The ‘Devoid of Choice’ Generation.

It still makes me laugh to see companies with signs saying ‘This company operates a no smoking policy’. No, you don’t. No company operates such a policy because no company has any choice in the matter. Every company, every operator of every workplace and every place open to the public is obliged to prevent smoking on the premises. If they fail to comply they will be fined.

There is no choice. No amount of smug signs saying ‘we are making this rule’ changes that fact. You might as well put up signs saying ‘we obey’ because that is what you are really doing.

Hiding from that fact only emboldens the Health Nazis. They see such compliance as weakness and they know they have not reached any boundary yet. In fact there’s no sign of any such boundary. I suppose, denied the old fashioned persecution of anyone non-white, gay or otherwise different, the bigots out there have to have someone to hate and the Health Nazis have a target for them. Smokers.

They have more targets too. The overweight. Anyone putting salt on their food or swigging a can of chemical fizz. All lined up for when the last smoker has been dealt with.

Still, the war on smokers continues to its final solution…

“We want to address this. Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

That’s a quote from Steve Brine, whose surname is going to get him into trouble with the Salties in the future. They want a salt-free world, Steve. No more brine.

But look closely at those words –

“…Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

Ah, the new Aryan race. Moulded along lines directed by those who consider themselves lords over all. And to think, they object to being called Nazis.

This ‘smoke-free’ generation are not going to be asked if they want to play along and be part of Briny Steve’s ashtray-free Utopia. Oh no. That generation will be created by the Salty Fuhrer and his coven of We Know Best.

You won’t have the choice, kids, and you’ll be so proud that you have no choice that you will crow about your non-smoking even though you will never get to try it. You will not be allowed to try it and you will obey.

Oh I know there are antismokers out there thinking ‘Excellent. No more smokers’. They don’t see it, do they? Once you are obedient there is no end to it. No salt. Obey. No meat. Obey. No milk. Obey. No booze. Obey. No socialising without State supervision. Obey.

Oh I know, you’re thinking ‘Well I don’t smoke but they won’t make me give up meat’. They won’t make me give up smoking either. It’s not for us. It’s for their Aryan generation of your kids and grandkids and then on forever. The obedient drones they want to create. You want that as your family legacy? We’ll all be reviled as the filthy ancestors who ate burgers, swilled beer and drooled over meat pies with salty chips. Our headstones will be smashed to rubble to pave the pure streets of Obedience Utopia.

Sure, we’ll be dead, why should we care? Why should we care that our descendants will be drones for the elite (who, incidentally, won’t be giving up anything)? Why should we care if the Earth turns into a planet of slaves to be worked and culled and occasionally harvested for the entertainment of a few utter arseholes? Why should we care that Mount Olympus will be staffed by human gods in the future? Why should we care that our children’s children will live their lives in terror of saying a word out of place and ending up ‘on the farm’?

As fertiliser, not driving a tractor.

Why should we care that our great-grandchildren will watch each other constantly, hoping for that buzz of reward when they hand in a wrongthink criminal and get a pat on the head for it?

Ah, maybe I’m exaggerating – but look around. How much of it is in place already? We have ‘bacon crime’ as a real imprisonable offence. Really, we don’t have far to go.

Smoker persecution was just the start. It soon moved on to other things. Smoker eradication is, likewise, just the start. This smoke free generation will be an obedient, choice free generation. They will not smoke. Not because they don’t want to, because they have been told not to and they will obey. Just like those businesses who pretend that being smoke free is their choice, that generation will pretend it’s their choice too. It won’t be. They will not smoke, or drink, or ever taste bacon or beef or chicken, because it will not be allowed. They will be conditioned to believe it was their choice. Just like those businesses with their no smoking policies.

It’s better to believe you chose that path than to accept you were forced onto it, for many people. Not for me. I will not accept force but then school wasn’t a conditioning factory when I was there. They taught us how to think, not what to think. We are no use to the Briny Steves of the world, they are waiting for us to die and, in the meantime, silencing us with political correctness and poofterphobia and dynamitewaistcoatophobia and racism and all the other bollocks. None of it is real for pretty much all of us but their upcoming proto-Aryans believe every word. Especially the made up words. Oh and the suckers who currently enjoy ‘protected status’? Oh you are going to have a really shitty time, very soon.

In the future your grandkids will not smoke and they will convince themselves it’s because they don’t want to. I am not promoting smoking here, I am promoting choice. The choice to not smoke is as valid as the choice to smoke. When you don’t have the choice then you are nothing more than an obedient drone.

Is that what you see for your family’s future?

