Free Energy

First of all – the new Leg Iron Books publication. It actually came out on Sunday but as tradition dictates, this blog is silent for Remembrance Day. Both the Sunday and the actual 11th. So announcing the release had to wait.

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Free energy. Turn the heating up to ‘equatorial’, leave the lights on all the time and have the oven eternally ready to bung in a roast. Pay nothing at all, or maybe pennies, for all that.

A pipe dream. Of course. If you did that now you’d probably bankrupt yourself in a month.

And yet…

Tesla had designed a free energy system based on the pyramids that dot the world. The pyramids were not burial mounds, not even the ones in Egypt, and it is becoming more and more clear that the ancient Egyptians didn’t build theirs. They found them already there. Already in the first stages of decline.

Gobekli Tepe is touted as the ‘beginning of civilisation’ but it clearly isn’t. It’s pretty advanced and ‘suddenly appeared’ from the nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in the region. They took one step from animal-skin tents to advanced stonework. Really? It was deliberately buried. Were they embarrassed by their non-tent-based endeavours because other tent-dwellers laughed at them? Or did they not even know it was already there? Was it a beginning or an end?

Did Tesla’s system work? We might never know. Free energy is the ultimate horror to any energy company. Of course they are going to shut it down – and energy companies are very, very powerful. Imagine every oil, gas and electricity company saying ‘Yeah, okay, it’s all free now, we’re closing down’. Then try to imagine it again. If you managed to do it the first time you’re living in cloud cuckoo land. If you managed the second time you probably vote Green.

Those companies, just like any other companies in any other line of business, will not go quietly into that good night. If anyone comes up with a free energy system based on Tesla’s ideas or zero point vacuum energy or anything else, they will be made an offer they can’t refuse and be silenced.

It’s not ‘conspiracy theory’, it’s perfectly logical business theory. If someone is going to shut down your multinational business at a stroke and you can afford to offer them enough cash to shut up about it, of course you’ll do it.

Then you get them to sign a draconian ‘shut the fuck up’ contract in exchange for enough cash to drink themselves into a coma. It works in every field. The penalties for breaking the shut-up contract are beyond anyone’s ability to pay.

Renewables, eh? Why didn’t the energy companies shut down the bird chopping windmills and the solar panels?

Simple. Those things are bollocks. Fads. Inherent failures. Incredibly polluting and anti-environmental horrors that the Greens think are wonderful, because they believe every word of the Green God of Utter Destruction of Everything the Greens Pretend to Stand For.

They are not competition for coal and oil and nuclear. They are a joke not even worthy of being included in a Christmas cracker. All the energy companies have to do is wait, watch and snigger. Let then screw up all they claim to want to preserve. They’ll be back.

If anyone comes up with a real free energy system, the big boys will fight it. They have not bothered to fight the wind and solar nonsense at all, and nobody seems to wonder why. Some have even got in on the subsidy act. Free energy? The hell with that- here’s free money.

‘The love of money is the root of all evil’ is an old saying, but the truth of it is imminent. The sun is now entering grand solar minimum – not ‘in ten years’, right now. Yet all the money is in warming while the planet cools.

Soon we’ll see climate protestors carried along by the glacier in the high street, shouting ‘global warming’ through their snorkel Parkas. The Green God’s acolytes will still believe.

Energy is not going to be free in the coming years. It’s going to be very expensive indeed. The windmills and solar panels will be of no use at all. There is nowhere near enough infrastructure to cope with extended cold. It’s all fallen for the warming crap.

It is not a surprise. Science has warned about this for a long time but you haven’t heard about it because it’s not ‘warming’. You can’t legitimately tax cold. Oh, some scientists have been warning for a long time. Chinese and Russian scientists aren’t silenced by the scam and their governments have been building reliable energy supplies to cope with it. Meanwhile our Western governments still think it’s getting warmer. Idiots.

You’ll pay more for heating and they will charge more for global warning.

This year, the winter death toll will take far more than the pensioners. And yet, the same idiots will be voted into government once again.

This is why I have a large stock of firewood, a petrol stash, and will be getting a generator in the coming weeks. The time for preparations is nearly over.

Winter is here.

Money

One of my favourite Pink Floyd songs ever.

I’m told there is an issue with commenting here, apparently Google and WordPress are each calling the other invalid. Best guess: one of them updated and ballsed something up. That’s usually the reason. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Anyway. Money. My favourite quote on the subject came fom an Andy Capp cartoon many, many years ago. Flo returns home from shopping and says ‘It’s frightening how the pound’s going down in value’. Andy responds: ‘Well it’s a good thing we don’t have many of them then, isn’t it?”

It’s pretty much how I’ve always felt about it. This feeling has only been increased by finding out about fractional reserve banking and how most money is simply created by typing numbers on a screen. I don’t need very much money. In fact, I need other people to have cash to spare because I’m always trying to sell something. If other people have no money, they can’t buy from me.

In the past I sold my knowledge as a microbiologist. I’ve retired from that now, not least because science has, by and large, become really quite silly. Food, drink, smoking, climate, and now vaping – it’s clear they are just making shit up. Not even very convincingly, I was more convincing when I explained the lack of roundabouts in America in terms of Roman invasion. This reflects on science as a whole so nobody trusts science any more. Maybe that was the plan.

