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.

Discordia

It doesn’t make sense.

In Reading today, some lunatic went on a stabbing spree. Three people are dead, three more seriously injured and more have minor injuries. As far as I can tell, all those stabbed were white British.

Some linked it to the Black Lives Matter protest that happened in the same place earlier in the day, but that protest ended a few hours before the stabbing.

Then it emerged that the knife-weilding loony was Libyan, some say ‘fresh off the boat from Calais’ but I have not been able to confirm that. He’s not black. He’s Arab.

British police entering the apartment of the Libyan asylum seeker who stabbed 3 ppl to death today after a #BLM protest in #Reading today. Credible reporter @Sotiridi1 reports that witnesses say the attack was race-related. First case of #BLMterror? pic.twitter.com/mKx1AcpFVj

— BasedPoland (@BasedPoland) June 20, 2020

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

Still being linked to BLM, even though the killer isn’t black and the protest ended hours earlier. It could be race related but I suspect it’s more Islam related.

The thing is, Libya has a current slave market trading in black slaves. Not two hundred years ago. Right now. They are buying and selling human beings today, yesterday and tomorrow. So I really don’t see a Libyan supporting Black Lives Matter because in Libya, they don’t matter. They are a commodity, and a cheap one at that.

I’m not buying this ‘black on white race violence’ in this case, the attacker isn’t black and is from a country that actively enslaves black people. And yet the media have a dilemma. Do they make it a race issue or an Islam issue? Nobody falls for the ‘mental illness’ shit any more. They’ll have to pick one.

I think they’ll call it a race issue to fan the flames of the race war they are trying to provoke.

Now, Black Lives Matter don’t really care about black lives either, as shown by their destruction of black peoples’ businesses all over America. They are a Marxist group intent on installing communism, they say so themselves. The children in Seattle who made mini-farms have set up a ‘black only’ area now. They have also designated one of the mini-farms ‘black only’. That’s right. In addition to a border wall, border guards and strict rules they have now installed apartheid. White liberals treating black people as pets, same old story. Communism in action. You know, nobody ends up free under communism. A lot of people end up dead. Every time.

Twitter is full of black-on-white attack videos. No context, just black people hitting white people. In some cases it’s clearly unprovoked, in others it’s not so clear. Some are not recent, they have been ‘outed’ as past videos. It looks like a setup to enrage white people into retaliation.

There have also been many videos of black people just talking, and they are condemning this whole race war narrative along with distancing themselves from BLM and Antifa, the thug club for the soyboy wannabe Stasi. They are talking sense but I fear few are listening.

The real bad guys are the media. They hyped up COVID19 to sell papers, never grasping the reality that the only reason people bought newspapers in recent times was because they couldn’t get toilet paper. The news has become worthless. It’s sensationalist nonsense and it only serves to cause more fear. Now they are hyping up their race war because they think it’ll sell papers. I don’t think it will. I think this is the hill they die on.

The Grauniad, indeed, was already in dire financial straits before it started the whole ‘delete the ancient slaveowners’ narrative. Now it turns out that it was founded by a slave owner. This must be why handguns were banned in the UK. Lefties kept shooting their feet with them.

It has all become very, very silly. If only these hysterical children would take a moment to google the statues they are destroying, they will find that half of them were on their side. Well, assuming their side is really about anti-slavery and not just about deleting history to fit a Marxist loony-tune idea. It isn’t about black lives, it isn’t about slavery, we all know it.

We know what the real aim is here, kids.

What a pity you don’t.

Street battles

Well, just to add to the delays, our water supply shut down last night. It happens once in a while, the pipe from the well gets an airlock which has to be cleared. The pipe delivers water by gravity feed to a large storage tank in the house and then it’s pumped through filters and UV treated. If the pressure in the tank drops too far the pump can’t operate. Since it happens about once a year we always have reserve water to hand.

It’s fixed now, and it shows one of the benefits of renting. If I bought this house I’d have had to pay Sunday rates for someone to come and fix it. Fortunately the landlord is well versed in the mechanics of this system so was able to repair it quickly.

