Another ending

There is a theory, not entirely without merit, that humanity has reached impressive levels of technology in the distant past and then lost it all and regressed to pretty much caveman status. The big issue with this idea is – where did it go? Why are there few, if any artefacts of that past civilisation? Where are the books, the buildings… the statues?

The idea that they destroyed it all themselves before falling back to a primitive state has always been the source of ridicule. Why would they do that? What possible motivation did they have for abandoning the pyramids, including the buried ones in other parts of the world? Why was Gobleki Tepe deliberately buried? Did the hunter gatherers of the time suddenly develop extensive stonemasonry skills, or was it the other way around?

Civilisations have risen and fallen throughout currently recorded history. Many have conquered the known world of the time, only to lose it and fade into obscurity. You don’t see a lot of Byzantians or Romans around these days. So many great civilisations, fallen into dust, in just our short record of human history.

Every one of those past civilisations believed they would last forever. None of them did. So why do we believe ours will be the ‘special one’? Because all the old ones did. It’s human nature. And yet every civilisation falls in the end. They become complacent. They become tolerant. They become weak.

This time feels different. It’s not just like the fall of Rome, it’s global. The whole shitshow is falling all at once. They are smashing their statues, renaming their past, destroying their history. Burying their monuments and closing down their civilisation. They have nothing to replace it with.

Most of modern knowledge is in digital form. What if it was in that form in the past too? Paper books will rot away anyway, but digital? How can that be lost?

Who has a BBC computer with a Cumana disk drive and Cub monitor? (hint: me). 5.25-inch floppy disks. The bee’s knees 40 years ago, hardly anyone would know what they are now. How about cassette or even VHS tapes? Betamax? Laser disk? 3.5-inch disks? All gone, a whole generation has no idea what those things are and yet none of them existed when I was a teenager. CDs. Invented and gone. DVDs losing out to streaming. Vinyl, tapes and CD music… are there many households still using them? (hint: there’s one, it’s me)

What will future archaeologists make of CDs? Some kind of decorative mandala perhaps? They will have no means to play them so they are likely to assume them simple jewellery items made by primitives. With that in mind, look at what they consider ancient jewellery now.

People now store information, documents, photos, in ‘the cloud’. When the power source fails it’s all gone. No need for mass burnings and destruction. Flick a switch, all traces vanish. Nothing for a future archaeologist to find other than some mysterious boxes with wires and disks inside. Well, those that haven’t rusted into dust, if any. There might be an Antikythera mechanism still around.

Will they be able to figure out how to read them? We have 8-inch disks and reels of computer tapes from the past we cannot access now, and we are talking much less than a century. I personally have files in WordStar on 3.5-inch disks that no modern computer will accept, much less read. I’ve already burned a lot of them, they are of no use now.

I have lost whole years of digital photographs while my mother has traditional film and print photographs from before I was born. Digital is so very easy to erase. One solar flare and this world is lost. The paper photos will last a few hundred years but not much longer.

What if it was like that before? An information storage system we cannot access because we have no idea how it worked, nor even that it existed? We have lost so many of our own information systems in a few decades, how can we hope to guess how the builders of Gobleki Tepe stored theirs?

Oh sure, we can say ‘but they were primitive people’ and pretend it’s not simple arrogance. Those ‘primitive people’ built enormous pyramids with geographical precision in a way we ‘advanced’ people can neither replicate nor understand. The temples of the Incas were built on top of stones that were laid in a way far more advanced than they were able to replicate. Even so, we cannot even replicate the Inca methods of building now. Can we be really sure we know all there is to know about those ancient people?

There are many theories as to how, why and when the pyramids and other structures in Egypt and all over the world were built. Not one of them stands up to scrutiny. They were not tombs, that is now clear. They would have taken a very long time and a hell of a lot of work to build, so they must have been important. For what? We might never know.

Gobekli Tepe is an intricate structure with many carvings, some of which are echoed on other ancient monuments. The ‘handbag’ image is particularly interesting in this regard. What is it? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else, including those who have spent their lives studying this stuff. Maybe the 3.5-inch disk will gain similar notoriety in ten thousand years. Already it’s hailed by the young as a 3D print of the ‘save’ icon. Its real purpose has already been forgotten.

Many times, including in recent memory, we have not just forgotten our past, we have actively deleted it. Iraq pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue. How many of the under-20s even know who he was? When the Soviet Union collapsed, many statues of Stalin fell. Germany refuses to allow any mention of Hitler and model planes of the second world war have no swastika decals for the tailplane. Every second world war plane of the Luftwaffe had that insignia. It’s history. Deleted. They have deleted the past, so future generations are doomed to do it all again.

Now we are in the process of deleting all of it at once. All power generation failing due to an imagined apocalypse that has been ten years away since at least the 1950s. All food production to be deleted because ‘why do you need farms when you can just buy it in a supermarket?’ I am not kidding, that is a genuine argument.

The world has gone insane. Except in parts of Africa, that reservoir of humanity that still lives in the old ways and is ready to repopulate the world once this all falls to the ground. They will once again meet neanderthals, the residue of the white race in the northern lands and it will all start again. Different technology, most likely. Maybe it will work out next time, or the time after that.

It is not inevitable. People could still come to their senses and see they are heading back to massive starvation and a residual hunter-gatherer life. They could still avoid it, although the signs are not good. They seem to want that ending, they want to go back to primitive life but they want someone else to pay for it. They are going to be unhappy to find that that is not how it works. They have brought their own destruction on themselves.

I have lately written about a character called Moros. This character is not fiction, it’s mythology. The difference is that fiction is entirely made up, like my dishwasher goblins or the genie in a beer can story. Mythology is often based on a fictionalised remembrance of something in the past. A story passed down like a Chinese whisper, embellished and sensationalised on the way.

Moros is a character in Greek mythology. He does not kill you, he drives you to destroy yourselves. In this modern world he might have accumulated enough wealth to simply pay you to destroy yourselves while taking no part himself. He might even use a twist on his name.

I know, I know, take out shares in tinfoil companies but do you really think the human world isn’t in a super-self-destructive mode? Do you believe history is not being rewritten and deleted before your eyes? Do you have to wait until the Empire State Building is felled and buried?

There is much talk of ‘people will rise up’ but you know they won’t. They never have. So many believe in the indestructibility of their way of life and consider history ‘the past’. The Fall of Rome. the destruction of the Library, the collapse of the Pharoahs, it’s history, it can’t happen again. Even though it has happened every time before.

The ones who take over think it can never happen to them too. It always does.

Then you get the global one. The ultimate deletion. The one that wipes out everything right down to knowing how to grow plants. As in Seattle’s ‘death zone’ now. Not one of them will survive a reset but that is what they want.

I think the reset is coming. I also think it will not be what those who demand it expect it to be.

The secret is, bang the rocks together, guys.

The Confused Lands

I’m a bit out of sorts. My sleeping pattern is all over the place. I’m either sleeping far too long and then being woozy all day or sleeping far too little and then being tired all day. It’s hard to concentrate on anything. Tonight I’ll try for an early night – last night was a short sleep so I’m pretty knackered, but I’m forcing myself to stay awake for another hour or so to try to get into a reasonable pattern again.

The novel prices at Leg Iron Books were supposed to go back up on Wednesday night but my concentration was so poor I decided to delay to the weekend. I’d just end up clicking the wrong thing and making a balls of it, so the low price hunters will have a couple more days.