The vapers will soon point out that the UK Health Nazis have now decided to allow vaping to help with cutting down on smokers. Yeah, don’t get too cheery about it guys. You have not had a reprieve, you have had a stay of execution.

When they finish us off, do you really think they’ll leave you alone?

If you do, you’re going to be very, very disappointed.

 

 

The Grimy Reaper

First of all, here’s a review of Margo Jackson’s ‘The Mark’ on the US Amazon site. It’s a good first review!

I think I have Dirk Vleugel’s next book ‘Tales from Under the Drinking Tree’ about ready to go. Just trying to catch every possible glitch before CreateSpace start playing the ‘no, do it again’ game.

Today though, today was gardening day. Gardening means getting grimy and if you don’t need a hose-down or at least a wash when you come back in, you’re not doing it right. Today was perfect – a day when it actually didn’t rain! The scythe arrived and after a bit of setting up and adjusting, I set about reaping many nettle souls and a lot of other weeds that the strimmer can’t deal with. The blade is almost glowing with all those souls now!

If you’re thinking of trying one, don’t just buy the scythe. You need a whetstone and water sheath (to keep it wet) and a peening kit to periodically bring the blade back to evil razor sharpness. The cutting edge is very fine and wears in use, so you have to give it a quick sharpen with the whetstone every five minutes or so – basically, when it starts bending things rather than cutting them. The scythe is the biggest expense so the accessories are not that much extra. Leaving them out is a real false economy because you’ll soon have a blunt scythe with no means to sharpen it.

I was surprised at how easy it is to use. I expected hard work but just a casual swing and the nettles fall. I have the ditch blade with the stone point – a nail-like end rather than sharp all the way to the end. That’s important for me because I’m cutting in the woods where I might encounter all kinds of hidden hazards. The pointy end hits the hazard first so the sharpened blade is protected.

I found two rusted frames for school desks in the undergrowth. I doubt they can be re-used so I’ll let the farmer add them to his scrap metal pile. They are, technically, his since they are on his property, but I suspect he doesn’t know they exist. They’ve been in there a very long time.

There is an extensive rabbit warren under the nettles. When they emerge they are going to survey the devastation around them and wonder if the local fox has deployed nukes.

The scythe isn’t the simple primitive tool it appears to be. You need to set the handles so the swing is easy and consistent, set the lay (blade angle on the ground) and the haft (angle between blade and shaft) and when you have all that just right, using it is so easy you’ll wonder why these things ever went out of fashion.

There is still a place for the strimmer. There are places the scythe can’t get into, especially near fences and around what I euphemistically call a ‘rockery’ although it’s actually just a pile of rocks. It can’t get between trees and fences and it doesn’t work well among densely planted flower beds. Well it would work there just fine as long as you don’t mind turning the flower bed into a monument to Tunguska.

One big win for the scythe is chopping the nettles around things like pampas grass. If a strimmer hits pampas grass it won’t cut it, it’ll wrap the leaf around itself until it’s tied up tighter than a tart in a bondage brothel. Pampas grass yields to the scythe.

I can’t mow lawns with it yet but then it has only been in my possession for less than twelve hours so far. Maybe I should get a second blade for lawns. You only need one snath (shaft), you can change blades easily.  I actually prefer the lawn cut I get with the hand-pushed cylinder mower that I got for £30 from Aldi. It cuts really close and has a roller so it leaves those attractive lines. Now the lawns are pretty much clear of pine cones it’s working well. A pine cone, and especially a fallen twig with ten cones on it, will stop that mower dead.

The petrol mower cleared the cones. It cares nothing for pine cones nor even fallen branches, it mashes them and throws them into the grass basket. As I don’t fancy picking cones off a razor sharp scythe blade I’ll still need that mower. Especially at the start of the year when the cones have been dropping all winter.

Also, a summer like this one with daily rain leaves the grass long and wet when you finally get a chance to cut it. The push mower can’t cope with that. Maybe the scythe can, we’ll see. It got so bad at one point that I had to use the petrol mower without the grass box because the grass was so long and wet it was choking the mower. This meant a lot of raking up afterwards which was a pain.

There’ll be raking up afterwards with the scythe too but when the grass is long and wet, raking will happen anyway.

It’s resting now, with the other tools. Munching on nettle souls and waiting for me to set up a proper wall mounting for it. Hanging it like that will mean resetting the blade because it’ll shift relative to the shaft.

I hope it’s a fine day tomorrow, There are many more nettle souls to reap.

 

Number 14 FFS!