These days I sell books. Mine and other peoples’ too. If there was nobody out there with disposable income, nobody would buy them. It’s tough enough now – I really don’t want other people to be poor!

Jerry Cordite has declared that there are 150 billionaires in the UK. There won’t be if he gets elected, they’ll be packed up and ready to go just in case. Can he stop them moving money? Hardly. It only takes a few keypresses these days and it’s moved to the other side of the planet. Billionaires don’t even need to book flights. They own planes. And yachts the size of cruise liners.

He also says there are 14 million in poverty. Poverty is when you have no shoes and you ride out the winter under a bridge dressed in rags. The New Poverty is where your iPhone is last year’s model and you can’t afford the latest Reeboks. There are real poverty-stricken people living on the streets but not 14 million of them. Thanks to the Green Agenda, this winter will reduce the real number significantly, as well as clearing out many of those over-70s who are too smart to vote Labour.

So Jerry thinks a fair country would have no billionaires and everyone is equal in the bread queue. Who the hell does he think owns the factories and other businesses that employ so many people and produce all that stuff? When he flushes out the billionaires, they take their business with them. There won’t be any bread at the end of that queue. Nobody is employing anyone to bake it.

I don’t care that other people are billionaires. I’ll never be one, I don’t want to work that hard and I certainly don’t want to employ other people. Not now that the Entitled Generation is looking for work where they expect to get paid for looking cool on Facebook and playing online games. I don’t want a yacht, I don’t need a Lear jet, I have no interest in owning a football team, I just need enough to pay the bills and have some left over for baccy and booze. Oh and toy trains.

In my almost-60 years I have paid higher rate income tax twice, both times on redundancy payouts. I will not work to reach the level of working for half pay. What’s the point? A huge house? The one we rent now is too big really, there are five rooms used only for storage of accumulated junk (must get around to clearing that out) and there is a vast attic we haven’t used at all. Cleaning it is a nightmare, you knock down cobwebs at one end of the house and by the time you get to the other end, the spiders have rebuilt the first ones.

How about a fancy car? Well I have a 2005 Toyota, it starts every time, it’s cheap for servicing and parts, and I don’t care if you drop a sandwich in it. I really do not want a car that I have to worry about, that I would have to maintain like a living room and which is worth more than most houses. Besides, those low slung things would lose their exhaust on the way up this driveway.

I never understood why millionaires have cars at all. Why bother? With that much money I’d just call someone and have the stuff delivered. I don’t need to go there myself. And I could take taxis to and from the pub. I’d never sober up again.

The whole world is obsessed with money. Most of which doesn’t actually exist. Everything is about money. It’s the biggest social construct of all and everyone acts as though it’s the only aim of life.

In one of the Batman films, the one with Heath Ledger as Joker, Alfred tells Batman that ‘Some men don’t care about money. Some men just want to watch the world burn’. The two things are not connected. I don’t care about money beyond having enough to live on but I don’t want to destroy things. I just want to be left alone.

The obsession with money is the downfall of all the political parties. It ‘costs the Treasury’. No it doesn’t. The Treasury takes in other people’s money. It isn’t a ‘cost’ if it takes a bit less. It ‘costs the NHS’. Well we’re all paying for it so it costs the NHS nothing. It costs us – and we’ve already paid.

All these policies, all these manifestos, are all about money. It’s not even real! It’s an agreed means of transfer, so a carpenter doesn’t have to build a chair a day to pay his rent. He can swap the chair for money and pay his rent with that. Since rent of a ‘chair a day’ is probably somewhat excessive, the carpenter can use the extra cash to get food and more wood for the next chair. It’s convenient. It is not meant to be your God.

When people like me say we don’t care about money, it’s like we are Money Atheists. ‘Oh so you can live without money eh?’

Well no. I have to pay council tax no matter what. I have to fuel, insure and maintain my car if I want to go anywhere. Especially here – two buses a day and the nearest railway station is 15 miles away. I have to buy food. I can grow and catch only so much here – and if I want fish I need to buy a permit to fish in the river.

It’s not the same as religious atheism. I can live without worshipping or even acknowledging any God. I can ignore religion entirely. But money, you can’t ignore. There’s always someone who wants to be paid for something – or in the case of politicians, they want to be paid to tell you how much to pay them. If you can’t pay they send the boys round to throw you in jail. It’s a feedback loop you can’t evict.

Corbyn and his drooling idiot gang seem to think that you just have to give everyone the same amount of money and it’s all fixed. Capitalism will be gone. But money is capitalism.

If you pressed a button and everyone had the same amount of money, what happens? Some will piss it away on fancy cars and booze. Others will invest in things they can then sell for more money. In a matter of weeks you are back to having a few billionaires and millions who are broke. Russia found this out, as did China, and they modified their systems to accept it. Neither are truly communist because communism cannot work.

It works for bees and ants because within those colonies, the workers are all the same. Humans are not all the same. Communes can work on a small scale if like minded humans get together to make it work, but on a countrywide scale, no chance. It has to be forced, as in North Korea.

If you have to force people to follow your Utopian dream, then it’s not Utopia. And it’s not a dream, it’s a nightmare.