It’s not helped by the absolute confusion in the world today. People pulling down random statues on the pretext of ‘slavery’ even though they are also pulling down those of people who had nothing to do with slavery – and indeed some who were actual abolitionists who spent decades working to end it. They don’t care. It’s just destruction they want.

It made me realise I had inadvertently followed part of Orwell’s 1984 blueprint in Panoptica. Of course, the main character won’t understand history because he’s never been taught any. Never been taught that there was a time before him nor that there will be a time after him. There is no ‘history’ in his world. Influenced by Orwell? Very likely. I have read that book a few times.

Unlike Winston Smith, 10538 has absolutely no concept of history – nor of a lot of other things. It’s beyond 1984, the transformation is complete. More of that later.

I have seen claims that George Floyd is still alive, that the whole thing was a setup. I have seen claims that he actually died three years ago and a lookalike was used in this alleged setup. Even a claim that ‘George’ was one of those dummies used for practicing respiratory recovery techniques. None of this seems likely but these days, you just never know.

I would rule out the ‘dummy’ since he was talking. Unless the cop was a ventriloquist, which I’d also put firmly well down the ‘likely’ scale. I can’t honestly rule out the other two except to say they are so contradictory that it’s all just starting to sound like a good time to buy shares in tinfoil. Next I expect to hear it all took place in a Hollywood studio and none of it was real. Heck, if they can say that about the moon landings…

There are some very odd things about that scenario but at this time I still believe that a cop with a long history of getting away with violence killed George Floyd – whether deliberately or not, I think the cop killed him.

Then there is the whole Siege of Seattle. Reports that businesses are forced to pay protection money are denied by the businesses themselves and countered with ‘well of course they say that, they’re being threatened.’ Which is true? How can you tell? I doubt we’ll know until this is over.

There are reports that it’s all fine and rosy in there, and reports that warlords are now engaged in turf wars and handing out the kind of summary justice that started this whole thing. There was one report that someone called the police after getting a kicking from one of the self-appointed ‘Freedom Police’, only to be told ‘It’s not our jurisdiction now’. I only saw that once, no idea if it’s true.

It does amuse me that the first thing they did was set up a hard border and put armed guards along it. They are even building a rudimentary wall. Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing they are protesting against? They have self-appointed police who allegedly deal out violent on-the-spot beatings to anyone who doesn’t do as they are told. I thought they were protesting against that too.

They soon ran out of food and put out a plea for someone to send in some vegan food. Has to be vegan, no matter whether their members are all vegan or not. I wonder how many now understand the concept of lifestyle control, and who are now not too happy to have it applied to them?

Communism can work on a very small scale. A commune comprised entirely of people who want that lifestyle can work. Imposing it on a wider population can never work. It will always lead to violent imposition of the ideals on those who don’t want to live that way, and the extermination of anyone who opposes it. Every time.

And so the tiny independent state within Seattle will fragment. It’s too big to work as a commune. It has nowhere to grow food. They did try making a ‘farm’ which will produce enough salad for one meal for maybe half a dozen people in about a month. Assuming they know how to deal with slugs, whitefly, fungus and all sorts of other things.

They have no power generation. They don’t seem to realise that unpaid electricity bills result in termination of service. Water and sewerage are under the control of the actual city, they have none of their own. No infrastructure, no economy, nothing.

Yet they have declared themselves independent of the USA. Which means the USA can now simply seal them off and demand they produce passports if they want to leave. Which, of course, they don’t have.

On the other hand, it’s similar to the sort of thing every libertarian dreams of, where ‘my home is my castle’ becomes a reality. However, even libertarians recognise that they will need heating, lighting, water, sewage etc and they don’t want to do all that themselves so they won’t go into total isolation. They would also need a common currency for trading.

If I could afford to buy this place I could potentially do it, but I’d be working all the time to grow food, cut wood for heating, grow more wood for future heating, undertake repairs myself, hunt down a rabbit or two for dinner… I would be working dawn to dusk just to survive. Totally off-grid can be done but it’s a daunting task. I have solar chargers that can run my phone and a small laptop for a short while but I’d still have to pay an ISP for internet access. Unless I cut myself off from the modern world entirely I would need at least a small income.

Water and sewerage are already sorted, water is from a well and sewerage is a septic tank. However, I still need annual replacement of water filters and UV and the septic tank has to be pumped out every few years. Unless I want to boil every last drop of water before use and take my chances on the dissolved minerals. Oh, and dig holes in the woods to shit in. That has no appeal, especially in winter.

So, if I was going to go for total independence I would need to plan it all very carefully indeed. I’m way too old to live the life of a Mediaeval peasant, I would want access to infrastructure and that will mean paying for it. I don’t make much use of the NHS but maybe in ten years I’ll need them a lot more. I’ve never had to call the police and to be honest, it would be a bit pointless out here. Even if they came at once with a champion rally driver behind the wheel it would take at least 20 minutes. Still, nice to know they are there. If I was lucky, the annual police patrol would be passing by at the time.

Cutting yourself off from all infrastructure at the drop of a hat with no real plan beyond ‘anarchy, man’ can only end in disaster. The Seattle protestors hadn’t even considered a food supply longer than a day or two. They have also not considered that a hard border can be sealed from either side. They have no coast, no farmlands, no independent power supply, no means of getting fuel. The middle of a city was not the best place to do this.

I don’t, at this moment, know if it’s going well or badly for them but my bet is that if it’s not going badly now, it will be in a very few days. Their attempt at an independent food supply is tiny and will not be ready for weeks. That’s if the whole range of crop pests doesn’t descend on them in the meantime.

Their ‘police’ are basically warlords and will soon develop a feudal system where the serfs find the food and the lords rake in the proceeds. It’s going to be Mad Max in there by next week, if not before. They are also not a united force, there will be turf wars. I hear this has already started but it’s like getting a reliable news report from North Korea at the moment. It depends which news outlet you read and I don’t think there is an unbiased one left.

Today I saw Piers Morgan telling everyone to calm down. Yes, that Piers Morgan. If you look up ‘mindless blind-panic hysteria’ in the dictionary, it just says ‘Piers Morgan’. He’s telling everyone to calm down.

That’s it. I really need to sleep now. As long as the discordant thoughts can be settled for long enough. I hope some of that makes sense to somebody.

It makes little sense to me.

On Kafka’s furrowed brow

Kafka could not have written this reality. Even he would shake his head in confusion at this.

Boris is still reciting his mantra of ‘you can visit family as long as you only meet in the garden and stay six feet apart and you can’t use the toilet in the house’ while thousands of protestors mob city centres all over the world. From the 15th June we are all to wear masks on public transport, which won’t affect me at all since we don’t have any of that around here. It will have no meaningful effect on anyone else either. Meanwhile tens of thousands have travelled all over the country to attend protests, pick up a viral souvenir and take it home.

In Scotland, the Chief Goblin of the Spiteful Nannying Party has declared we can’t travel more than five miles. Well, sod that. A five mile radius around me is farms and fields, the nearest supermarket is 15 miles, even the nearest pharmacy is 7 miles and the doctor’s surgery is another five miles further on. A five mile radius might get you everything you want in Glasgow or Edinburgh but out here it gets you farms and fields.