When I was about 14 I took part in an essay competition at school. Not really voluntary, it was assigned to us in English class. Anyway, the subject was ‘women’s liberation’ as it was known in 1974. I won the damn thing with a cobbled-together rant and spent the money on the first three of Kraftwerk’s albums. The ones before they discovered actual music. I still have them.

The teacher handed the essay around. Most of the girls in that class didn’t speak to me for weeks. Some probably won’t speak to me now.

So, with the announcement that Dr. Who has gone all transgender, let’s see if I can repeat my youthful success at offending just about everyone.

Another thing I was good at at school was maths (I know the Americans call it ‘math’ but we have more than just adding and subtracting in the UK so we need to use the plural). A consequence of this is that I was forced to grind my teeth at the announcement that the new Doctoress is number 13.

I have watched this show from its original, monochrome, wooden-acted beginnings. It took me almost 50 years to notice that in the first encounter with the Daleks, there were only about four actual Daleks. The rest were painted on the wall. However, I have noticed each and every Doctor incarnation.

We can ignore Peter Cushing’s Doctor in the films because he wasn’t a Time Lord. He was a human inventor who built a Tardis in his shed. Something we can all aspire to, but he wasn’t an incarnation of the Doctor so doesn’t count here.

One. William Hartnell. A wonderfully grumpy old sod who was clearly, from the outset, a non-human entity. Two, Patrick Troughton, a bit more jolly and then three, Worzel Gummidge – no wait, Jon Pertwee. At that point it all became a bit silly with him driving around in a yellow clown car dressed as Sherlock Holmes. He was stuck on Earth so no expensive special space effects. The biggest special effect was Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s moustache.

Number four, possibly still the best of the lot, was Tom Baker. Large, with a grin bordering on the wildly carnivorous, a fondness for jelly babies and the scarf! I have two of those scarves. My mother made one for me when I was at university (paired with an ex-army greatcoat, I won a fancy dress competition wearing my day clothes – but I was very, very drunk). CStM has since made another one. The old one was getting a bit faded.

Tom Baker brought the show back into a little bit serious. Not too far into serious but enough to make the scary bits a little scary again. After he left it went rapidly back to silly.

Five, six and seven – Colin Baker (arrogant clown), Peter Davison (cricket-playing arse) and the one we all wish never happened, Sylveste McCoy. Oh come on. The thin wiggly guy from Vision On is the Doctor? No wonder the show gathered dust for a couple of decades.

When the show was shelved, so was Sylveste. He didn’t regenerate at the end of his run. He seemed destined to be the last Doctor forever. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and burning of childhood Dalek suits (they were real, I had one and so did my brother – in the 1960s).

The show never had any message. It was just fun. The adventures of a bumbling alien idiot with a time machine, an astronomical IQ and no common sense. Then the BBC brought it back and gradually added an agenda.

Number eight was Paul McGann. Just the one special episode where we could delight in watching Sylveste McCoy gunned down by mistake by a gang. It was set in London about 10 am this morning. He regenerated into Paul McGann, the angst ridden Emo Doctor dressed like Percy Bysshe Shelley without the booze. Again, we didn’t see him regenerate and that’s where the trick was pulled.

The next one we see is not nine, but ten. He’s called nine because we haven’t met nine yet. Bernie – no wait, Christopher Ecclestone, the jolly Northern lad who’s okay with the pansexual antics of Captain Jack ‘if it stays still I’ll bonk it’ Harkness. Not too much message, it was still mostly fun and it had mercifully lost the ridiculous flamboyance of most of the earlier incarnations.

Next up was David Tennant followed by Matt Smith. Both good, both continued the scatterbrained genius approach to the role and both wore (relatively) sensible attire.

They were billed as ten and eleven but they were eleven and twelve. It’s during Matt Smith’s tenure that we meet Doctor Nine – the war doctor, played by John Hurt. Played very well, may I say, but the sneaky insertion of that incarnation between Paul McGann and Christopher Ecclestone cost an incarnation.

Which is evident at the end of Matt Smith’s tenure. Facing down an entire Dalek fleet with only his trusty Cyberman head, Handles, at his side, he is very old now and has no more incarnations left. As he says to the Daleks: ‘You lot have been trying to kill me for thousands of years and here I am, dying of old age. If you want something done, do it yourself’.

But that’s not the end – the Time Lords poke through the rift in spacetime and send him another incarnation. How many does he have now? Even he doesn’t know.

But that was it. Twelve incarnations. Thirteen was a bonus and thirteen was Peter Capaldi.

He started out a bit silly but improved, and then the agenda really kicked in. Lots of in-your-face gayness. Oh it was there before, with the Lizard Lesbian, but it was discreet. No more. Bill, the last assistant, never failed to remind us that she was a rug-muncher first and foremost even though it never had anything at all to do with the Dr. Who storyline.