The obsession with money is already killing the planet. Look at what the Greens are doing with their cobalt and neodymium mines and their hundreds of tons of concrete under every windmill. You know dead windmills go to landfill, right? The Greens make money on that too. Where does the money come from? Why, it comes from you, sucker.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were politicians who cared about people more than money?

Pipe dreams. Sometimes it’s all we have left.

Dichotomies

In ‘1984’, Orwell defined ‘doublethink’ as the ability to hold two totally contradictory ideas at the same time and to assign equal validity to both.

When I first read that, many years ago, I thought it absurd. How can that be done? Surely, like Schrodinger’s imaginary cat, the mere internal observation of two contradictory ideas would cause the brain to collapse one of them and choose the other.

Maybe it used to be that way. It seems to me that in the past, people held one belief at a time. They either discarded opposing views, or, if sensible, considered them and then decided whether to keep their view or change it. Maybe there were doublethinkers back then, maybe before the Internet we just didn’t see so many of them.

Now they seem to be everywhere. The Corbyn Party is a hotbed of it (I don’t call them the Labour party any more, they haven’t been that since Blair took over and they’ve gone way off beam since then). The Corbyn party want an election and don’t want an election, they want to leave the EU and stay in it, they want a Brexit with a deal and they don’t want a deal, but they want ‘no deal’ off the table.

That’s like leaving the atmosphere and refusing to accept the vacuum of space. You can’t take ‘no deal’ off the table. It’s never been on the table. It’s what happens when a deal cannot be agreed. It’s not one of the options, it’s the default.

Then we have the youth claiming that Brexit has stolen their future while simultaneously believing the world is going to end in ten years and they have no future. Climate change is going to lead to a massive extinction event. We’re all going to die. Because of man-made carbon dioxide.

When I was a teenager, we were about to get a new Ice Age in ten years… because of man-made carbon dioxide. This magical gas, comprising a total of 0.04% of the atmosphere (and the human contribution is a tiny fraction of that), can cause ice ages and scorched earth simultaneously – and people believe it. They believe both things at once.

They also simultaneously believe politics will ruin their future while they have no future at all. A terrified generation – is it any wonder they are so full of nihilism and care so little for life? They think we’re all going to die anyway. Who did that to them, and why?

The one thing they will never accept is that the change in climate isn’t ten years away, as has been touted for about a century now. Climate change is happening now and it has nothing to do with carbon (they like to call it ‘carbon’, the stuff of pencil leads and diamonds, because they have never been taught that it’s not a gas). It has everything to do with solar cycles.

Those running the scam must have been aware of this. For those who were listening, genuine climate scientists have been warning about this for a long time. Nobody wanted to hear it. To be fair, those genuine climate scientists were shouted down and sometimes fired for telling the truth, but it’s still true.

Why this insistence on nonsense? You can’t tax the sun. All you can tax is human CO2 emissions so they have to be blamed for everything. This time, no tax will stop it. Nothing will.

So many people have moved north and south from Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Encouraged by those running the game. Oh it’s no secret, no conspiracy theory, that the aim is to massively reduce the human population to an easily controllable level. ‘They’ have been very open and clear on this point. They also intend to make Africa a nature reserve and concentrate what’s left of the population in small cities. There will be no travel for the worker drones, they can use the internet to see the world.

Climate change is very likely to kill a hell of a lot of people in the coming years. Especially those who have just moved from a warm climate into the frozen hell to come. They won’t know how to deal with it. They’ll be in flats and houses with no chimneys and they won’t be able to afford heating. It’s going to be horrifying.

All this information has been around for a very long time. Nobody wanted to hear it and now it’s too late. It’s not ‘coming in ten years’. It’s started. This year. Still they don’t want to hear.

We have spent decades preparing for the wrong apocalypse. And still nobody wants to hear it. Too late now, the clearout of humanity is under way.

Now we have another population reduction method. Transgendering children is a remarkably effective way of sterilising the next generation. Even if they transition back, they’ll have non-working plastic bits instead of the bits they were born with. Sure, there are real transgender people but these are rare. They are also, as with autism, on a spectrum.

There are men who like to dress in women’s clothes. Once called transvestites. and regarded as a normal English eccentricity, these men are not gay. They are straight. They just feel more comfortable in a dress and they like makeup. At the other end are those, men and women, who genuinely feel they are in the wrong body and seriously want it altered. It’s become fashionable to ruin your child’s life by pretending they are the wrong gender, long before they can decide for themselves. There are going to be a lot of lonely parents in the future.

Well I live in Scotland. Not so long ago, all the men here wore kilts and going back further, they’d paint their faces with blue woad to go into battle. I wore a kilt to my son’s wedding. It’s a comfortable thing to wear and the sporran is just the right size for a decent hip flask. Men in skirts hold no terrors for me. But then I’m not a woman. They aren’t creeping into my bathrooms and demanding I wax their balls. I will if they want. I’d use bitumen.

Now we have men dressed as women wanting access to women’s toilets and changing rooms, and taking the prizes in women’s sports – and this is done in the name of ‘women’s rights’. Rapists identify as women so they get put into a prison full of women and what are you going to do when they rape other inmates? Put them in prison? They’re already in there and they are surrounded by captive victims. Why would they ever want to leave?