Right, I am behind with editing and still have to put those novel prices up. It’s complicated by Amazon’s web crawlers which, if they find the book cheaper anywhere else, will flag it up and possibly get it withdrawn from the Amazon site. So they all have to be changed on Smashwords first, let those prices filter through to the outlets they distribute through and then change the Amazon prices.

In case I was feeling a shortage of distractions, the internet is full of stories about the ‘riots’ in London and elsewhere. They aren’t really all that big as riots go, nothing like the Tottenham ones a few years back. Still, people have been getting hurt at them.

It is all starting to look like a clumsily engineered plan of sorts. Last weekend, BLM and Antifa were allowed to vandalise a lot of things and the police pretty much gave them free rein. In Bristol, police stood back and watched as the mob pulled down a statue of someone nobody outside Bristol has heard of and dumped it in the harbour.

This triggered a nationwide demand for statue-smashing. In response, London sealed Winston Churchill in a box.

Yes, really. He doesn’t even have a window.

You see, all of a sudden, Winston Churchill is a Very Bad Man. I’m sure the Wehrmacht thought so too. However, our side thought he did rather well. We did end up winning that war, although it is increasingly starting to look like we needn’t have bothered.

Google even removed his picture, as well as any reference to the period 1940-1945, from their search results for British Prime Monsters. He also no longer appears on a list of world leaders in that war, although Hitler and Stalin are still there. Google likes them, apparently.

Statue smashing is not a new sport. Americans have been playing that game for some time. It’s new to the UK and… well sir, we don’t like it. Okay, I’ll admit to having paid scant regard to statues and monuments, other than Cenotaphs, throughout my life, but a lot of people like them and even a Philistine like me doesn’t want them smashed. They are, for better or worse, part of our history, and once you delete history, what is left? Pol Pot’s ‘year zero’, that’s what.

Those hippie squatters in Seattle’s breakaway state of Soymalia, aka Chaz, seem to be practicing for just that. Although they are really going to have to improve their farming techniques. They might also want to consider what a Seattle winter can be like. Tents are going to be a tough call in December over there.

But I digress.

Last week it was all BLM and Antifa and most of it was just people marching around with signs on sticks. They were protesting about the brutal actions of a policeman in America and many have now been led to believe that the same things happen in the UK. The rowdy element was allowed to have a little tantrum and threaten a lot of monuments and pretend that they have only just been freed from slavery.

There are a lot of bona-fide slaves in East Africa and around the Middle East right now who would trade places with them in a heartbeat, but the protestors don’t care about them. The rowdy element don’t even care what the protest was really about. They have their own agenda which they were allowed to get away with.

Was there a reason? The BBC and Sky and the Scale Model Mayor all lauded the protest as mostly peaceful. I doubt the injured police would agree, and neither would those who had to clean off the graffiti afterwards. Emboldened by their consequence-free tantrum, the rowdies drew up a list of statues they wanted destroyed, some tenuous link to past crimes was devised (usually slavery even though they targeted abolitionists too) and bragged they were out to smash them all.

The Scale Model Mayor of London joined in with this. He thinks all the old statues should be replaced with new ones to reflect London’s diversity. If he suggests one of Mohammed, the resulting collective sharp intake of breath would suck all the air out of the city. So, History and its tangible residue, the statues, are under threat. A few token ones were removed to rile the public and move to the next stage.

What happened next was entirely predictable and, I suspect, exactly what was supposed to happen. A load of enraged people went to London to defend the cenotaph and the statues. All of these people, including many military veterans, were labelled ‘far right’ and ‘football hooligans’ determined to ‘stop legitimate protest’ because they are ‘racist Nazi bigots’.

What has been glossed over is that these ‘far right’ people did not come to attack the BLM marches. They did not come because they are racists who despise black people. They did not come to tear down the notion that Black Lives Matter.

They came to defend the statues and monuments. That’s their only motive. Having seen the police back off, run away, bend the knee and generally let this toddler tantrum escalate out of control, of course they decided to defend the statues themselves. Any idiot, even Khan, saw this coming.

Tommy Robinson (NHRN) saw it coming. He declined to attend. He saw the jaws of the trap and decided not to walk into them. I have to admit, that’s a smarter move than I expected from him, but thumbs up for seeing his opponent’s next move. He’s getting the hang of the game, I think.