Boris has a new trick too. He wants to boost the Green God’s new Church of Climatology. Well, Boris, it is now the sixth of June. Two weeks to midsummer’s day. It is currently 7 degC outside and in the daytime tomorrow it is forecast to reach the giddy heights of 12 degC. This, you tousle-haired arse impressionist, is not warming. Twenty years ago I’d have had every window open by now.

I thought Boris or at least his carer, Demonic Cummings, had some sense. This new obeisance to the Green God has blown that out of the water. The sun is dimming, it’s at the bottom of three cycles at the same time. It’s getting colder. Shutting down your power stations and replacing them with shiny suncatchers and spinning lawn ornaments is exactly the wrong thing to do now. You want to cut emissions without killing large swathes of the population? Nuclear is the way. Lots of small plants rather than a few big ones. Small ones have less risk of meltdown and if one does go wrong, it wouldn’t contaminate the entire country and while it’s closed, the rest of the stations can take up the slack.

Chopping down every CO2-absorbing tree and replacing them with concrete and steel and fibreglass blades and toxic waste is suicide. You won’t be able to power anything at all on a windless night.

Then there is the alleged vaccine for the new Flu Manchu. Well, scientists are concerned…

YES! We don't need a Coronavirus vaccine and we don't need Bill Gates to give us a "health advice" any more!! https://t.co/tbsQ7sIsPo

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) June 5, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Scientists are worried that the virus might disappear before they have a vaccine for it. This, apparently, is bad news. Really. It’s only bad news if you were expecting to make a fortune from a vaccine that nobody now needs. It’s also bad news for those who delight in ultimate control of the population (yes, Wee Nippy, I’m looking at you). For the rest of us, it’s good news.

Flu Manchu is dying, but the restrictions are increasing. The rioting over a career criminal being killed by a dirty cop is on the wane. Only the daftest of the Woke are now kneeling, their replacement displacement activity from clapping on their doorsteps, and it’s time for something new.

Or, perhaps, the resurgence of an already established fearmongering scam.

Yes, we are back to the imaginary ‘global warming’. It’ll do, until the Chinese release another virus.

Tales from the Asylum

There used to be a rather fine online magazine (I believe the term is ‘e-zine’) by that name. I had a few stories published in it. It’s sadly long gone now but I republished the stories, with credit, in ‘Fears of the Old and the New’.

Now we have the real asylum right here, almost planet-wide. I hear there are plans to reopen swimming pools, limit how many can be in there at any given time and close them periodically for disinfection. Disinfecting the highest-chlorine environment you are ever likely to find yourself in. This is where we are now. I bet they’ll use bleach.

A scientist called Ferguson, the man behind lockdown, the man who has made multiple doomsday predictions based on mathematical models, none of which have ever been even close to reality, has resigned. He was caught bonking another man’s wife while ignoring the lockdown and social distancing rules he was responsible for imposing on the rest of us.

Well. Maybe they did social distancing sex. He could have had a dildo on a stick and she could have had one of those things for reaching cans on high shelves. Considering the current level of insanity in the world today, I would not be shocked by that nor even surprised.

There have been many out in support of him, mostly those who want a Green world with most of us dead, because his bit on the side is a big supporter of mass death and economic ruin, as promised by the Greens. They say he ‘just made a little mistake’. How do you make a ‘little mistake’ about strict rules when you’re the one who invented the rules? It’s not a mistake. It’s imposing rules on the little people while refusing to accept them yourself.

Dickie Burger, MP for somewhere, is repeatedly declaring on Twitter that the UK has the worst figures for coronavirus deaths in the EU. The UK is including deaths at home and deaths in those care homes for the elderly, God’s waiting rooms. Other EU countries are not. I have seen suggestions that if they did, France and Spain at least would have to double their numbers. We cannot know how well any country tackled this until it’s over.

Sweden looks bad, but they didn’t have lockdown. They got it over with and their infection rate is now declining. There is going to be a surge in cases in other countries when lockdown ends, yes, but that will happen whether lockdown lasts another week or another year. I rather suspect that, in the end, every country will have lost the same percentage of their population to this virus. Some just delayed it. I really don’t think any country will ultimately avoid it.

Piers ‘Toddler Tantrum’ Morgan has tested negative for coronavirus. Yes, the same Tantrum who shrieked about MPs and celebs getting tests when NHS workers weren’t. He got one, it was negative and he’s back to shrieking ‘the sky is falling’ and it’s all the government’s fault.

What does he want them to do? Ban the virus? Successive governments have failed to stop boatloads of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel, and those are easily visible. How does he expect them to stop something so small you can’t see it with a microscope?

‘We should have locked down sooner’. Well, look around. People are sick of lockdown. People are starving, people have no income at all, people are getting into serious debt and the economy is falling apart. Imagine if the government had locked down sooner, long before the virus looked anything like a threat. There would be rioting and looting by now. Lockdown has a finite, and short, limit. It has only one purpose – to give the health service time to stock up on extra capacity. That has been achieved and now the press is moaning about empty hospital beds.

Some emergency hospitals are being dismantled. Big mistake. You have to end lockdown at some point and then there will be a surge in cases. No matter when you do it. Then the press will shriek about dismantling empty hospitals. We already know this virus can lurk in animal reservoirs. It’s not going away. Deal with it now or deal with it later, you’re going to have to deal with it sometime.

In other news, Musky Elon has apparently named his son X Ӕ A-12. Presumably he is now marketing a computer motherboard called Trevor. Hey, it’s an easy mistake to make. Well, Panoptica has numbers for people rather than names and an old story, ‘One Stop After Marchway’ had names based on formulae so maybe he’s just accepted my predictions. I still think he has set his son up for patricide though. He seems to have a long term death wish, that guy.

David Icke, the most entertaining loony on the planet, has now been banned from all social media for spreading ‘misinformation’ about the Flu Manchu. Come on. Sure he has followers aplenty but does anyone take all of his stuff seriously? He does hit the mark now and then but he always spoils it by going too far.

I mean, giant geckos running the planet? I was on board with his ‘secret elite’ stuff but lizard faces are not suited to human masks. No human nose could contain that snout, not even Barry Manilow’s. Then there’s the whole ‘Saturn used to be the Sun’ thing. That would require a shift in astrophysics that no life on Earth could have survived, much less be a part of human history.

Still I do like Mr. Icke. I know he really believes in the weirdness he spouts and as I said, he does sometimes hit on some real stuff. I know he has a lot wrong but he does get some things right and it’s worth picking out the good bits from the dross. He’s everyone’s crazy uncle, the one who tells great stories but you only believe every other word. Would you really ban that uncle?

Apparently he has claimed the whole coronavirus thing is fake. It’s not. The virus is real enough and if you’re in good health it can range from a cold to one hell of a shithouse of the flu. If you’re in poor health it can kill you. So can flu. This new one can hit internal organs too, but it seems nicotine is one of the things that blocks it. Surprisingly (not) there has been much poo-poohing of this, but it does work.

However, it has certainly been used to terrify people into accepting total control over their lives. With considerable success. Many people want a lockdown until there is a vaccine. There will never be one. It’s a single strand of RNA in a lipid/protein coat, no matter what the vaccine sellers tell you it will mutate like a bastard. It is inherently unstable. There is no vaccine for the common cold and no truly effective vaccine against flu because they are the same class of viruses. Lockdown until there is a vaccine means lockdown forever.