I’d support them going into a women’s prison. Yes, really. The sentence would include a stay in a secure hospital first, where they get surgically transformed into a woman before they serve their sentence. I have a feeling after one or two of these, rapists won’t self-identify as women any more.

I have strayed from the point here and there, but if you’ve read my babblings for any time at all you’ll know that’s normal.

Now I think about it, there were indeed doublethinkers in the past. There were women who demanded access to men’s clubs but still wanted their women-only clubs. There was once a publisher who wanted to publish only ‘man’ stuff – cars, violence, trousers, that sort of thing – but was shut down by a gaggle of harpies. Women-only publishers thrive.

Blackpool has, I hear, gay hotels where non-gays are not welcome. Bakers who don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding are taken to court. These bakers, and it’s also happened to at least one bed-and-breakfast place, are targeted. There are other bakers who have no religious issues with baking a cake with two men or two women on top. No straight people have ever bothered to target a gay-only hotel or club.

The whole ‘only white people can be racist’ narrative goes back a long way. Usually attached to thiose who want to kill all white people. They’ll never see it, there’s no point trying to explain.

I live in the middle of nowhere. It’s the only sensible response to all this. I am off grid for water and sewage, I have alternative heating and cooking arrangements, if food supplies ever have a problem I can hit rabbits, pheasant, partridge and sometimes even deer from the living room window. I just need a reliable, non-fossil-fuel electricity supply (solar panels won’t cut it in winter here and I don’t want a bloody windmill) and this place will be right off the grid.

This place survived the last mini ice age and it’s still standing. I think it might be the best place to stay for now. There are horrors coming and there are so, so many people who will enable them. Not because they want them.

Because they don’t have the ability to see the consequences.

I have a dream…

…that one day, in the distant future, humanity will once again discover the principles of science and apply them without emotion and without the influence of money. That there will come a Real Scientist who will throw the money-grabbers from the laboratory and – wait. This is getting a bit messianic.

Well that’s not too surprising. As soon as ‘the science was settled’ it stopped being science. It became religion. Like any other religion it needed an Armageddon that could only be averted by obeying (and paying) the High Priests to appease the god of the day. It also needed a Saviour.

I know, you’re immediately thinking of Little Greta and the Church of Climatology, in obeisance to the unquestionable word of the Green God. It’s so much more.

The vapers will tell you of the ‘scientists’ who claim that vaping is worse than smoking and drinking combined. To any rational mind this is utter bollocks but people in ‘respected scientific positions’ have said it so it must be true.

I was once tasked with a menial job for my qualifications, it was a few years before I gave up on science altogether because of the increasing silliness of it all and because of an idiot in charge. I had to check the antibiotic effects of four different antibiotics that were included in pig feed. The project was set up by a different idiot (believe me, it has become so much worse since then) so each antibiotic had a zero sample.

Later I was quizzed by no less than the Head of Research as to why I had not checked all of the zero samples. My response of ‘Well zero of compound A is the same as zero of compound B…’ was met with a shouted ‘I know that!’. Something that told me at once that, no, he didn’t. I later discovered that the Head of Research had absolutely no understanding of statistical analysis, but that’s another story.

Myself and my boss at the time were called into a meeting where an epidemiologist had come up with a great idea he wanted to explain to us. His idea was, in fact, something we call ‘gradient plates’ and which had been in use even before I started my first degree. We were frowned upon for pointing this out.

My final boss took early retirement. He said ‘When we started we were chasing kniowledge. Now we’re just chasing money’. That was 15 years ago. Look at the state of it now.

This is all in the distant past.

Yet we have people saying that ‘scientists have said this so they must be right’ even though science is never ‘right’. Science is never ‘final’. Science is absolutely never ‘settled’.

The general public think all scientists are Spock, working with pure emotionless logic. No. Scientists are human and in any human profession there are shysters and money-grabbers. The problem is that the shysters and money-grabbers are the ones who make the news.

I spent my entire career in science. And yet I am told by those who have never studied science to ‘do some research’. It’s all I’ve ever done and I’m told to do it by people who don’t even know how.

I’ve been sent ‘proof’ of global warming based on ice caps since 1979. I asked why they didn’t want to go back past 1979 and I got a graph of ‘global warming’ from 1880. The end of the Little Ice Age. That was when the Thames froze over. You want to go back to that?

Not that you have any real choice. Humanity’s effect on climate is so tiny as to be irrelevant. We are not as important as we like to pretend. One volcanic eruption pumps out more of the magical ‘greenhouse gases’ than all of human history. I know it’s hard for some people to accept but we just don’t matter at all.

Oh, and the whole ‘greenhouse effect’ was debunked decades ago, even though it’s still around in fashionable pretend-science circles.

Remember the ozone hole? CFCs? Acid rain? Miami underwater by 2000? Remember the New Ice Age of the Seventies, caused by rising CO2? How can you still be falling for this scam? All thse things stopped when funding ran out, and not one of them ever came true. Yet the New Lie is still potent.

Yes, we have a problem with non-recyclable plastics and pollution in general. Nobody can deny that. Yes, we should do something about it before Mother Nature slaps us and tell us to clean our room.

This has nothing to do with climate change. Not a damn thing. It is an entirely separate issue.

