covid’ which is actually a well known phenomenon called post viral syndrome. This is a real thing but it’s really not common and I’m betting you know few, if any, who have experienced it. Basically, it means the virus (any virus can do it) wreaked so much havoc that it will take weeks or months, sometimes years, to recover from it. All those damaged and destroyed body cells have to be replaced and it can take some time. The virus (any virus and indeed many bacterial infections, including Campylobacter which is in most chickens) could trigger Guillame-Barr syndrome and that might never get better.
So you decide. Live your life in sterile bubble-wrap or take your chances and have some fun before the shit hits the fan. It might never happen, your personal fan might remain forever shitless and if you stayed in the safe zone you might end up feeling pretty silly one day, lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing.
Let’s face it. We are all going to die. None of us are immortal. One day I’ll be gone and these words, and the books I’ve written, will be all that’s left until a solar flare wipes out all electronic records. Most of the books and all the scientific papers are at least in print somewhere but this blog? It’s around until the sun decides to send us a reset. That will happen too, eventually. I hope it doesn’t happen before I die, it would be a pain to see it all wiped. Also, I hope the books don’t make millions after I die since they’ve made sod all while I’m alive. If you buy my books after I die I’m haunting you. Buy them before and you get unmolested sleep. I think that’s a fair deal.
Percentages. 0.3% die of this virus. We are told a ‘new variant’ is 100% more deadly. That means it kills 0.6% of those it infects. Does that sound far less scary than ‘100% more deadly’, or is it just me?
We’re also told that the vaccines reduce the death rate by 80%. Okay. We are starting with a 0.3% death rate so an 80% reduction takes that to 0.06%. 0.3% to 0.06%, well, if you are in the 0.24% that’s good news but if you were already in the 99.7% who weren’t going to die anyway, big deal.
Remember, the mean age of death is 82. Coincidentally, that was my father’s age when he died. Not of Covid, he died before this shitshow got under way and that might be a dark kind of blessing. He did not have the patience to deal with this nonsense. So, if you are 82 and you are in the 0.24% who are saved by the vaccine… how much time do you think you realistically have left? Months? Years? Weeks? Hours?
Oh I know it sounds fatalistic but I’m 60. The president of Tanzania just died at 61. I have known people who died at 40 of heart failure and brain haemorrhages. I remember a co-worker who died in his forties of cancer. Didn’t smoke or drink, was never overweight, it got him anyway. You and I are like filament light bulbs. We can burn bright today and tomorrow – pop. One day you just don’t wake up. The rest of the world carries on.
Life is finite for all of us. We have all just wasted a year of it in lockdown. You don’t get that added back on at the end, it’s gone. Done. The year you have spent cowering in terror has brought you, me, all of us one year closer to meeting the Reaper. Death’s hourglasses didn’t stop for a year. You don’t get to turn the clock back. That year is gone. The skeletal referee will not give you ‘injury time’ at the end of the game. How many more years do you want to waste, in fear of something that has a 0.3% chance of killing you?
Let’s play a game. Let’s say you follow every deranged and made-up piece of advice the ‘health experts’ spout. You don’t smoke or drink, touch no drugs of any kind, eat as directed, drink the required volume of water, recycle your tofu packets, all of it. Then one day you’re out for a drive (or more likely, cycle) with all your hi-viz gear and your perfect road sense and following every guideline… but you don’t know that the guy driving at breakneck speed towards you has a pile of empty cheap vodka bottles in the back of his car and is swigging from his sixth today. Maybe he’s had a crap life, maybe he’s suicidal, but now he can barely see the road, never mind you. What do you think comes next?
Squish.
And he’ll rattle on along the road until he finds the corner he can’t take and he’ll die without knowing he killed you.
That, I’m afraid, is the reality of life. Any second now, your gas boiler might explode or your toaster burn down your house. You might have a blood clot building in your brain or an aorta that’s about to pop and leak your life away in your sleep. Any of us, no matter how healthy we might feel today, could be dead tomorrow, We are not indestructible, we are actually quite easy to kill.
So what do you want? A life of nothing, of pure safety, that might end spontaneously at 100 or 90 or 70 or 40 or even 20? Yes, that happens. Or do you want to end it knowing you at least made the best of it and enjoyed it? You only get one go at this. When ‘Game Over’ appears, you don’t get to respawn.