Sidelines – It was a little endearing to see the last male Doctor fighting the Mondassian cybermen and that they did look rather like the original Mondassian cybermen encountered by the first Doctor. Also a big plot hole. The Master (John Simm, a delightfully psychotic portrayal)  regenerated from Derek Jacobi and was confined to Earth until he died. His next appearance was as ‘Missy’ (Michelle Gomez) and it’s not clear how he got there – but it is clear that as the John Simm incarnation he never left Earth he was cremated there. So how did he end up on the Mondassian ship?

Anyway. Bil is going to be seriously pissed off to find that she spent all that time hanging around with an old dude, only to be turned into a cyberman and then die just before the old dude turned into a hot chick. Oh that is some serious bad luck right there.

But then they had to Kill Bill. She can’t come back now the Doctor is an automobile’s nightmare. She’d try it on with the Doctor like that loose floozy Amy Pond did (and she was engaged to Rory the Dull!).

So the new one is a wench. I wonder if the Tardis wardrobes contain any women’s clothing? I mean, after 13 male doctors, why would it? Unless one or more – or all –  of them was into that sort of thing. Perhaps they used to go off to some remote part of the galaxy and become Doctorina for a few years. Maybe sneak back as their own assistants.

This new one is number 14 though. Why this mad insistence on 13? Is it supposed to be unlucky that this regeneration missed out ‘the package’? The first Doctor had a granddaughter but he hasn’t used it since then anyway. Twelve new knobs and no action. No wonder he’s given up on them.

If it wasn’t for all the PC crap introduced into the show recently I’d have no trepidation about this new Doctor. A Doctor I can drool at rather than have to make do with the assistants would be a nice change. But then, having seen the 13 men she was before that could prove difficult to get past.

Still, I have a feeling it’s going to have a lot more anti-white-straight-male going on. Not 14’s fault, it’ll be in the script.

The agenda just moved on a notch. Those cheering it don’t know where it’s going.

It’s not where they think it’s going.

 

 

Letter to Theresa

Frank Davis has brought to my attention a very calm,. measured and rage-free letter sent to Tessie ‘Jackboots’ May by an older lady. A currently vaping ex-smoker. Which, in the eyes of the total morons most countries have accepted as Health Dictator, is the same thing anyway.

I like older women. There aren’t so many of them around now, I find.

We seem to be doing a little better with the health Nazis in the UK but not much. When the Nanny doesn’t want to be called ‘nanny’ but insists on nannying anyway, it’s not going to end well. Not for nanny.

But hey, let’s keep it calm and measured and none of the modern frantic swivel-eyed stuff. I mean, I know I’m moving fast forward in time here and when my scythe arrives I will have reached the technological prowess of the Amish. The rest of America won’t take much longer to catch up on.

A quick side note – if you want to track vaping posts here, don’t type ‘vaping’ in the search bar. I don’t call it that. I have called it ‘Electrofag’ from the beginning and always will.

Without further ado, here is a video even better than Bowie’s excellent ‘Letter to Hermione‘

It is more logical and makes more sense.

 

 

 

 

Party like it’s 1699

My quest to drag myself into the modern world continues. I rarely play vinyl or cassette tapes these days and even the VCR is getting dusty. Lately I have been concentrating on updating my outdoor aspects.

I have ordered a cutting edge tool to deal with the mass of nettles in the woods. This will be an improvement on the battery strimmer (not powerful enough) and the mains strimmer (powerful enough, but would need so many daisy-chained extension cables that heating would become a problem). The mowers can’t go in there, the long grass and weeds hide too many fallen branches and old tree stumps. The new tool will deal with it – and I have a long dark hooded robe to go with it. I will be the height of fashion! Or was it the depth?

I have also revived my old bow, the one I nearly sold but in the end, couldn’t part with it. I did part with the crossbow due to being fiscally buggered but am now in a position to buy it back (at a profit to the one who has it, if they don’t want it any more). Living in an upstairs flat in town for a year left me with no chance to use any kind of projectile weapons so I am out of practice. Now, I have plenty of space to play William Tell whenever the weather is suitable. I even bought an apple for CStM but she refused to wear it and fed it to the guinea pigs.

Maybe she could have a guinea pig on her head… I probably won’t suggest it.

We should maybe work up to the apple part. I had forgotten how hard it is to string this bow and foolishly tried to stand on the stringer without shoes. No, that will never work. Stand on stringer, raise bow, ow ow ow ow ow, lower bow, get shoes.