The UK media is reporting all deaths from this virus, including deaths of people who were never tested for it. The UK media is reporting nothing on recoveries. The actual kill rate of this thing is less than 1% and will go lower. If we had a reliable antiobody test, we’d know exactly what the recovery rate was, but we don’t. It has been here since October at least, deaths were recorded as flu even though they tested negative for flu. Most of us have been exposed. We are now very likely to be in the second wave.

Extending lockdown merely delays the inevitable now. It’s going to spread. It’s just waiting and it can wait a long time, in its animal reservoirs and asymptomatic carriers. All we are doing now is killing ourselves so the virus doesn’t have to.

Maybe this experience will give the human race its sanity back. Or maybe we are the Failed Men that Brian Aldiss wrote about.

Loch Doon and Tinfoil Hats

I knew I’d lost a story somewhere in all the confusion. I had lost two from Marsha Webb. Those are now edited and returned and contracts, then payments, won’t be long now. I hope to have it assembled for Beltane, it’s not much time but until I can at least get the part to fix my car, I’m going nowhere anyway.

The book, thanks to Longrider, will be titled Tales from Loch Doon. This is a quick mockup of a cover using one of my photos of Loch Ness.

I’ll mess around with the lighting and I’m not entirely happy with the font there. Still, the basic image works, I think. Roo B. Doo will be first in the editor list since she did, by far, most of the work while I was dealing with life. Life. Don’t talk to me about life. Loathe it or hate it, you can’t ignore it.

The book will have 14 stories from 9 authors, unless I missed someone else. If you still don’t have edits back, please let me know. Check your spam cupboard for a Leg Iron Books email.

Okay, that’s the book stuff. Tinfoil hats ready? Here we go.

Is 5G really dangerous?

I don’t know. Ask Vanessa Redgrave. (Okay I can’t get to a post office, possibly for weeks, but if you get that reference I’l email you an eBook of your choice from Leg Iron Books in any format you want)

I have no expertise in microwave radiation at all and frankly, I live where 4G is only available if you stand in the right place and our landline comes through ageing copper wires. I’m not going to have to worry about 5G for a very long time, so I haven’t looked into it all that hard.

It seems to have a short range so you need a lot of towers. That sounds expensive. And ugly. I’ve seen the towers and they aren’t exactly pretty things. I admit I am not keen on this whole ‘internet of things’ idea at all but then I did grow up in a time where only the posh people had a landline phone in the house. It’s all accelerated at a hell of a speed. I remember the invention of cassette tapes, and how we couldn’t afford a Walkman and didn’t feel the need for one. I remember when the CD was a fanciful myth on ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and those are already gone.

So, this new 5G, well, I doubt I really need it and if I stay in this house I’m not likely to get it anyway. I will not install an Alexa listening device in this house and I won’t buy a TV with a camera in it. There’d be no point anyway, the internet out here won’t cope with it. Most of what I do, most of what I send by email, involves text documents. I could do it with an old dial-up modem.

But is 5G dangerous? I don’t know. I admit I am concerned by the lack of any testing and the apparent lack of will to do any testing. I really do think it should be tested, high energy microwaves have the potential to be harmful and if they are going to tell me my smoking and drinking is harming me then they need to prove that their profitable new game is at least less harmful.

Baseline answer: I don’t trust it because of the refusal to run and publish tests, but I have no hard evidence it’s dangerous.

Can 5G create/control a virus?

No.

This is an area where I do have some expertise. You cannot create a virus from electromagnetic radiation and there is no way at all to control a virus. As most of the world is currently finding out.

A virus does not have a brain, nor even the basis of any kind of nervous system. It does not think, it does not reason, it considers nothing, sees nothing, hears nothing, feels nothing. It is not even an entire cell. It’s essentially a cell fragment. Lower in complexity even than archaebacteria. A bit of RNA or DNA enclosed in protein and lipid, with a surface that lets it attach and get into a real cell. It is a parasite. It does nothing but invade cells and replicate itself.

The current bout of Mao Tse Lung seems to affect some ethnic groups more than others. That does not make it racist. It knows nothing of race, it doesn’t even know humans exist. It doesn’t know it infects cells expressing ACE2 protein, it doesn’t know it kills people, it doesn’t know about people at all. It knows nothing at all. It has no means of storing any kind of external information and no means of receiving external information. You can blast Radio 4 at it for eternity, it will not notice.

So aside from the rather obvious observation that even 5G is not a Star Trek replicator and creates nothing, there is no means to control a virus via any kind of waveform because the virus has no means to even detect that waveform. 5G has absolutely nothing to do with any virus of any kind.

Are renewables renewable?

Windmills and solar panels are possibly the worst thing to ever have happened to this planet. Sure, oil spills are bad, but oil is part of the planet. The world can eventually reabsorb it and deal with it. Okay, timescales are longer than human lifetimes but we are ephemeral. Our entire history is such that the planet hasn’t noticed us yet. We really aren’t as important as we like to think we are.

Basically, we are a form of monkey that has developed fancy toys. All made from the planet’s resources and much of it will just be reabsorbed. Like CO2. It really is plant food, you know. Anyone who was taught real biology knows this.

The windmills and solar panels, those ‘green’ things, are causing lakes of toxic waste where the required elements are extracted. Solar panels, once expired, are buried in landfill where they leach out poison into the soil. They cannot be recycled.

Ever wondered how a 60 foot windmill stays up? It’s bolted to several hundred tons of concrete hidden below the soil. Every one of them. Those blocks will be wondered at by archaeologists a thousand years from now, and they will produce complex theories about the fibreglass windmill-blade mass graves they will find all over the planet. None of these things are recyclable and they are going to be in the ground far longer than any other landfill. They won’t rot.

Nuclear power waste will be long gone before the solar panel and windmill waste decays. Future archaeologists will wonder how we powered our world with such inefficlent systems while they power theirs with uranium. Just as ours now wonder how the Incas cut stone so precisely.

Eventually it will all fall apart and the realism that hydro and nuclear are the clean way forward will emerge, but we will never power any kind of long distance transport with those things. Fossil fuel use will reduce but I don’t believe it can ever be utterly dispensed with. Just ask Greenpeace and their diesel powered ships.

We could, of course, go back to putting sails on ships… Greenpeace hasn’t though. Why is that, I wonder?

Is there really a plan to reduce global population?

Yes. There has been for a long time and they really aren’t being subtle about it. Africa – all of it – will be a nature reserve, large areas of other continents will be no go areas for humans, we are to be corralled into economically productive cities and only the elites will travel.

Sounds horrible? It is, but the ones pushing it think it won’t apply to them. Just like the ones who fought for communism in the Soviet Union and China and those who supported Nazism in 1930s Germany. Just like those academics who supported Pol Pot until he had them all exterminated.

Oh you can call it tinhat foilery all you want. You can pretend it won’t apply to you all you want but it is no secret. The UN are quite open about Agenda 21. The delegates at their meetings think it won’t apply to them or their families. Agenda 21 was a ‘conspiracy theory’ but there are now conferences discussing it.

Does anyone want to destroy society as we know it?

You haven’t been paying attention, have you? The ecoloons want to drive us back to mediaeval times. No industry, no nothing, you will be caking your straw hut in cow shit and eating raw turnips to save a planet that has not noticed you exist. This is genuinely what they want and once again, they don’t think it will apply to them. They think they will film it all on iPhones and upload it to TikTok. Sorry guys, neither of those things will exist. You’ll be up at 4 am to chase badgers off your turnip fields and pick slugs off your lettuce just like everyone else. Unless, of course, you are executed for wrongthink.