You can take the covid vaccine. That will let you get on a P&O cruise this summer. You’ll still have to wear masks and socially distance even though every single person on that ship is vaccinated. Does that make you think? At all? For many, the answer is, of course, no.
The vaccine is currently being blamed for blood clots. Not just any blood clots, as the MSM would have you believe. I don’t know if you can access this if you don’t have Twitter but if you can, this tells you it’s some very specific blood clots. Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. Not the general ‘blood clots’ that are no higher than expected. A specific type that is 700% higher than expected.
This should come as no surprise since it’s already known that the virus spike protein activates platelets and initiates clotting. The virus itself does it so making the spike protein in your body can do it too. Fortunately this reaction is rare. For now. Long term? Who knows? Nobody. There hasn’t been any ‘long term’ yet.
Also, this concentration on blood clots is odd. Nobody suspended the vaccine over effects such as blindness or Bell’s palsy or even death. Why this one?
And then there’s the long well-known thing about vaccines. Any vaccine will make you more susceptible to the disease you’re vaccinated against for up to a week, while your immune system cranks up. Normally it doesn’t matter. When I was vaccinated against rabies and various forms of hepatitis, my chances of encountering the disease within the next week were pretty much zero. Even tetanus, unless I went out and rubbed dirt into open wounds in the next week, chances of getting infected were close to zero.
But now, we are giving vaccines against a virus that’s endemic. It’s here. Now. All over the place. Chances of encountering it are pretty good. And we are priming people to get it.
Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll laugh this off and ignore it. Maybe you’ll try to convince me your way is the One True Way. The choice is yours. Your future is yours to decide.
Cards on the table. Aside from not being able to visit family, lockdown has had little effect on me. It’s had much more effect on my car – the decayed brakes and dead battery were entirely caused by lack of use.
I have a small pension, not enough for a world cruise but it pays for rent and food and heating (although heating is of course supplemented by having a real fire and an endless supply of free wood). There is a trickle of income from Leg Iron Books, still not much but it’s slowly improving. At the moment I’m not taking a cut from author profits since these are still low, authors get 100% and I just get the pennies from each anthology sold. The Spring anthology is building up, by the way. So I don’t have much income, the pension lets me run Leg Iron Books, but then there isn’t much left in the world that I want to buy. Instead, I have a load of stuff I need to sell.
We can’t go shopping – well, we can, but it’s such a miserable experience now that food deliveries are a much better option. It’s also worth noting that the charge for a delivery is far less than the petrol I’d use to get to the nearest supermarkets. I’ve used about one and a half tanks of petrol since last March. I am sure the mower has used more than the car. Also, not going to places like Aldi mean I don’t get to browse the Aisle of Wonder and buy more stuff I don’t need. Lockdown is actually saving me money.
So, am I a fan of lockdown? No. It’s the most ridiculous, damaging and downright cruel social experiment ever devised. It does nothing to stop a virus spreading, it has put a lot of people out of work and out of their homes, it has destroyed high street businesses and it has created a climate of fear that will take at least a generation to recover from. It is pure insanity.
Governments claiming they can control a virus is like governments claiming they can control the weather. Surely no government anywhere would make such ludicrous claims? Oh, wait…
Sure, I’m lucky. I live well away from other people and have plenty of outdoor space. If this had happened a few years earlier I’d have been stuck in a four-room top floor flat going rapidly insane. So yes, I can appreciate what it must be like for whoever lives there now.
“But lockdowns saved the NHS!” It wasn’t lockdown that emptied the hospitals and made the Nightingales unneccessary. What achieved that, and allowed all those medics to make dance videos in empty wards, was the complete shutdown of all doctor’s surgeries and all other treatments. Even now, if you don’t have Covid, they don’t want to see you. Don’t bother the doctor if you’re ill.
There was once an old joke, in which a man goes to his doctor. The doctor’s first words are ‘I haven’t seen you in a while’, to which the man responds ‘No, that’s because I haven’t been well.’ It’s no longer a joke. It’s reality.