Pollution is something we could deal with if the political will was there. It’s not though. Instead they call it ‘climate change’ knowing full well that this is something inherent to the planet and which we can do absolutely nothing about. So the thing we have no possible control over is used to avoid doing something we can control. And there is a whole congregation of the Church of the Green God to support it.

The climate changes. Always has and always will. Holding remembrance services for glaciers is astoundingly silly. Claiming you can change it by installing communism is frankly insane. Nature does not care what we do. Nature does not care about us at all. We are one species among many and Nature has eradicated most of the planet many times and started again.

The ones that survive are the ones that adapt to change. The ones who deny change go extinct.

We are not a special species. Adapt or die.

Oh, and don’t forget to give the glorified weather forecasters more money on your way.

Killing yourself to live

Okay, the Freddo competition still hasn’t happened because I’m dealing with two novels and a short story collection while preparing for visitors and getting ready for a short trip to Denmark and battling a garden that looks like Chthulu’s extended family rising in the rain.

Nobody noticed the last one so this time it’s up front. Where did I steal the title from? Band, album, year. And what did the song actually reference? Up for grabs – a print copy of ‘you’ll be fine’ plus a bit of Leg Iron Books crappy merchandise – which is not on general sale so far. First answer in the comments gets it. The book is a funny one, not a scary one.

Right. To the real point. The Green God and the Church of Climatology.

I have argued with them on Twitter but no longer. There’s no point and it’s too late anyway. They call me ‘climate denier’, the new word for ‘heretic’. They believe what the High Priests of Alleged Science tell them, they believe in The Models (the digital version of a remarkably inaccurate religious book) and they talk of nothing but the End of Days unless we all live as they direct. No discussion is allowed, the ‘science’ is settled and is now Gospel.

And they scoff in smug self-righteousness when I call it a religion. Then they want me burned at the stake for heresy.

Well, the real truth is that there has been no global warming for twenty years and we are now in a sharp cooling period because the Grand Solar Minimum is already underway. The Apocalypse has indeed started and the Church of Climatology has made it far worse than it needed to be. We could have adapted, as we have in the past, but that option is now deleted for most people.

Let’s put my positions on the line.

Climate : The climate changes. All the time. It does this in cycles, a complex set of cycles with big cycles of hot and cold overlying a shorter warm/cool cycle. Anyone my age knows this because we have experienced it.

In the first few years of the 2000’s I could grow six foot tall tobacco plants outdoors. I live well north of Aberdeen. It was legal back then, it’s not legal any more but it doesn’t matter because I’d struggle to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse this year. In those years I’d have to use an electric fan indoors because even opening a window was no use – there was no air movement for weeks and the air outside was hotter than inside anyway.

In the early 1980s I went out to drive to work and couldn’t find my car. All I saw was a row of white mounds along both sides of the street. Deep snow in between them, deep snow on the pavement. I walked in to work and it turned out not many others had bothered.

About eight years ago we had two successive winters that started in October and continued into May the following year. It wiped out my fish pond and gave me cracked ribs because it would get just above freezing in the day and then freeze again at night. So every outside surface was frictionless. You just could not walk on it. Especially after a few whiskies.

Last winter was pretty mild by comparison. The one before wasn’t. The next one might or might not be. It is not warming. Human activity is not affecting climate. We are just not that important.

Pollution : This is always a bad thing. Plastic islands at sea (tell me which song that line came from and I’ll send you a copy of the next book I publish) are always, always a very bad thing. It should not be happening. We nag our teenagers to clean their rooms while we bung plastic into the ‘recycle’ bins which are really nothing more than a magic portal to the middle of the Pacific.

Yes, I know, most plastic enters the sea from rivers in China and Africa but that’s because we send our recycling there to be processed. It’s not their own waste they are dumping. It’s ours. Anyway it’s changing, China at least has had enough of getting blamed for this.

Overall though, apart from plastics, pollution has been declining. Vehicle engines are a lot cleaner than they used to be, there is a lot to do still with cargo ships who pump out more pollution than all the cars, trucks and buses in the world. They should be fitted with sails as well as engines – free propulsion, with no emissions, when the wind is in the right direction – but why should they? Greenpeace ships don’t do this. They all run on diesel.

Factories don’t produce smog in London any more although some places still have that problem.

Green driving? Sure, it works great in town and that’s where it’s needed. A high concentration of vehicles produces concentrated traffic fumes. Replacing most of them with electric or hydrogen fuel is going to make a big difference.

However, for long journeys it’s not viable. Imagine waiting for a delivery when the large truck bringing it has to stop-over for 12 hours or more to recharge. Imagine driving across country when that ten minute stop to refuel becomes a few hours of recharging your little car. If you can find somewhere with a charging point. And… where do you think that electricity comes from?

Still, if you live in a city and don’t want to drive long distance, all you need is an electric car to get to the shops and back. I’d be okay with that as long as it doesn’t ramp up fuel prices for people in the countryside, like me, who live half an hour’s drive fom the nearest shops and whose electricity supply can be shut off by a lightning strike.

I drive a 4×4 because anything that isn’t 4×4 isn’t going to get to this house in winter. I do not drive it for any kind of showing-off, I drive it because it is necessary. Sure it has emissions but there are combine harvesters and tractors here. Even their emissions don’t produce enough to taint the air. My little 4×4 is making no difference. It is not like the cities those who moan about ‘clean air’ live in. It’s the place where ‘clean air’ is normal.