You don’t need to look at the tinfoil hat brigade. There are no aliens coming to poke your bum, no reptiles coming to eat your children. That’s not even needed.

Look at what they are telling you openly. They are not kidding.

Against stupidity…

…the gods themselves contend in vain.

I don’t know the source of the quote, I only know it from a very-long-ago reading of this book. Blimey, a new copy is expensive! I hope mine is still in a box somewhere here. It could be, I’m something of a packrat with books.

It seems so appropriate today. The UK government thinks we will all be driving electric cars in ten years. There isn’t enough cobalt on the planet to make enough batteries for the cars needed in the little UK. The batteries gradually die, the car’s range gets shorter and shorter and in just a few years it’s a lawn ornament. New batteries? The old ones can’t currently be recycled and there’s no cobalt left in the ground. What then?

How big a battery do you need for a truck? Or a tank?

You know the best thing about these cars? The drive is permanently coupled to the wheels. There is no neutral. If it stops, it stops dead. No matter where you are or how fast you’re going. If you’re doing 70 mph on a motorwat and it dies you don’t coast into the hard shoulder. You stop as if you hit a wall. That’s going to be fun, especially when the ones coming behind are still going.

We have people proudly advertising their electric building equipment, a small digger that runs for two hours on one charge. A charge that is replenished by running a diesel generator for eight hours. So the diesel engine runs for eight hours instead of two, and that’s good?

To make Scotland green, we have cut down 14 million trees to make room for wind farms while governments claim they want to plant more trees. That’s just Scotland. You can barely see it on a map of the world. The windmill parts are not recyclable, they will, along with all those solar panels, be in landfill in 20 years or so. Leaching extremely toxic waste into the soil that will be growing a future vegan world’s food.

Oh don’t worry about the animals. The vegans want to kill them all to save the planet. So do the ecoloons. The animals must be scratching their heads and wondering who the planet is being saved for.

The Swedish Doom Goblin has been to Bristol to talk about how the planet is burning up… in a country beset by flooding, in the rain, while wearing two coats against the cold. Her parents should have been prosecuted for child abuse long ago but they are being allowed to continue on a massive scale. The only thing Extinction Rebellion achieve, all they have ever achieved and all they will ever achieve, is destruction. They have utterly ruined every single place they have ever visited. In the name of saving it.

Now we have coronavirus. The name is not new, there are many coronaviruses, but in the modern world nobody can remember beyond five minutes ago so there are people wondering how Dettol can claim to kill coronavirus ‘before it existed’. This variant is new. Its biggest danger is not its kill rate, it’s that someone could be spreading it for weeks while showing no symptoms. It will overwhelm medical services and close down supply chains. It doesn’t need to kill more than enough to cause panic. The asymptomatic carriers will increrase exponentially. A million Typhoid Marys. The perfect blind assassin.

Most of all though, what is the Left of politics doing? On the right we have Trump and Boris, both of whom appear to be bumbling clowns but they aren’t. They are very calculating people. Brushing them off, underestimating them, is a big mistake.

The Left, both in the UK and America, are in the process of choosing a new leader. The lineup in both cases looks like the starting gate of the Olympic window licking competition. There is no Tony Blair in the UK or Barack Obama in the US. It’s as if they raided the Shady Rest Home for Weary Minds and put up the most insane candidates they could find. Are they trying to lose? Is this really the best they have?

If there is a God he must surely be reaching for the reset button now and maybe he has already pressed it. Pestilence and Famine are loose upon the world and one look at the Turkey/Greece border will surely have the shadow of War over it. Turkey and Greece have been enemies for a long time, mostly because of Cyprus. So war there would be no surprise. Erdogan is as mad as Hitler was. Opening up a new front with Greece when he already has war with Syria would not surprise me/

Notably absent is the new ‘EU army’ that the EU claims they have command over. Also notably absent is the UN. Greece are members of both but they are being left to deal with this alone.

This level of stupid has appeared and accelerated in only a couple of decades. There is so much more, I could extend this post to whole book levels! Ten years ago there were two genders, I have no idea how many there are now. It’s as if the entire world has gone insane, as if we are being set up to destroy ourselves while thinking we are saving ourselves.

I’m sort of getting used to the fiction coming true, you know…

Killing yourself to live

No competition this time. It’s a Black Sabbath song that should really be the theme song for the Extinction Rabble. They should play it at Davos every time the Doom Goblin takes the stage.

This planet is turning into a lake of toxic waste thanks to mining for the materials needed to make windmills and solar panels. All those trees lost to the wind farms and short-lived suncatchers… planting a few more isn’t going to bring them back.

(I cut out the original poster’s ID so they won’t get flak from the loonies)

I have even seen a ‘scientist’ declare that the phrase ‘CO2 is plant food’ is an ‘unsubstantiated claim’.

Really. That’s the level of intelligence running the show here. Biology so basic that no university lecturer feels the need to even mention it. If you didn’t learn that at school you really have no business in any biological science subject of any kind at all.

So they remove acre after acre of photosynthesising plants that are absorbing atmospheric CO2 and releasing oxygen, only to replace them with panels that absorb sunlight and turn it into electricity. Those panels neither remove CO2 nor produce oxygen. They only work in daytime, if they’re not dusty or covered in snow. After 20 years the panels, and all the toxic materials they contain, go into landfill. They cannot be recycled.

Neither can worn out blades from those windmills. They go into landfill too.

The windmills have a finite life. When they are scrapped, they leave behind several hundred tons of concrete in the ground. Well what did you think was holding them up? Those huge concrete blocks will be marvelled at by future archaeologists who will write papers entitled ‘How stupid were our ancestors?’

The windmills only work in the right amount of wind. Too little and they don’t move. Too much and they have to be stopped or they explode. If there’s no wind and it’s sunny, they use power to rotate them because differential heating can warp the blades. If the wind is perfect but nobody currently needs power it goes to battery storage. Hahaha! That last line is a lie. The windy millers get paid bucketloads of cash to shut them down when they aren’t needed.

We are told to panic over plastic straws and yes, I am absolutely in agreement that there is far too much plastic waste being dumped. But that is going to pale into insignificance against the toxins generated by the ‘green’ industry.

The Electric Spaceman, Elon Musk, is currently building a massive factory in Germany and is chopping down many, many trees to make room for it. I would have preferred he put it somewhere that was already treeless. In fact I would have thought that would make considerable economic sense. However, watching the ‘greens’ handwringing outrage over this, when they have destroyed massive tracts of forests for their silly lawn ornaments masquerading as ‘sustainable power’, is actually sickening.

The windmills kill birds. Certain styles of solar power, the ones that reflect sunlight to heat a central tower, have been filmed frying any flying wildlife that gets into the path of the beams.

Mass killing of wildlife is apparently okay when the Greens do it. Australia is about to kill thousands of wild camels because they give out the long-debunked ‘greenhouse gases’. Those camels, birds, all the animals that used to live in those forests, must be wondering who exactly the Greens are trying to save the planet for. It’s clearly not them.

It’s not the farm animals either. There is a big push on Veganosity this month, they call it Veganuary (also Dry January, Januhairy, and other things, all of which is childish silliness which I have ignored). Lots of nonsense about farm conditions (although some farms are shit and end up prosecuted, most are not).