So, last week the police were in shirtsleeves, no armour, no helmets, no protection at all. Around 30 were injured (numbers vary), some seriously, in that ‘mostly peaceful’ event.

This week they arrived in full riot gear. Six were injured. The BBC, Sky, and Mini-Mayor described it as ‘carnage’. These far right thugs spoiled their toddler-tantrum fun!

It was set up. They tried the same thing in Glasgow with predictable results. Glasgow turned out in force and the rowdies ran away. Antifa have also threatened to invade Milwall. Good luck with that one. If we ever have nuclear war and run out of bombs, then we will escalate it and send Milwall fans over. I suspect Antifa are all talk on that one.

Why are the police standing back from the Rowdies of Antifa and the militant wing of BLM? They’ve been told to. The same is true in America. Seattle police are not allowed to enter the Soapless Zone, not because the inmates demand it, but because their mayor will not allow it. There are Hell’s Angels and others on the way. I bet the police will be told to stop them, and I’m sure I know which lot the police would rather deal with.

Meanwhile, politicians everywhere insist we stay home, don’t meet even family members, we cannot see dying relatives, we cannot attend funerals or weddings, now we have to wear masks on public transport (well those of you who actually have access to public transport).

Every other toilet is taped off, bus seats are taped off, you have to stay two metres apart and Boris’s ‘experts’ are threatening to resign if he relaxes that rule.

At the same time, mass protests are allowed. No ‘social distancing’. No control at all. You can forget contact tracing. That’s right out of the window now.

The virus was dying out. Scientists were afraid it might disappear before the highly profitable vaccine was ready. It needed another surge.

Brexit is happening. The government have refused to extend it any more. Remain need chaos, pain, suffering, a reason to make an extension inevitable.

The Marxists want to bring down government and delete history. This is the perfect opportunity.

All of this is happening at once. Every faction sees their chance. Every player in their own particular game sees advantage in this. Every maniac is let loose, every scheme for profit, power and gain is running at full tilt now.

Sometimes, two and two really do equal four.

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.

Escape from Minneapolis

Kurt Russel should have done that one. He did Escape from New York, which now just needs a wall around it to complete the job, and America has just the right president to do it. He also did Escape from LA… likely to come true also. As are several other places.

Minneapolis has decided to do away with a police force altogether. Apparently being able to call the police when a gang breaks into your house at midnight is ‘white privilege’. Even if you are not white. Instead, you will be able to call a counsellor who will talk you through your slow and inevitable demise. Isn’t that sweet?

Already, businesses that were burned down are taking the insurance money and rebuilding elsewhere. That will accelerate since even if your business in Minneapolis is still in one piece, your insurance has just gone through the roof. It’s simply not worth trying to run a business of any kind in that city.

If you live there you’ll want to leave. If you have a mortgage, might as well default on it. You are not going to get a buyer for your house. Sure, the banks will rub their hands at getting your property, but that property is worth nothing. Maybe the banks think it will be worth something again after the dust settles, if it’s even still there.

So, will Minneapolis recover from their Somalia experiment? It’s hard to see how. If they want to reinstate a police force they will need tax money. Businesses are fleeing. No business rates, no income tax from thousands of now-unemployed workers all looking for benefits. It’s a feedback loop you can’t evict.

Once they take this step there is no way back. They are not even going back to the Wild West where the sherriff and deputies were The Law In Town. There will be no law in town. The mayor etc. can pass all the laws they want. Who is going to enforce them?

I can genuinely see a wall put up around Minneapolis in the near future. Nobody gets in or out. Leave them to it.

Food? Who the hell is going to drive a truck into that Mad Max land? There will be no deliveries of anything. They are going to end up eating each other. There is also the small matter that with nobody running any business, nobody is getting paid and no taxes are being generated. This is a one way ticket to ghost town status. The Day of the Woke is here.

New York is going in the same direction although it seems likely that the mayor’s push to cut police funds is rather more connected to him having already spent it all. Escape from New York might become reality.

The second film should have been Minneapolis, not LA.

That would be the third film.