I have also to work on my arm muscles – lack of use since I left the janitor job is starting to take its toll. I am getting old and feeble! There’s plenty of weed-digging to do, that will help.

What inspired me to revive the bow was a chance meeting on Twitter with a maker of fine arrows (David Sinfield, @omotforest). I ordered a small number to try them out and today they arrived.

They are much better than my usual stock arrows, which are carbon fibre with plastic flights. These new ones are wider and heavier and have a more solid feel to them. They’re dead straight too. Okay, so are the carbon fibre ones but ‘dead straight’ is easy with synthetics. I wanted to upgrade to something less modern. Wood shafts and real feather fletching. It almost seems a shame to shoot them at anything but… here goes.

Here is my weapon of choice, strung and ready to go…

I don’t use bow sights because I don’t understand them. I also don’t believe in the sticky-out rods people seem to like these days. Some kind of balancing thing? They just get in the way. There is no pressure button on this bow, I don’t know what they are supposed to achieve but I never found one that improved my aim. I use a simple flip rest. This is a very basic setup and I like it that way.

I haven’t yet upgraded to a one-piece longbow because those are in the ‘ouch’ price bracket. One day. I don’t like the compound bows, I know you can pack a lot more power for less pull but… well, I just don’t like them. They look weird.

First thing I noticed was that I can’t fully pull back the bow any more. This turned out to be not a bad thing, it was hard enough to get the missed arrows out of the wooden fence as it was. And I’m going to need a much thicker target, especially when I build up enough to pull it to full power. Possibly a stronger fence too… this is, after all, the bow that sent an arrow through a straw target, through the pallette behind it and through the garage door…

I could have got the light bow out instead – a one piece fibreglass toy one with a pull of about 20 lbs or so – but that’s just for a quick play now and then. No, serious arrows need a serious test.

The black arrow (pun deliberate of course) points to the one metre square straw target in the middle of the picture. I shot from about 25-30 metres although I moved a little to the right to avoid most of the foliage. Not that a few thin branches would make a lot of difference.

I don’t currently have any paper overlay targets but hey, I haven’t used this bow for so long I’ll be happy to hit the straw square. Plus, I have new and unfamiliar arrows to test. I shot a few of the old carbon fibre ones first to make sure I wasn’t going to lose them all in the woods behind the fence – all okay – and went for the test.

Incidentally, if I did miss the target and fence, the arrow would go into the woods and in the event it managed to swerve around every tree it would land in a field of wheat. There is nothing and nobody in the way here.

Weather was good, sun behind me, the only issue was a gusty breeze going from right to left. Not too bad for a practice.

And then I made a mistake. I decided to fire alternate carbon and wood arrows to see how they measured up against each other. First carbon one, fine. In the target, a little low. Compensate about a foot upwards. First wood one, right at the bottom of the target. They are heavier and will drop faster than carbon, but that didn’t register right away.

So I compensated up with the next carbon and it hit the top of the target. Compensated down – but the next one was wood and hit the ground. It just got worse from there. None of this was the fault of either set of arrows, it was all my fault for re-adjusting without considering  I was using different weights and types on alternate shots.

Carbon shafts went higher and higher and were more affected by wind, wood shafts went lower although they stayed in line – there was much less wind effect.

I was shooting from low down on the triangle garden to the fence at the far side of the square garden. The very low shots shallow-buried themselves in the ground up to the fletches. If you do that, slide them out backwards, don’t try to lift. You’ll either break the arrow or leave a furrow in your lawn. They slide backwards easily. Give them a quick wipe right away because wood and soil doesn’t mix well if you want to keep the wood. Soil is full of bacteria and fungi who have spent many millennia learning how to eat wood.

Tomorrow (weather permitting, we don’t have the mythical ‘heat wave’ stuff up here) I’ll try with a set of carbons and a set of wood separately.

The big thing for me is the wind resistance of the wooden arrows. Their extra weight means they stay in line so I just have to adjust upwards to get them on target. Sending the carbons higher just let them suffer more wind movement.

There is likely to be a transition period during which I will order more of these wooden beauties. Then sell off my carbons to those who like that sort of thing. Okay, on a fine day with no wind gusts they’ll be great but I live on top of a mountain. Windless days are really, really rare here. Sunny days are hard to come by. Windless days, well forget it.

I think the basic lesson here is – stick to one type of arrow. I had been, before, but that was due to financial constraints so I had a lot of cheap arrows and had learned to use them well. The cheap ones aren’t crap, not really, not once you get used to them. The thing is, when you get used to one type you have to re-learn a new type. It’s not enough to learn the bow. You have to learn the arrow too.