Photos of pigs in restraining pens, with the story that they spend their entire lives in there. This is bollocks. The restraining pens are called ‘farrowing crates’ and the sow is in there so she doesn’t inadvertently lie on her piglets when they’re born. A full grown sow can reach 300 kg and she won’t even notice a 5 kg piglet under her arse when she takes a nap. The restraints give the piglets a fighting chance to get out of the way.

Once the piglets are weaned, the sow goes back to roaming around with the other sows. She isn’t in that pen forever.

‘Oh, but pigs wouldn’t do that to their own babies!’ I have personally rescued screaming piglets pinned against the side of a pen by an uncaring mother. She has so many at one time, she doesn’t worry about losing a few. Pigs are pretty smart but the adults are not cute. They are evil bastards, as a visiting electrician who left without a large chunk of his leg will attest. The Brick Top character in ‘Snatch’ wasn’t using fiction when describing what pigs can do to a human body. These buggers will eat you.

So, are you going to let them run wild? They can’t find food. They don’t know how. Food is brought to them every day. Even then they are not averse to taking a chunk out of you if they get the chance. Imagine a pack of them set loose. In a couple of days they’ll be really hungry. And they will eat absolutely anything.

Cows? Pretty placid most of the time. Take a dog near them – especially when they have calves – and well, your chances are not good at all. An angry cow is not something you want to be within a mile of.

So let’s suppose the whole of the UK went vegan tomorrow. What happens to the cows, chickens, pigs, sheep etc? They all get killed, butchered, frozen and shipped to other countries at bargain prices as farmers try to salvage what’s left of their lives. They are not going to be set free. They are all going to die.

You can argue that they don’t have a great life now, in most cases they actually do, but they have life. Vegans want to end that. Greens want to kill them all too because they fart the long-debunked ‘greenhouse gases’. At least we meat eaters let the animals have life before we kill and eat them. We don’t want them extinct.

Pets… dogs and cats are carnivores. They cannot survive on vegetarian, much less vegan diets. So they all die too.

Ah but we’d have loads of wildlife. Well, apart from the ones the solar and wind farms have displaced, minced or fried of course.

Large areas of this country are lousy for crop farming and I don’t mean the cities. There are huge areas that grow nothing but grass. Not even trees grow there. You can’t plant crops there. So, you need every square inch of arable land to have the slightest hope of feeding a vegan population and you cannot afford losses due to rabbits, crows, pheasant or anything else. They all have to go.

The Green idea of ‘saving the planet’ leads to a sterile world of no biodiversity at all. It leads to a deep-communist world where nothing that is not essential is allowed to survive. Where nobody can question the way of things and nobody wants to. It leads to Panoptica.

Where Panoptica leads is likely to become very clear by the end. It was 10538 Overture by ELO that started that story, but it was another, later, quasi-documentary that really brought it to life.

I’d better get back to it before it all comes true.

Panoptica Chapter 9

I’ve been distracted by a short story idea concerning Annunaki, Neanderthals and the ‘replacement of Europeans’. This will not take long and I’ll be back to Panoptica as soon as I have the other story drafted.

As for the news, I’m finding it hard to get worked up about any of it. The Labour leadership contest – meh. I’m not a member of any political party so won’t have a say and frankly, don’t give a damn. The candidate lineup looks like the starting line of a window licking competition. I don’t care which one they pick.

Apparently it’s ‘racism’ to criticise Meghan Markle, or Meghan Windsor as she is now. This is playing a full deck of race cards all at once, and what for? What does it matter if a minor royal decides he doesn’t want to be royal any more? He won’t be the first to abdicate his royalness. There are no examples of racism in any of the criticism I’ve seen and I don’t care enough about another family’s issues to comment myself. This is for Mrs. Queen and Wrinkled Phil to sort out. Not my business.

I’ve given up arguing with global warmers. There’s no point and it’s too late anyway. Climate change has arrived and is killing people in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they aren’t used to experiencing that much cold. Countries all over the world are seeing cold records fall every day – and the Church of Climatology focuses on arsonist-set fires in Australia. Even though much of Australia is also recording record low temperatures in what, for them, is summer. When I say ‘low’ I mean low for Australia, so pretty much British summer temperatures. They aren’t under glaciers and probably won’t be. There’s too much sea between Antarctica and the next land for effective glacier formation. The North doesn’t have that buffer. Maybe Australia will eventually have low enough temperatures for normal people to visit without having to wear stillsuits and a Meccano framework of fans and ice.

We have several years’ worth of firewood, we have well water and septic tank sewage. I just need to get a generator, ideally steam powered because the idiots are likely to push fuel prices into daft levels soon. I doubt they exist but I’m sure a petrol one could be modified with maybe an old railway tank engine to drive it. Yes, I am looking for an excuse to get one. Let the warmers keep pretending it’s getting hotter, and that CO2 is the only thing that matters. The game is over. They’re just hiding in that global warming jungle, pretending the war is still going on. I’m happy to leave them there.

Brexit – will it happen? I’m not going to hold my breath. Boris might actually come through on this or he might be a jolly Santa-like version of Jackboots May. We’ll get a better idea on the 31st January but we won’t know for sure until December. Either way, there’s sod all I can do about it so I’m not going to worry about it.

Enough gloom – I’m obviously spending far too much time with Gloom Dog lately – and on with the jolly tale of Panoptica. This’ll cheer you up. Comparatively.

Panoptica: Chapter 9

46110. 46826. 46053. The onesie patterns were unmistakable. 10538 stopped moving when he saw the unit marked as 93224. This rail station was under heavy security. Ghosthunters and a Coalition advisor? Something important must be happening, so what was he doing here? Surely he didn’t merit such a high-ranking sendoff party?

“Something wrong? Why have you stopped?” 18823 nudged him forward.

10538 took hesitant steps. “There are very important units here. A lot of security. What’s that for?”

“Have you ever been to a train station before?” 18823 moved in front of 10538, smiling.

“Well… no. I only ever needed the bus.”

“Trains are for longer journeys. The higher ranks need to get to distant places quickly. They’ll be waiting for trains going to their own destinations.” 18823 took 10538’s arm. “Come on. The train to Pensionville is already here. It has to clear the platform before other trains can arrive.”

10538 looked around. There was a concrete floor, a thing like a little room with a door, the concrete floor seemed to fall away on either side of the little room. Baffled, he turned to 18823. “I don’t know what a train looks like. Is it around here?”

18823 laughed. “Of course. I’ve never ridden in one but I’ve brought others here. So I know how it works. Let me show you.” He led 10538 to the edge of the concrete floor, just beside the little room, “Look down there.”

10538 peered cautiously over the edge. About a metre or so down lay steel bars, linked together at intervals, that ran under the room and off into the distance.

“Those are rails.” 18823 pointed into the distance. “They lead to Pensionville. This—” he indicated the little room “—runs on those rails so it can’t ever take a wrong turn. You sit inside and it will take you to Pensionville safely. That’s all there is to it. You just sit inside and wait. You don’t have to do anything.”

“Just like the bus?” 10538 looked over the little room. It had no visible windows, just the door.

“Even better. Because it’s on rails it can’t go the wrong way. It’s a lot faster too.” 18823 patted 10538’s back. “Come on, let’s get you on board.”