______

There is a line from a song in there. A band that went quiet for years, the line is from their first song in ages. A Leg Iron Books mug to the first one to tell me the band and the name of the song.

Call the Police… oh…

There are now mass calls to defund and shut down the entire police service in many countries. Well, okay, in many cases what they have become was not what Robert Peel anticipated when he set up the first London police in 1829.

The French police are, frankly, a protection-racket gang and a bunch of thugs, as the Yellow Vest protests have shown. The American police are unionised to the point of being a mafia who cover up their bad ones. The British police are hamstrung by political interference and Common Purpose. It all needs very deep reform. But ‘no police at all’ is what the protestors want.

I saw a video I can’t find again of an American ‘fuck the police’ protest throwing things at cars. One of the cars turned around and came back. Out of it came a hairy redneck holding some double bladed thing that looked like something a Klingon might brandish. The anti-police protestors’ first reaction? ‘Call the police’.

It’s not an isolated incident. The first reaction of those who want no police, when threatened by some lunatic with an unusual weapon, is always ‘call the police’. Surely they don’t want any police? None at all. Defund the lot. And yet, when it gets nasty, they suddenly want the police to protect them.

You can’t have both. You either have police or you are completely on your own. At the mercy of every passing lunatic, with no recourse to anyone if your home is invaded or you are attacked in the street. Do you want to be able to call for help or not? Do you want to be able to call someone to track down a murderer, rapist or thief or do you want to just let it pass? One or the other. Make your choice.

There are too many people for the old way of village justice meted out by the elders. Well, at the moment anyway. If the Billy Gates Gruff and Ol’ Henry and their pals get their way, the world population will soon be back to about 500 million. Before you cheer, I’d have a little think about whether one of them is likely to be you. It isn’t, is it?

Okay, so we need some kind of police. We do not need baton-weilding thugs dressed as Robocop, if things get that bad we have an army to deal with it. We have to have accountability, no hiding behind a union and no covering up the utter bastards who manage to get employed. They have to be rooted out as soon as they are discovered. Policing, as it stands, needs reform right from the top to the bottom. No Common Purpose self-important morons in any position anywhere. One unjustified use of violence, demotion. Two and you’re out. I can accept that the police are human and can lose their rag sometimes under pressure, but twice suggests a rage problem. We should not risk a third.

The nearest town with a police station (and with any variety of shops) is 15 miles away along some very twisty country roads. Even if they left instantly after I called, which is unlikely since they are seriously undermanned, it would take them at least 15-20 minutes to get here. So I have plenty of woodland, a shovel and sufficient weaponry (all legal) so as not to bother them. I have not had to do this yet but if it comes down to the ciminal’s life or mine, no contest. Out here though, there’s nothing worth stealing. I don’t have the fancy TVs or Xboxes or anything much of any value. They could steal a tractor I suppose and go on a 25 mph version of Mad Max. Slightly Irritated Max might not be quite as much fun though.

This is the world the protestors want in the cities. In places where they cannot justify owning a wood splitting axe or a sledgehammer or any of the other sharp or firing things you need on a farm. Where they are unarmed, totally, and are all set to have absolutely no organised protection of any kind. They already have gangs who aren’t at all scared of the police they have now. How big will those gangs get when it’s the only way to stay alive as soon as you reach your teens?

Who will be the law? Once all the law enforcement is gone, who will be the law? You want Sharia? Take down all Western law and that’s all that is left. You might want to take a very close look at that before you decide to support it because there’ll be no going back once it’s in.

So. If you want no police at all, what will you do when you are trapped by a rubber-fetish horse?

Waiting for King Charles

That’s all it needs now. King Charles III will preside over much the same mess as the first two. We might need to be saved by another William. Like last time. Fortunately we have one ready to go, and this one isn’t orange.

At least this time we get to skip the James part.

Well, we have all been under pretty vicious restrictions for months. CStM and I can’t shop together and I can’t be trusted to go on my own (trolley full of just the essentials, whisky, power tools and baccy) so we’re getting used to having the shopping delivered. It’s working well so far.