Lately we are treated to videos of masked medics doing slow handclaps in empty wards because they were ‘only’ offered a 1% pay rise. Many people have found their income drop to zero during lockdown. Many businesses have gone to the wall. Those on furlough have taken a 20% pay cut this past year. Anyone wanting non-Covid treatment has had to fork out for private healthcare so they can see the same doctor they would have seen on the NHS, which we still have to pay for even though we can’t use it. Nobody is getting a pay rise other than the NHS, which has all but closed down for a year. Complaining about 1% in those circumstances endears the NHS to nobody.
Could the world get any madder? Well, as it turns out, yes it can.
A woman was kidnapped and murdered in London. The suspect is a police officer. You know, the ones we trust to stop people kidnapping and murdering other people. I’m not going to say any more on the case itself, I don’t know anything more and the investigation is ongoing.
The reaction to this, however, is nothing short of insane. Yes, it is a horrible crime. Yes, women do get attacked in city centres at night. There is much Outrage about this particular case, and a lot of it comes from those who excuse grooming gangs and illegal-immigrant violence with ‘it’s their culture’.
Yes, I wrote ‘illegal immigrant’ and not ‘asylum seeker’. If they are seeking asylum from violence, why did they bring it with them? Is it not more likely that their country paid them to leave so the home country would be safer?
And ‘immigrant’ is not something I am against. My own family, on my mother’s side, immigrated here from Italy a couple of generations ago. I could have been unlucky, I could have been born in Italy and all the Italian I know is ‘pizza’ and ‘espresso’. Although I could probably get by on that.
It looks like a digression, but consider – a woman is kidnapped and killed and there are questions raised in parliament. Immigrant drug gangs in London are killing each other so frequently now that the news doesn’t even report it. Grooming gangs are only now, after operating for decades, starting to be dealt with. So much more – but this one murder has become politicised to the hilt.
I repeat, this was a horrible crime and I am not downplaying it in any way. especially if it turns out it was really committed by a policeman. However, it has been picked out of the crime stats and hyped for political gain.
In the House of Lards, Baroness Gonzo Jones (a natural mistake, she does look like a Jim Henson creation) declared that there should be a 6 pm curfew on all men so that women feel safe. She is entirely serious.
Am I bovvered? Do I look bovvered? Local Shop shuts at 7 anyway, the pub is a 40 minute sober walk away and probably two hours on the way back if I don’t get lost in the woods (I haven’t tried) so I’ve only ever been there for meals. Which are good, but under Scotland’s drinking laws you can’t drive home after a couple of beers. It would be just my luck to meet the annual police patrol so I don’t risk it. I drink my whisky at home.
So no, a 6 pm curfew for men would not affect me in the slightest. Lockdown has messed up my sleeping patterns to the point where I don’t even get up by 6 pm some days. So… do I support it?
Of course not. It’s insanity in the form of a badly made puppet with unkempt hair. Who does she think will enforce it? The police? The ones charged with keeping us safe from murderers and kidnappers? Um… look again at that case, Baroness.
It would take every law abiding man off the street. Criminals, as with the gun and knife bans, will pay no attention at all. So the next time a woman is attacked there would be no male witness, no man to step in and intervene, no man a woman can approach and ask for help. Not even a policeman, most likely. I have nothing against policewomen but… up against a burly rapist? Yeah, all they’d really do is increase the victim count. And with a curfew on men, can they call for any meaningful backup?
Who the hell would ever think this was a good idea?
Well, Mark Drakeford, apparently. The head of the Welsh Assembly who thinks he’s Owain Glyndwr but acts more like Pol Pot. He wanted a curfew for men in Wales but then Winston Smith got to the newspaper report. Presumably someone with a smidgeon of intelligence realised that most of Labour’s voters like to get home from work and then have a couple of beers in the local pub (if there are any left. I hear The Crown, one of my favourites there, is now rubble). A 6 pm curfew would finally destroy every pub in the country and leave a hell of a lot of highly enraged voters. So the story changed.
Very fast U-turn there. Maybe someone pointed out to the bespectacled idiot that his own son is currently in prison for an eight-stretch for rape and sexual assault? So trying to lord it as a champion for the fairer sex really isn’t going to go well.
The virtue signallers get it wrong every time. Every single time. Western civilisation is dying and the ones killing it are the ones charged with supporting it. It’s over, we’re finished, we haven’t got a prayer. The idiots in charge think they’ll survive this but when the taxpayers are all gone and all you have left are the benefit claimants, what happens then?
If schools still taught history, the answer would be clear.