I think I’ll treat arrows like I treat whisky in future. I’d rather have less of the good stuff than loads of the cheap stuff.

So, I will soon have upgraded my mower to a scythe and am in the process of upgrading carbon fibre arrows to proper wood ones.

Now that’s what I call progress.

 

Update:

The following day was cloudy but hardly any wind. Getting the hang of the new arrows now, but I’ll need to practice more before bothering with an actual bullseye target.

As long as I don’t mix different arrows within a session, things go well. Soon be back to decent accuracy and full power. I might well need a thicker target soon…

The Janus Effect

It’s been a busy time. I have to control the grapevine almost daily or it will bust out of the greenhouse again, and the grass is growing so fast you can run the mower straight back over it and cut it again. The weeds, I swear they laugh at me. Add in the pretty much daily rain and the garden is winning this year.

Then I had to find presents for Mother’s birthday and two family wedding anniversaries. It gets more difficult every year – good thing CStM had some new ideas.

While this is happening I am assembling Dirk’s next book – ‘Tales from Under the Drinking Tree’. It’s in Dutch but I  hope he’ll do an English translation one day. I’ll have to let him self-edit the final version because I know sod all Dutch. I’m having enough problems learning Danish!

Everything is finally calming down. Tomorrow I send the (late) birthday and anniversary presents and at long last, a few interesting bottles to JP’s Workshop so he can turn them into lamps. He’s promised to make one for me – any one of those will be fine. I hope he can make a few bob selling the rest. The bottles would have been on the way on Friday but the post officette in the corner of Local Shop can’t handle anything over 5 kg and it was 5.1. Computer says no. I’ll visit a real post office tomorrow.

Right. That is one of my longer digressions but, at last, to the point. You all know who Janus was/is? Of course you do. He’s an old god who’s been very active lately. The god with two faces.

Here’s one of his current incarnations…

Chubby Jim only uses magic sugar in his recipes. it’s not the same as the evil sugar sold by Big Fizz, who Jamie wants eradicated from the face of the Earth because they are causing obesity. Jamie’s magic sugar does not cause obesity so he can promote that while declaring everyone else’s sugar evil.

Sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound like the ‘nicotine is a deadly poison’ line that comes from people who want to prescribe nicotine patches and gum? Theirs is magic nicotine, not like the nicotine sold by tobacco and vape companies. It’s the same molecule but theirs has pixie dust sprinkled on it.

It didn’t start there you know. Vinegar produced by fermentation is sooo much better than synthetic vinegar. That one’s been around for many years. It’s acetic acid. It’s a simple molecule. Plain old vinegar is acetic acid in water no matter how it’s made. Okay, the wine vinegars might have a bit of the wine taste left but the alcohol has turned into acetic acid. Which is just plain wrong in my book but hey, if you want to cook with gone-off wine, that’s your business.

We had the Cleggeron Coagulation a couple of governments back. Both those bastards smoked and both refused to even consider any amendment to the smoking ban. Clegg got electorally obliterated and Cameron was ousted by Totalitarian May, she of the DNA database and Internet clampdowns. If your party thinks she’s better than you, give up politics now. You have spectacularly failed. Double fail with honours.

On the other side we have Jezza Corbyn, rich boy with the aim of keeping himself rich and everyone else poor. Cult leader, brilliant at it. Party leader, well, Kruschev would be so proud of him. But he’s not the Janus incarnation here – that is in his mass of followers.

Corbyn is pretty straight and clear on what he wants. He wants Hell on Earth with him presiding over it as Jeremy Chthulu. If he gets voted in before I finish Panoptica, I’ll give uip on it because it will all come true within a decade. His followers think he’s great. They think he supports gay people while he supports Hamas and takes cash from Iran, where Saturday evening entertainment involves betting on which crane-dangled gay guy will stop kicking first.

Corbyn’s supporters have been on Twitter to declare their pride at booing Tory-leaning gays at the Gay Pride march. Which kind of misses the entire point of that march. Which isn’t what you think it is.

Aside from the fact it’s now been commercialised beyond the wildest dreams of Santa, to the point where police stations that won’t put up Christmas decorations (usually citing Elfin Safety) will fly the Rainbow Flag for the March of the Pooftahs, and repaint their cars to look like something Zippy, George and Bungle would ride around in… aside from that, the march is not about pride at all. It’s about shame.

Not gay shame. No, the gay marchers can be proud to be gay – but can I be proud to be hetero? Proud to be white? Proud to be male? Of course not. I have to feel shame that I was born melanin-deficient – worse, born ginger! With a (albeit mediocre) knob that only reacts to women and with an arse that prefers to remain exit-only. Funny, those things have never made me ashamed. Now it seems they must.