However, nobody can visit a dentist or optician, nobody can get a haircut (none of these bother me all that much) and anyone with a mysterious new lump dare not go to hospital to get it checked. I managed to get the part to fix my car from United Arab Emirates in under a week, the dealership 50 miles away couldn’t get one for a month. And then they wanted me to collect it. It’s the transmission cable, I can’t come and collect it unless I have one. Idiots.

In the face of mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is an effective antiviral, the WHO denies it. In the face of mounting evidence that nicotine has a protective effect, the WHO denies it. The WHO also claimed the virus wasn’t a big deal at the start of this, now they inist their vaccine must be mandatory.

Well, now we know that China owns the WHO, it all makes sense.

The pointless protests all over the world make any vaccine irrelevant. In the coming weeks we will know whether the virus is a serious danger or whether it’s all been overblown hype. There are mass gatherings, everywhere, of those who are most likely to be killed by it. If they start dropping like flies then it’s too late for a vaccine. If they don’t then there’s no need for one. The vaccine story is dead in the water.

We can also forget the whole ‘track and trace’ thing. Mass protests make it impossible. How the hell is anyone going to figure out who they came in contact with in all those mass protests? Track and trace is dead in the water.

We now have rules that state you cannot meet your partner indoors if you don’t live together and cannot have sex with anyone who lives outside your home. I wouldn’t do that anyway, she’d kill me. So there are likely to be a few six fingered banjo players in the future. And yet you can go on a rampage and loot a store called Target (not the best choice of name) and that’s all fine and dandy.

People have not been able to be with dying family members in their last moments, nor attend funerals. Couples have been separated for months. These restrictions still apply and yet mass demonstrations, vandalism and violence are allowed. It’s almost as if it’s a deliberate design to provoke uncontrollable fury.

Against who? Let’s not dwell on it. Let’s have an imaginary scenario instead.

___

Pure fiction follows. I just made it up.

An experimental bioweapon escapes a lab in China. The Chinese government try to hush it up at first but then realise they can make use of it. So they stop travel between the infected region and the rest of China, but not between the region and the rest of the world. Let it spread awhile.

Their pet WHO plays it down at first, but then the game ramps up. Videos of Chinese people being sealed into their homes. Videos of people just dropping dead in the street. Huge hospitals built in days. Reports of mass cremations.

The West is, naturally, scared shitless and starts getting ready. Huge hospitals built and never used. Nobody dying in the streets. Absolute lockdowns that have made no detectable difference. Economies destroyed. Everyone out clapping like performing seals, wearing pointless masks and now kneeling like trained dogs. Everyone scared of everyone else.

Neighbours snitching like East German Stasi. Police arresting people for sitting on a bench. Supermarkets using customers as chess pieces on the Board of Shame. The virus is dying, it can’t spread. The Plague has failed.

And then, suddenly… mass protests and violence. Over one bad cop in America, one bad cop with a history of being a right arse and getting away with it. No other country can do anything about this and the cop has already been arrested and charged anyway.

It’s not an isolated nor unusual incident. Police violence has been the norm in many countries, including European ones, for a long time. Ask the Gilet Jaunes (who do not loot) in France. Or the protestors (who have never looted anything) in Hong Kong. It is not, and has never been, the norm in the UK. Police stupidity is rife but violence isn’t.

So, you have a bioweapon, released accidentally but you want to make use of it anyway. What do you do?

Stage massive precautions and terror in your own country for the press. Let the rest of the world destroy their livelihoods by following suit. Let them live in terror.

Ah, but the Plague is failing. It’s not spreading any more. What to do?

Pick an incident, any racial incident, and blow it into International Outrage. That will get your targets to mass together and spread the plague once more.

The target? Consider. China has been extremely unpleasant to Muslims. They round them up and put them in camps and ship them around as slave labour. They have also been exceptionally nasty to black people. The virus hits BAME people a lot harder than anyone else. White people are hit less hard but are more likely to be spreaders. The demonstrations are mostly BAME people and their lefty white servants. I’m sure it must be all a coincidence.

By the end of this month we will know one of two things.

Either the virus is deadly, especially to non-whites and they’re all wiped out or…

The virus is all hype and the government’s lockdown and restrictions were all pointless bollocks.