There is a lot we can do about all forms of pollution and really, a lot of it has been or is being done already.The biggest problem pollution control faces is that it is now linked to climate change when they are actually totally different things. Yes, we should get the plastic out of the oceans but no, it does not affect climate.

And so we come to those killing themselves to live.

Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. “I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I’d have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I’d call my mom telling her life was pointless,” she said. She believed at the time that the human race “should be wiped out.”

But… if she believes climate change will do that, what’s the problem?

“I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I’d be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn’t] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage,” Rohrer said.

This is what the Church of Climatology has done. No hope, no redemption, only despair. Unlike every other religion there is no way out for the followers of this one. They have no Heaven or Hell, only oblivion and no hope of changing it unless… everyone follows their religion.

You think Islam is a bit strict? Islam is a summer hayride compared to the Green God’s religion. At least in Islam you still have a chance of Heaven by killing unbelievers. In the Church of Climatology, unless every single person on the planet believes, everyone will die with no Heaven, no redemption, nothing but rotting corpses on sun-baked sidewalks. Even if everyone does believe… it’s the same.

Gritty Thunderbird, the latest wheeled-out child advocate, is now dictating climate policy to the idiots in charge. Yes, I know, I’m ‘attacking a child’ and that is the reason they use children. Any dissent is ‘attacking a child’, in this case an Asperger’s child with well orchestrated hair braids. She looks so innocent and naieve and unfortunately, she is.

She is being used and abused by the Church of Climatology in the most disgusting way possible and yet criticising the message she has been fed is ‘attacking her’.

I do not attack her. She is a child and she is being used. The message she relays is lies. She does not know this. She has been convinced of it by much darker forces. One day she will realise and on that day she is going to feel things nobody should ever be made to feel. I sympathise, but sending lies through a child is not going to silence me.

Barmy Prince Charlie has been out with this crap too. ‘We have 18 months to save the world’. Oh dear. We’ve had a few years to Armageddon since the 1950s and nothing at all has changed. Well to be fair, in the 1970s, rising CO2 was going to cause an ice age, now rising CO2 is going to cause warming. Why?

Because that’s the only thing they can tax.

You know what rising CO2 really does? It makes plants grow faster. It’s currently 0.04% of the atmosphere and all plants on the planet use it in photosynthesis. Reduce it to zero and all the plants – every one of them from giant redwood to dandelion – dies. And then so does everything else.

Increase it and the planet gets greener.

So, Steering a large asteroid into the plent is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, or so I am told.

Erasing 0.04% of the atmosphere can be done if someone has enough money to buy the right chemicals and place large batches of them in the right places.

Bill Gates once said he wanted to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to zero. He has the money to do it.

And I have the know-how.

Hey, Bill…

Reliance

I know, it sounds like the next Mark Ellott novel, following ‘Ransom’, ‘Rebellion’ and the almost-ready ‘Resolution’ and who knows? Maybe it will be.

Well, the replacement router arrived today and it’s much improved over the one I had before. Four years of technology can do that, I suppose. It linked much more easily to the wifi booster and it has a stronger wifi signal than the old one. So four days without internet was worth it.

Just in time – I had almost used up my data allowance on the mobile by using it as a mobile hotspot. I have been considering reducing the data package since I normally rarely use it, but I think I’ll leave it there. It was very handy in this emergency!

It’s amazing how much you can get done when your internet access is severely restricted. I have both Mark Ellott’s and Marsha Webb’s novels formatted and returned to the authors for last checks and I have a short story collection from another author that I can now start sorting out. I’m really going to have to limit my forays into the mad world of the internet in future.

These days in the Internet wilderness also showed me just how reliant I am on it now. Oh I remember when the only phone available was the phone box at the end of the street. I remember when I bought a mobile phone for the first time – I was in my early thirties and scoffed at them until a pheasant flew into my windscreen on a country road and shattered it. Suddenly they seemed like a potentially useful thing to have.

I was, of course, travelling at a perfectly sensible and sedate pace along that dead straight and empty road. It was entirely the pheasant’s fault.

I remember when it became law to fit front seat belts to cars so my father did. It was not yet legally required to use them, so he didn’t. I remember when I was sent, with my younger brother, to the corner shop to by my father’s cigarettes. I remember very well the day they couldn’t sell them to us any more. He wasn’t happy.

We used to buy things with money. Now we just wave a plastic card at a machine and soon we’ll have the card chips in our hands.

Now, of course, the Phone is God. You can use it to pay for things, watch films, browse the internet and if you can figure out how, you can even still make phone calls with it. That feature, once the only reason for a phone’s existence, is now buried in the mass of icons on the screen and in the 48 gigabytes of memory it contains. Ah, I recall fitting a 16 kilobyte memory pack to a ZX-81 and thinking it was amazing.

So many of us are absolutely reliant on the internet. Leg Iron Books could not function without it – the days of high street printers are pretty much gone and the thought of having to cut and paste with real scissors and paste is horrifying. And yet that’s how I wrote my PhD thesis. My mother typed it, on an actual typewriter, I cut and pasted pages together for the retype.