They stood before the door to the little room 18823 had called a ‘train’. There was a hiss and the door moved forwards, then sideways along the side of the train. 10538 was aware of movement around him – the ghosthunters had tensed, the advisor took a step back. He glanced at 18823, whose smile was tight and who appeared to not be breathing.

10538 stepped through the door. Someone sat in there, someone who looked up at him with one raised eyebrow. The onesie identified them as 71556. 10538 raised his hand in greeting to show his designation. 71556 snorted and looked away.

10538 turned to 18823. “Seems I’m not travelling alone.”

“Anyone you know?” 18823 spoke through gritted teeth.

10538 felt a little taken aback. It felt as though there was another overlay to this whole situation but he just could not grasp it. “No,” he said. “Never seen this unit before.”

18823 blew a long breath, as though relieved about something. He raised his hand. “Well, 10538, this is goodbye. I hope to join you in Pensionville one day but until then, be compliant, be comfortable, and conform.”

“I will. Be happy in your important job.” 10538 raised his hand in response until the door hissed closed. Once it had, he took a seat opposite 71556 and wondered if he should start a conversation. It seemed presumptuous to insist on conversation with a higher rank so instead, he stared out of the window.

The empty platform slid away as the train pulled out of the station.

More madness

I am frantically writing ‘Panoptica’ before it comes true. I have long suspected it might but in these last few days it has transpired that the ‘genderless society’ is well on track. A transgender man has given birth to a baby, with his/her/its non-binary partner, using a donation of female sperm.

That’s a real headline. Give it five more years of this and the first politician to suggest scrapping all gender altogether will win by a landslide. No more differentiation. Everyone the same, perfect equality enforced with neonatal surgery. Although I doubt they’ll tell you that last bit right away 😉

By then they will have transgendered so many children they’ll all be permanently sterile anyway. Worker drones, like ants or bees. Only the elite reproduce. Far-fetched? I thought so too but not any more.

The Church of Climatology is now claiming the world is warming when it isn’t. Nothing new there, they’ve been claiming humans affect the climate for about a century and yet the climate does what the hell it likes with no regard to humanity. Catastrophic warming is ten years away. As usual.

In India, houses have no heating. Not even new ones. The winter temperatures there are normally around 10 C while the summer heat is appalling, so houses are designed to dissipate heat, not retain it. Currently, large swathes of India are at 2 C. People are freezing to death. Okay, 2 C is, to me, quite mild weather but I live in the north of Scotland. Minus 10 C is a perfectly normal winter temperature here. For people whose environment never goes that low, 2 C is absolutely freezing. And with no heat source it can kill those people.

America is recording record low temperatures this winter, all over the place. All those reports of ‘record high temperatures’ have been proven false. Every one of them. They can doctor data, but people are finding old newspaper reports on very hot weather that contradict the doctored data. This scam should be falling apart. It’s getting stronger.

I think it genuinely started with scientists trying to boost their grant income but it has now been hijacked by communism. It’s not about climate any more, if it ever was. It’s about control.

We are told we must all go vegan to save the planet and we are told that massive crop failures are imminent due to climate change. So if we are all vegan, won’t we starve to death? Well duh, that’s the idea. Massive population reduction is no secret and hasn’t been for a long time. Make everyone vegan then crash the food source, having first killed off all the animal sources.

The BBC recently flew to meet Gritty Thunderbird in Sweden. They apologised like penitents at the altar of a vengeful god for their sinful use of planes and then they interviewed her.

In the snow.

You cannot get through to these people. Any of them. I’m not trying to warn them any more, I’ll just document their decline into total servitude. Panoptica will happen. Nothing can stop it now. So I am writing as fast as I can, before we hit the next book-burning phase when there won’t be anyone left to read it.

It’s going to be a busy New Year. I have to combine the last three anthologies into one omnibus edition. I have also decided to combine ‘Fears of the Old and the New’ and ‘Dark Thoughts and Demons’ into one book, as long as I can make it cheaper than the separate books. I’m thinking about trying it with ‘Jessica’s Trap’, ‘Samuel’s Girl’ and ‘Norman’s House’ but that might turn out to be a vast tome. Then there are a couple of other books that have been on hold over the Christmas period.

Panoptica has to be a priority now. It’s coming faster than I had anticipated. I can see the panic in the Church of Climatology – the Grand Solar Minimum is about to blow that game right out of the water in just a few years. If they are going to get control they have to get it soon.

People point at George Soros and while I think he’s definitely a wrong ‘un he isn’t doing all this alone. Incidentally, I saw a recent tweet claiming Soros was a holocaust survivor. He survived it totally. He joined the Nazis. He’s never made a secret of it.

I don’t know if there is some secret elite running this show. Maybe there is. Lots of people claim there is but nobody can point at them. I don’t think it’s necessary.

Lots of little crazy pressure groups like Antifa, BLM, the Climatologists, so many more, just need a few radical infiltrators and the lunacy is ingrained. There are many, many, gullible people out there who can be convinced of pretty much anything in a matter of minutes. Heck, I’ve played with antismokers I’ve met and left some of them believing that all grey dust is tobacco ash. That was easy, their ‘handlers’ had already convinced them it never degrades so all I had to do was mention 400 years of smoking and… bingo.

But I was doing it for a bit of malicious fun. I wasn’t trying to take control of an entire population. Just mess with the heads of those who hate me.

There are now many groups trying to take control. If we’re lucky, they work individually and will end up fighting each other. There are some signs that that is happening. If they are co-ordinated, we’re doomed.

I don’t mind if you want to believe I’ve joined the tinfoil-hatters. I don’t mind if you want to believe the world is warming while you protest in the snow. I don’t mind if you buy listening devices and cameras linked to the internet and install them in your home. I don’t mind if you’re happy to get that contactless card chip or the chip that opens your house installed in your hand. All that and more is entirely up to you.

I don’t know about the chemtrails thing. I’m looking into it but I’m so far not convinced. I don’t see how you can reliably target an aerosol attack from 30,000 feet and hope it lands where you want it to land.

I once thought Common Purpose was just a conspiracy theory. It’s not. It’s a useful-idiot training facility and you can recognise them by their exaggerated body language. Really, it’s like bloody semaphore! Yet they are placed in positions where their stupidity can do a lot of damage. I suspect their flamboyantly-waving hand is in the current claim that the Lake District is racist because a lot of white people go there.

I’ve been there. It’s very nice in summer. I’ve also driven through it at night. It’s total darkness because at night, and especially in winter, nobody wants to live there. It can get pretty bleak. It’s located in the north of England so you would expect the visitors to be largely the indigenous population. Complaining it’s too white is like complaining Mecca is too Muslim. And yet the person in charge of it is now demanding diversity. Expect to see busloads of non-whites turning up and being forced to enjoy the bleakness at gunpoint.

It’s ‘elitist’ because only able-bodied people can truly enjoy the mountain walks. Well I’m able to do the mountain walks. I’ve done a few. I’ll save you the bother. There is bugger all at the top. I’m not doing them again.

Maybe they should use the mountains to fill in the lakes and bulldoze it all flat. Then we can all bask in the comfortable compliant conformity of it all. The CCC of life in Panoptica.

Yes, CCC…Panoptica is quite deliberate 😉

Anyway, I’ll let you get back to watching the insanity of modern life and the collapse of civilisation while I write your future.