Either way, vaccines and track and trace are pointless now. Lockdown is pointless now. Either way, the governments of the West do not come out looking good.

Either way, China wins this.

Watching the world burn

Outside, the sun is rising on a world silent apart from the crows. Even the sheep and cows have nothing to say this morning.

America is burning. The unrest has spread to the UK and Germany and there has been another ‘incident’ in Canada so it’s firing up there too. My money is on Australia next.

This is because a man named George Floyd was murdered by an American police officer with a long record of being a violent twat.

Why was Mr. Floyd being arrested? It doesn’t matter. He was on the ground, face down, with his hands cuffed behind his back. There was no need to press a knee into his neck at all, much less for over nine minutes including over two minutes after he passed out. This is not a ‘third degree’ murder, which would imply an accidental killing. Nobody ‘accidentally’ kneels on your neck for nine minutes. This is a quite deliberate murder.

The officer has been sacked, as have those with him who did nothing to stop this murder. The ex-officer faces a murder charge, there may also be charges against the other officers present. I don’t think it matters how long his sentence is, I doubt he’ll get a warm reception in prison.

That is not the end of it. Many cities are burning in America, both white and black businesses have been destroyed. The rioters are not all black people, there are many whites among them and there have been videos of black people trying to stop the white people destroying stuff. There was one of a group of black men surrounding an isolated white police officer to protect him from the mob. This is not ‘black riots’.

The whites, we all know, are Antifa. Not ‘white supremacists’ although in a sense they are, really. They see all other races as needing their guidance and tutelage so really, Antifa are the biggest white supremacists of all.

The police, on the other hand, are not blameless. Too many rubber biullets to the face, too many eyes lost. The police could take the easy body shot with those rubber bullets but they are aiming for the face and they are hitting journalists as much as, if not more than, the rioters. They are not looking for a resolution. They are looking for news.

Scary news. The Flu Manchu scare is wearing off. People are ignoring lockdown. It has nothing to do with Dominic Cummings, we are just getting pissed off with it all. It’s failing as it was always going to. Talk of a ‘second wave’ isn’t cutting it. There will be one, of course. The mass of isolated people haven’t caught the virus so have not developed immunity. But it won’t be all that bad unless… people go out in huge groups on marches and ideally, riot.

The huge groups will ensure a much bigger ‘second wave’ than ending lockdown could hope for. That alone will ensure a second lockdown. Add in riots and well, folks, you’re going nowhere for a very long time.

You’ll live alone in small apartments you’ll never own and you’ll get used to that life. You will go out for work and no other reason. Food, such as you are directed to eat by the health computer, will be delivered. You’ll get used to it, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t. Your children are going to be brought up with it. They are also to be brought up believing that social contact is deadly and a lot of other things you don’t believe now. It will only take one generation.

Your children will not go outside apart from work. Not because they are scared of flu or riots, but because nobody else does. They will not question why, since there will be nothing to do outside anyway. No pubs, no restaurants, no fast food places. Those will all be dead by the end of this year at this rate. So all they will have is home and TV. They will know nothing else.

They will have no concept of family. That will take one more generation. They are separated from grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins now. Next they will be put into creches at birth ‘for their safety’. You’ll never see them again. I would not accept this, my children would not accept this, but their children? They are being brought up to believe that human contact is fatal.

Brian Aldiss wrote a story in 1957 called ‘All the World’s Tears’ that put this pretty well. It’s in a collection called The Canopy of Time, which I definitely recommend if you can get it.

The riots are blatantly engineered. There are films of Antifa paying people to go smash stuff. Films of pallettes of bricks conveniently left for rioters to throw. Films of water and milk stations to alleviate the effects of tear gas. Meanwhile the murderer cop has been charged already.

This has nothing to do with Mr. Floyd, the victim of a serially violent arse of a cop. I do wonder why the cop got away with so many vicious attacks, were they saving him for something? Maybe.

But this new rage is engineered. Controlled. Directed. It is not ‘black rage’, as evidenced by so many black protestors and others trying to calm it. This is the White Supremacy of Antifa telling anyone non-white ‘We know what is best for you, do as you are told’. Or as Mad Biden revealed, ‘Vote for us or you ain’t black.’