This is not the fault of the gay pride marchers. They don’t know how they are being used. And like the Muslims, they won’t see it because they don’t want to. They are enjoying their current protected status, not realising how that is going to change when their heroes come to power.

Look at the Lenin/Stalin takeover of Russia. They had a clearout when they took power and it wasn’t who their supporters thought it would be. Even Lenin, when he fell out of favour, was airbrushed out of many photographs. Useful idiots, when they are no longer required, are simply deleted.

I can understand the gay stance here. Only fifty years ago they could have been imprisoned just for being gay. They have a reason to celebrate. But hey folks, don’t let them push you into being useful idiots. Don’t fall for the ‘shame those who are not like us’ mantra. Fifty years ago, that same mindset put you in jail and now you want to be like that?

Now we have a (maybe fake) transsexual on Twitter saying that straight guys who don’t want to date Frankenstein’s creation have to get over that hurdle and accept those who have had the full dickectomy as mates. Well, okay, some guys will and some guys won’t. Specifically those guys who don’t want to have children might be attracted to a non-fertile XY woman (I’m speaking as a biologist here) but other guys will be very uncomfortable with that.

Should they be ashamed they don’t want to sleep with a boy/girl combination? I would say no, there are plenty who would have no issue with the change so having a few say ‘Ah, no thanks’ shouldn’t be a problem. It happens to everyone. I mean, even Kate Bush probably had a guy turn her down once, although it was Julian Clary – and I bet even he had to think about it.

Apparently it is a problem. It’s more shame.

Shame keeps you quiet. It’s shameful to refer to black people as niggers while you watch them on twitter calling each other that name all the time. No, there really is not a difference between ‘nigger’ and ‘nigga’, so stop being a useful idiot. Janus is laughing at you. From both faces.

I don;t care if you are gay. Why do you care if I am not? I don’t care what gay people think of me. Why do you care what I think of you? (Hint: replace ‘what’ with ‘whether’ and the answer is ‘never’. You don’t have the parts that interest me)

I don’t care if you are Muslim or Hindu or Christian or Jain or anything else.  I don’t care which political ‘us’ and ‘them’ game you want to play. They are all the same, don’t you get it yet?

It is all about making you feel ashamed. You cannot denounce Islamic terror or you are Islamophobic. You must be ashamed. You cannot say you are not comfortable with the shirt-lifters (you can’t say that now, because it’s shameful) and you cannot use the common abbreviation Paki for Pakistani even though your parents used it with no racist intent for decades. Now, even acknowledging their existence is deemed racist.

When you are ashamed, you are powerless. It’s even more powerful as a control than getting you to say ‘sorry’ for something you didn’t do. Like apologising for slavery hundreds of years after we ended it. Ask Islam to stop doing it today. Ask them to stop kidnapping schoolgirls as sex slaves. No?

Janus, your other face is showing.

We never gave Janus due credit. He was a minor god. A  trivial add-on. A mere forgotten app on Death’s iBone. Yet here he is again, filling the world with his two faces and the doublethink that follows.

Janus, two faces, doublethink. The modern way. Make the ‘normal’ ashamed of their very existence and they won’t fight back.

And they won’t. They never do. Those of us who resist get silenced, one way or another.

So hey, magic sugar? You fucking idiots will accept that.

Kill me, before I let more out.

If you dare…

57 Varieties

It used to be a Heinz slogan. I never knew what the other 56 were and really wasn’t much interested in finding out. I only remember the beans and the TV bean ads with the little fat wizard. ‘Beanz Meanz Fartz’ or something.

Naturally, all that has nothing to do with the subject of the post but if you’ve been here more than once before you already knew that. This isn’t about beans. It’s about sex. Beans and sex don’t really mix unless you are into something very kinky that I’d prefer not to know about, or you like that bit of extra turbo boost in your thrust, or part of your foreplay involves an eye-watering Dutch oven… we’ll stop there I think.

These days, ‘gender’ has joined the long list of clearly defined words misused for political purposes. Let’s clear that one up.

I have every qualification in biology you can think of, right up to PhD and I even have a CSE in it (for which I didn’t even take an exam – yes, weird stuff started early for me). Trust me on this, there are two genders. Male and female. If you are human you are one or the other.

If you are a gay male who prefers other males, you are still male. I know, 99% of the gay males out there are saying ‘Well duh’ and 99% of gay females are just waiting for their turn to say ‘Well duh’ too. You can extrapolate. I don’t need to bother. Gayness is a sexual orientation. It does not change your biological gender.