If I can get it done before it comes true.

Bicycle Repair Man

Back in the 1960s, the great prophet Monty of Python (peas be upon ham) wrote a little sketch. In this sketch, everyone was Superman. Or Superwoman. There was no representation of SuperNeuter or SuperCreatureOfIndeterminateGenderOrEvenSpecies so the prophecy wasn’t perfect but it was close.

There were no cars. Supermen don’t need cars. They travelled everywhere by bicycle. There are moves to force that part of the prophecy into truth.

Everyone was equal. Everyone was super intelligent and super strong and everyone had a bicycle to call their own.

There was only one problem in this Utopian dream. No tradesmen. If your bike broke, nobody knew how to fix it. Everyone had degrees in super-something but nobody had bothered to learn anything practical.

Except one man. Seeing a flat tyre or slipped chain, one man would change out of his Superman costume into overalls and flat cap and appear with his box of spanners. I can’t find the original, only this one with a song voiceover.

Biicycle Repair Man was the superhero in this story and oh, how we all laughed.

A world where everyone is classed as Super and nobody can fix a bicycle. Can it happen?

It’s already started. Local garages are closing down because they can’t get apprentice mechanics. Nobody wants to be a plumber or a plasterer or an electrician, they all want degrees in yogurt weaving and smartphone typing and Wiccan veganosity. I am astonished at how many young people not only cannot start a fire using a flint and tinder, but are actually terrified of fire! One generation is all it took. We had at least one fireplace blazing away in every house not so long ago, and now houses are built without chimneys and nobody seems to have noticed.

We used to wake up cold – and I’m not exactly ancient yet – with frost on the inside of the windows and breath condensing in the air until someone lit the fire (after cleaning out the previous day’s ashes) and started warming the house. One generation later, they set the timer on the heating to come on before they get up so their double-glazed house is warm. They cannot cope with cold.

If nobody is taking practical courses, who is going to fix that heating when it breaks? Who is going to service your heating boiler when it breaks down between Christmas and New Year as happened to us here last year?

Fortunately our landlord had a spare heating pump and a box of spanners, and it soon got going again but while it was down we were very glad of our chimney and fireplace.

This house is at least 250 years old and made of granite. Thick walls of it. Once you get those walls warmed up with a fire they are like huge storage radiators. If I owned this place I’d be looking to get those sealed over fireplaces reopened. There are three open ones (one is capped) and six sealed ones. Two of the open ones, including the one we routinely use, are the old style huge openings with a swinging iron bar to hang pots over. How could you not want to use that?

Sure, move with the times and all that crap but forgetting the ‘old ways’ – and I’m talking 1960s and 70s ways here, not neanderthal times – is not a good idea. What if the new-fangled way doesn’t work out?

We have the disposable society now. I used to routinely repair my old Ford Cortina MkII with a few tools and a bit of time. I changed the head gasket on an Austin Princess and drove it from Wales to Scotland. I had to strip down the pedal linkages to a Commer van once, and replaced a wheel bearing and steering rack boots on a Vauxhall Astra.

Now? I look under the bonnet of this Toyota RAV4 and I see nothing recognisable. No coil, no distributor, just a lump of plastic on top of a lump of metal. Lucky for me it’s reliable, because I would have no idea where to start to fix it.

Just down the road, someone had an Austin Seven for sale a few months back. I was sorely tempted. It has mechanics I can understand. Now you have to link the car to a computer to get any idea of what’s wrong with it.

There used to be TV repairmen. Now you just buy a new one and dump the old one. There were cobblers to fix your worn shoes. Throw them away, supermarkets will sell you a new pair for next to nothing. They’ll last about a month so don’t bother with shoe polish.

As for darning socks… I bet nobody under 30 has even heard the term. Socks are incredibly cheap now.

Incidentally, if you are ever tempted to give clothes to one of those charities that collect for the homeless (the real ones, not the fake bastards who stock their second hand shops with donations) then a pack of unused socks would be really appreciated. Especially at this time of year. They’re cheap, but there’s no such thing as ‘cheap’ when you have no money at all.

Nobody fixes anything any more. It breaks, you throw it away and buy another. In this age of the microchip, itf it’s not the battery or a connector or switch then it can’t be economically repaired. Ah, the old days, when you turned on a broken valve radio you’d picked up for a few pennies, noted which valves didn’t light up, replaced them for about a quid and then sold it fully working…

I should have kept one really. The sound quality was so much better than modern crap. But then, they wouldn’t pick up digital radio.

This winter, I have to peen the ditch blade on my scythe. It’s taken a few dings. The grass blade just needs sharpening since it doesn’t hit the stumps and rocks in the wooded part of the garden. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I’m not Amish, these things are still in use. And yet who out there knows how to use and maintain one? Who even bothers sharpening the blades on their mower? Nah, scrap it, get a new one.

Need to replace a light switch or fitting? Need an extra outlet on a spur from the ring main? Can you do it? Do you even know what I’m talking about? EU regulations mean you are required to get a qualified electrician to do jobs we all used to do ourselves. That’s because they’ve dumbed down education to the point where modern kids don’t even realise there are wires in the wall behind those electrical outlets. They are magic holes in the wall.

The problem is, qualified electricians are getting thin on the ground. Just like good chimney sweeps. It’s time to call the one I use and I know he’s going to be busy. There are so few of them now.

Ring main and spurs. Wiring a plug. Airlocks in plumbing. Changing a tap washer, tap, installing a sink. Sharpening any kind of blade. Safely lighting an indoor fire. These were not specialist subjects in my youth and to me, they aren’t now. And yet, in a very few years, they have become the domain of a dwindling number of specialists. The principle behind the ring main was once taught in physics classes. I bet it isn’t now.

I was taught to use a forge, brazing, welding, casting, a shaper and lathe in metalwork class. I bet those are mostly banned by the modern fearful-of-lawsuit brigade. Especially the shaper. If you nodded off while using it, it would have caved in your skull.

I do have an O level in metalwork. It’s a little out of place among the rest of my qualifications but I did enjoy the subject. I could have been a blacksmith and very likely would have enjoyed it – but it’s a competitive field because there is limited call for blacksmith skills now. Lots of fire and hammering. I think I would have fitted right in there.

Now we have youth wailing about disposables while carrying bottled water. I used to go camping. We had bottled water – in refillable metal water bottles. Disposable plastic ones are a recent thing. They howl about the capitalist system throught their iPhones and then demand new ones because last year’s model is no longer good enough.

It’s going to collapse. It’s designed to do just that. These ecowarriors are the useful idiots of the new communism but don’t tell them, they won’t believe you. They are all going to die before they get much older and who will be left?

Those who know how to light a fire to stay warm. Those who can skin and gut a rabbit – those who can catch one without retching in horror. Those who understand seasons and planting and that avocados are not essential to life, and don’t grow here anyway.

The patient ones. The ones who watch it all burn and are ready to carry on after the canned-goods riots.

The idiots who think themselves superior want massive population reduction, to a level they can easily control. They have not considered the obvious.

The ones who will survive are the ones who take no notice of their propaganda, and who cannot be controlled. Their drones are going to follow their directions into the abyss. Make all the rules you want. Demand veganism and insect-eating and nonsmoking and nondrinking until you have killed off every single compliant drone. Make them all utterly dependent and useless at looking after themselves.

I’ll still be here.

Fixing things.