What next? Well, the press will hype it all up and you’ll all be under a curfew soon. You will not be allowed more than a plastic knife for your soya-steak (only the elite will get meat). You will work, you human stock, and you will go home to your box and absorb the TV propaganda.

In the end, your skin colour will be of no relevance at all, as it should have been long ago. In the end, your name will not reveal anything about your heritage.

You will not be a free man. You will be a number.

Stop that. It’s silly

Some may remember Graham Chapman’s ‘colonel’ character from Monty Python. Another comedy team that wouldn’t be allowed near the airwaves in this time of political correctness, in which people get offended by tea.

He would have had to shout his line ‘Stop that, it’s silly’ until his throat was raw. The human race has, indeed, descended into a pit of stupidity it might never climb out of. Forget about diseases or crashing economies or wars. Humanity is heading into a race of drooling idiots who are offended by the mere presence of all the drooling idiots around them, never noticing the drool on their own chins.

I was in Local Shop on Saturday. My first visit for a month. I had to post a mug and pick up some minor essentials. This little shop has toilet paper, pasta and flour again. Any kind of flour you want. I can’t remember the last time I saw a not-empty flour shelf in any shop. Somewhere there are people with stacks of flour, pasta and toilet paper, all just waiting for the mice, mould and flies of summer to ruin the lot. We didn’t stock up with anything and didn’t run out of anything – but then we live far away from civilisation so tend to have a few weeks’ worth anyway.

You would think that people, especially the British, would now look at those immense stacks of pointless stocks and think ‘Well, we have been a bit silly. Let’s calm down and try not to do it again’.

No. Now they are arguing over masks. One side says nobody should wear a mask ever, the other says everyone has to wear one all the time. Which side is right? As is always the case, neither. Oh, and there are regular spam emails trying to sell overpriced cloth masks that won’t do a damn thing.

Actually that’s not true. Wearing a cloth mask all day virtually guarantees a repiratory infection. Medical masks have a hydrophobic layer because every exhalation carries a load of water vapour. The hydrophobic layer means the condensation resulting from that breath does not leave you with a damp mask over your face. Also, medics do not keep the mask on all day and they don’t put the same one on all the time.

A cloth mask will gradually get damp as you breathe through it. It won’t stop a virus. You might as well wear a sieve. What it will do is provide a damp environment, warmed by your face, that will delight any airborne bacteria or fungal spores that land on it. Keep that on for hours, let the populations grow, and inhale all those lovely infections. You’re going to feel a bit silly when you’re stuck in hospital with a fungal or bacterial infection caused by your futile attempt to stop a virus.

Those masks are to make you feel better about having other people around. That is all they achieve. They also achieve increased CO2 rebreathing, restricted oxygen intake, and a risk of other kinds of infection. All while doing sod all to stop a virus.

Okay, getting hold of proper medical masks isn’t going to be easy. If everyone stocked up we’d have the flour, pasta and toilet roll situation all over again (which I fully expect is happeneing now). Even the medical masks won’t stop a virus, which is why everyone wants an N95 mask.

However, N95 masks have to be properly fitted and they are, due to their fine pore size, hellish hard to breathe through. Keep that on all day and you’re going to pass out from CO2 toxicity long before you have to worry about any kind of infection.

Right, so let’s say a cloth mask is all you can get. You must get more than one and they must be washable. Minimum 60C wash. Forget about the bloody virus, the detergent will kill that at 30C. What you are trying to kill are the bacteria and fungi that your mask has been collecting while you wear it and you need at least a 60C wash for that. So no masks made of fleece that won’t survive a 60C wash.

Only wear it when you are around other people – and not the people you live with, it’s too late to worry about that now. Take it off whenever you are alone. Do not wear a mask of any kind when driving, there is a real danger of wooziness due to rebreathing CO2 which means you can’t concentrate. The virus cannot penetrate your windshield, trust me on that one.

If I am forced to wear a mask in a shop I will put it on when I go in and it’ll be straight off when I come out. Not that I’m likely to be visiting many shops, since CStM and I cannot shop together at the moment and we’re quite enjoying having the shopping delivered. Supermarkets are not likely to be much fun for a long time yet either.