Neither does bisexuality. I am a straight white male so I fully expect to be utterly lambasted on Twitter for this post but, well, I’ll let you all know if I start to care. Facts are not altered by shouting at them. This is not ‘Dune’, you do not bring down solid rock with magic words.

Okay, so far we aren’t getting controversial. So let’s up the ante.

If you’re a man who shags sheep your gender is not pansexual, you are male and probably more than a little bit strange. If you’re a woman who likes her bits licked by her pet dog (I am assured this happens but I will not be investigating further) your gender is not caninosexual, you are female and just as strange as the sheep guy. But hey, I am not judging you. Just don’t expect me to spend a lot of time around you.

Transvestites. Not a gender. A liking for wearing clothes that society has decided belong to the other gender. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, wear what you like. I live in Scotland where the sight of a man in a kilt is nothing unusual. I’ve worn one myself. In some countries ‘male’ clothing is a long robe or ‘dress’. It does not matter at all. But it’s not a new gender. It’s just clothes.

The  ridiculous idea of ‘gender fluidity’ is behind all this. Multiculturalism for the gonads. You have one set or the other. Two genders. Nature is not ‘fluid’ on this point. What you choose to do with them, well that’s up to you. But you do not have gender fluidity. It is not biologically possible.

Then there are transsexuals. Those who are born one gender but feel, inside, that they should be the other gender. Medical science can change your gender now but that does not increase the number of genders. Transsexual is not a new gender. You are gender 1 and you want to be gender 2. Still two genders.

Hermaphrodites want to be a third gender too. Nope, sorry guy/gals. You have elements of both genders but there are still only two genders. You have the bits for both. That does not make you a different gender. You’re human and either lucky or unlucky depending on your point of view but you aren’t the start of a new species.

If this all sounds harsh it’s not because I’m being hateful and intolerant. I’m not. I don’t hate anyone because of their body image, body shape or sexual preference. I don’t care what you do behind closed doors and I won’t ask about it. I’d prefer you didn’t shove it in my face and if you do, we probably won’t meet again. That’s all though. I won’t go on Twitter and demand you accept me as I am and conform to my way of life, nor will I bad-mouth your preferences in any way. They are your business, not mine. Let’s keep it that way.

If I still sound harsh the problem is not me, it’s you. You have become soft and weak and unable to grasp simple facts. There are two biological genders. You are one or the other. You can switch using surgery but there are still only two genders. There is no third gender.

Oh, you are oppressed, are you? Up into the 1960s you could spend time in jail for being gay in the UK. It was illegal! We are not talking unknown ‘poor gay people’ either. Oscar Wilde went to jail for being gay. Alan Turing, the man who decoded the Nazi Enigma code machine and played a big part in winning WWII, was later shat on by the authorities just because he was gay. Was that fair? Hell no, but it happened anyway.

Today you have a flag as if you are an independent nation and you have Pride marches where you can wave those flags, and police and fire services will repaint their transport in your flag’s colours while they moan about being underfunded. If you had held that march in 1960 the police would have been rounding you up.

You really call that ‘oppression’? I wish I could send you back to talk to the gay people in Hitler’s Germany, but even if I could you’d have found them in a mass grave, gassed to death. Pity, I’m sure they would have loved to hear how oppressed you are now.

If you had been transsexual only a few decades ago (and it is not a new phenomenon) you would not have dared speak out. You would have been sectioned for it and you know it. Now you can get the change on the NHS. And yet you are still ‘oppressed’.

Oh come on. Get over yourselves. You don’t have to publicise every aspect of your life like a damn Kardashian. Okay, you are different. I get it. Okay, you are not like me. I accept it. Accept this.

I. Don’t. Care.

I don’t care if you want to live in a different way to me. It would be boring if everyone was the same. Live any way you choose and if you want to live as the opposite gender, or become the opposite gender, I have no issue with that at all. But don’t tell me you are oppressed when you are able to do those things. Oppression means you aren’t able to do those things or are imprisoned or killed just for wanting to do them. You are not oppressed.

Yes, there are some people who will hate you for what you are and for the way you live. Guess what? That happens to everyone. It happens to me too. It’ll probably happen to me again once I hit ‘publish’ on this but do I cry ‘oppression’? No. The ‘oppressed’ are likely to try to shout me down while claiming they are the victims. That actually makes me laugh. A lot. Especially as most of them will start their tantrums before reading this far.

But don’t piss around with biology. There are two genders and they are fixed, not fluid. Male and female. There might be 57 different sexual orientations but there are no more than two genders.

Now, let the outrage commence…