Money, as pretty much everyone knows, no longer exists. Well, you can still (so far) get cash but most of the money circulating in the world is just numbers on a screen with no physical reality at all. If everyone decides to withdraw their money form a bank they will soon find the bank doesn’t really have all that much actual cash. It’s mostly just binary digits.

And to think, these same banks poo-pooh the likes of Bitcoin. Their methods have been the same for years!

On it trundles, the world based on unreality, and it works, sort of. At least for now.

All it will take though is one solar flare, one coronal mass ejection, and it’s all gone. Wiped. Cleaner than a Hillary Clinton email inbox. All evaporated like the dew on a summer morning.

Heck, I was put on restricted access this week by a lightning bolt. To be fair, it was four hours of lightning bolts and a pretty intense blast at the end. It was enough to fry a router and a landline phone. I couldn’t do too much through the mobile phone. I could check and send emails but sending/receiving large documents or image files was a ‘no’.

If that had hit the bank computers I could have been wiped out along with a lot of other people. How could I prove how much money was in those accounts? It didn’t really exist in the first place!

I have been paying a lot of attention to the sun recently. It has three cycles that go from high activity to low and it is now entering what is called a ‘grand solar minimum’ where all three cycles go low at the same time. It’s nothing to get all worried about, it’s happened before. Humanity survived.

It does mean it’s going to get colder. That’s why the Climatologists have rolled out the Unassailable Weapon in the shape of a highly suggestible autistic child. Argue with what she’s been told to tell you and you are attacking an autistic child. I feel sorry for her. Autism does not equal stupid. One day she will realise how she was used and she is going to go through hell. You think the Church of Climatology cares? Once they are done with her they will discard her with not a single look back.

But yeah, it’s getting colder and it will get worse. So the push is on to get as much funding as possible for the pretend science of man made global warming before the lie becomes obvious. Millions will die but hey, the Climatologists will make a load of money so that’s okay with them. It also helps their depopulation agenda which naturally does not include them.

I, and many others, have tried to tell the Church of Climatology what’s really coming but that just makes me a ‘Climate Denier’ which is their new word for ‘Heretic’. I stopped bothering, let the buggers freeze. Anyway it’s too late now, it’s already started and there is not a damn thing humanity can do about it. Light up the fireplace, get the popcorn and watch them shiver while they complain about the heat.

There’s always a silver lining. Low sun activity means a much reduced chance of a solar flare or coronal mass ejection coming our way. It’s never zero, of course, but the odds are in our favour as long as we can keep ice off the wires.

A mass ejection or flare would have to be pointed right at us to have an effect. Well, actually pointed a little bit ahead of us since we’re a moving target. A flare on the opposite side of the sun won’t bother us at all. This means the chance of being hit by one are always reasonably low anyway.

The chance is never zero. Never. Probabilities go up and down but they never hit zero. One day it could happen – in fact it’s safe to say that one day it has to happen. When? Tomorrow? Next month? A decade from now? A century?

There is no way to know. And there isn’t likely to be much, if any, warning. Go to bed rich, wake up a caveman. Go to bed connected to the world, wake up alone and isolated.

As people rely more and more on online comunication, the latter is going to be the hardest to bear, I think.

We really should have a backup plan in case of such an event.

But nobody has.

Plastic

It’s still quiet here. I have one novel nearly edited (a different one), the one I was doing before has been back to the author and is now back with revisions, there’s a short story book by another author and there’s the podcast ad.

If there is one failing in me, it’s that it never occurs to me to ask for help. It’s not ‘male pride’ or stubbornness (well maybe a little bit of stubbornness) it simply does not occur to me to ask. I’m going to have to give in soon though. I’ll have to get some freelance editors and cover artists involved at the rate the work is piling up.

I gave in on the podcast ad. Dr. Evil offered to do it for me if I provided the text. He has a well practiced and clear speaking voice and better sound equipment. My next investment has to be a half decent microphone! Mine mostly came from a pound shop… It’s now done and will be on the podcast next Monday. So it won’t be me speaking this one but I’ll have to get a few ready to go in case of another spontaneous chance at an advert. I also need good sound recording for story readings.

Anyway, that gets the digression out of the way early on. Now about those plastics…

I have always been a big believer in recycling. I suppose it stems from my childhood when we could take a bag of glass bottles back to the shop, get a few pennies per bottle and have a sweet binge on the proceeds. Back then, most sweets either came in a paper bag (measured out from a jar) or were individually wrapped in waxed paper. All of which would rot away harmlessly.

Oh I know, they weren’t ‘free sweets’ because the deposit was paid by whoever bought the bottle – but that was never us. Parents were happy to hand us the bottles and we found quite a few on Saturday and Sunday mornings after the older kids had a woodland beer binge. There were other sources too.

Then came the day when ‘No deposit – no return’ was moulded into the sides of the bottles. Disaster! No more free sweets!

And of course, all those woodland beer bottles and under-hedge drunken discards just stayed where they were because no kids were picking them up next morning. Bins started to fill with perfectly good bottles that could have been re-used and broken ones that could have been melted down and made into other things.

Worse, the reuseable milk bottles were replaced by card and plastic containers, then glass bottles were replaced with plastic ones, all of it non-returnable.

Fast forward a decade or so and you have the Greens shrieking at us for throwing away loads of plastic. Well, the milk comes in plastic bottles, as do most drinks now, so what are we to do? Cup our hands and carry it home that way?

I do not throw waste plastic into the sea, the river, of anywhere in the environment. I, like everyone else, have a special bin called ‘recycling’ that takes plastic, card and cans. This one does not take glass. That goes to a big bin near Local Shop once I accumulate enough to make it worth the diversion.

So what happens? Are those bin collecting trucks just magic portals that send all that recycling straight to the Pacific?

No. What happens is that the council sells the recycling (that they charge you to collect) to a recycling company who then ship it to China or Africa where they sort out what can be used and dump anything they don’t want into the rivers.

Sure, I’ve seen the argument that most of the crap in the sea comes from six rivers, but that’s because we send it there.

I have a friend who does not put cans in recycling. He crushes them and puts them in bins of his own, separating aluminium from steel, then takes them to the scrapyard and gets a few quid for them. That’s proper ground level recycling.

I have in the past attempted to make plastic bricks by hanging a frame on my chimenea and melting waste plastic in it. Not a great success that time. I’d like to try reviving that idea though.

You couldn’t build a house with them but a low garden wall, faced with cement and topped with flat stones? That could work to where nobody could tell the difference. However, real bricks are cheap so it wouldn’t be a great business option.

Unless you sell it as ‘green’ and you can do it on a scale where your plastic bricks cost no more than real ones, ideally less. As I said, bricks are cheap, but you need a lot for a wall so even a penny per brick saving could soon add up. Plus you have the virtue signalling and to many people these days, that’s a big selling point. There is also the point that filling the back of your car with plastic bricks would be far less damaging to your suspension than doing it with real ones.

Making one at a time on a chimenea isn’t really viable. You need a big melting pot and a whole raft of moulds to make loads at once. But I think it could work. If you’re talking about a low wall, ten bricks high, a few flawed ones won’t matter. And you could cut half-bricks with a saw or a hot wire.

That’s just bricks. You could make planks sized to order. Even mould-in fake grain. I’ve seen park benches made of recycled plastic. It can be done. You can already get garden furniture in a kit of moulded plastic parts – imagine the virtue signalling opportunites if it was clearly made out of recycled bottles!

Virtue signalling is a big thing with the smug and self-righteous now. Why not cash in on that?

I might have dreamed this or it might be real – was there ever a ‘stained glass’ type window made of glass bottles that were laid out and then melted so they all flattened and fused together? Whether it’s real or not, you could use the same idea to make a plastic greenhouse with clear plastic bottles. The plants inside don’t care about the aesthetics.

I don’t hear anything like this from those protesting plastics though. All I hear is shouting about how it’s all the supermarkets’ fault for packaging things in plastic.

Newsflash – they don’t. Their suppliers do.

What is the supermarket’s fault is the death of local small suppliers. I recall going to the local butcher and getting meat wrapped in paper that my grandmother carried home in her own shopping bag. Same at the greengrocer or the fishmonger. All those are now conglomerated into the supermarkets and the small ones are mostly gone. There are still some but they are rare and becoming more rare.

There used to be a good little lighting shop in a town I lived in. The nearby Tesco filled an aisle with lightbulbs of every type at lower prices. The lighting shop died. Tesco’s lighting section dropped to only the most common types. I can’t help feeling it was just pure malice. They killed the bookshop too and tried to kill the sporting goods shop – but since Tesco won’t sell shotguns or airguns or bows, they failed on that one. Tesco had a range of horse tack for a while but none of those horsey types are going for a Tesco Value hard hat or harness. The sporting goods shop is still there. So don’t imagine for a moment that I am on the side of the supermarkets. They are run by malicious bastards.

Even so, the latest idiotic protest involves plastic-feedback, espoused on the BBC by Huge Farty-Shittingstall. Unwrap the stuff you voluntarily bought, stuff all the plastic wrapping into a bag and take it back to the supermarket you willingly bought it from and then virtue signal that you are an EcoWarrior of the Ultimate Stupid Arseness. Or you could just not buy stuff wrapped in plastic… is that too hard a concept?

If you don’t put it in the bin, the supermarket will put it in the bin. Then it goes to exactly the same place as if you had put it in the bin yourself. It’s an exercise in utterly pointless dickery that makes a bunch of smug wankers feel really good about achieving nothing at all. Other than to make the lives of a few minimum wage workers that bit more miserable because it’s not the boss of the supermarket who has to clean up your silly protest. It’s the bottom tier staff who have no say at all in how any product is packaged.

Huge Farty-Shittingstall lauds Sainsbury’s for selling stuff that’s not in plastic packaging. They sell you cups to dispense things into from special dispensers so you aren’t taking home all that packaging. The dispensers, and the cup, are made of… plastic. Nice one Sainsbury. You caught the suckers fair and square there.

Look. Plastic can be melted down and made into other things. So can glass and so can metal. Don’t shriek about the amount of plastic being thrown away, ask why it’s not being recycled. And maybe come up with a few ideas about how it can be. Maybe even try them yourself.

But just getting someone else to put it in the bin for you? How does that help?

I hope the supermarkets ban every dickhead that does this.