Put the mask in the wash after ONE day of use. No, it is not okay to use it for three days in a row, those bacteria and fungi are still growing while it’s hung on a hook in your centrally heated home. Next day’s outing will add more. You need at least two masks so you can have one washed and drying and the other ready in case you want to go to the shops again.

If you are in a car alone or with members of your household you do not need a mask. The driver absolutely must not have one on. If you are cycling or running about in the countryside, well away from everyone, you do not need a mask and should not wear one. If you pass out, who’s going to find you?

Look at your memories of being in hospital. Admittedly I don’t have many of those but in the few I do have, none of the medical staff wore masks. Not the doctors, not the nurses and certainly not the patients. Masks were for surgery, and their purpose was to avoid contamination of an open wound by anything breathed out by the surgeon.

Suddenly everyone in hospital is wearing them. There was never any ‘PPE shortage’. Hospitals were stocked on the basis of normal use, not on the basis of every bugger in there wanting one. Stocks were not low. They were depleted rapidly because of a surge in demand. Restocking was hampered by that surge in demand happening in a hundred countries at the same time.

I could make a virus-stopping mask but I’m not really seeing the point any more. Well, I’m a special case I suppose, I have never really interacted with people very much and live where they can’t find me. If you live in a big city you can’t avoid that interaction. You also cannot escape the virus. Many of you have already had it, it can range from a cold to a really bad flu, but not many of you needed hospital treatment.

Not wearing a mask is about to become the New Smoking. They will point and scream at you, some shops will refuse entry, you’ll get nagged and harassed every chance they get, they will try to shame you because you are not one of the herd. You will need one, but do not wear it all the time. Especially if you have asthma or any kind of lung condition or have just recovered from any lung infection of any kind. That mask will restrict your breathing no matter what it’s made of and if your lungs are already struggling it will make that worse.

The mask is futile. Even N95, if you aren’t trained in its use. I note that all the mask wearers wear no eye protection even though we have known from the outset that this virus can get in that way. Yet it’s all about the mask.

There is no mention of taking supplemental vitamins C and D and zinc supplements. Watch it with the zinc, extended use can lead to anaemia but taking it for a few months while this nonsense rages won’t harm you. Vitamin D is cheap, and an orange a day will get you nicely loaded with vitamin C. Oh, I might get some Haliborange. I remember that from childhood, it was the only medicine that tasted like sweets. All these things help against a wide range of viruses and other ailments. As does being a miserable antisocial swine, but that’s just me.

Hydroxychloroquine… well, there are almost no lupus sufferers in the hospitals. That’s the drug routinely used to treat lupus. It does work although I’d only take it under medical supervision. For most people it’s fine but some do get an allergic reaction to it. You can get some quinine into you with a small daily glass of tonic water. Proper tonic water, not this modern trendy ‘no quinine’ shite. That’s why tonic water exists – gin and tonic was originally designed to get quinine into the Brits who had moved in on countries where malaria was endemic.

However, the mask is the new polarisation. Some see it as an oppressive thing, others see it as the only thing that will save humanity. It is neither. It is a fad, a sop to the terrified, a feel good farce. It will not protect you and will not protect anyone around you. And yet, if you are seen without one you will be treated as smokers have been treated for years.

The amusing part is that smokers, like lupus sufferers, are hugely underrepresented in hospitalisations from Flu Manchu. Nicotine is also protective and you don’t even have to smoke it. Several places are trialling nicotine patches as a treatment. I find this hilarious because it’s rather like this…

Smokers are excluded from most places now, places where everyone else gathers to spread their diseases. It’s just the icing on the cake to find that nicotine is the preventative they will all refuse to take.

If I have to go somewhere where masks are compulsory I will wear one, but it will not be a standard medical mask. I have a plague doctor mask and several ‘Are you my mummy?‘ style gas masks. I will only wear one where it is compulsory. While I could potentially make a virus-proof mask I no longer see the need. The virus has turned out to be far less dangerous than it’s been hyped up to be, although it could still be an issue in highly populated cities. It’s all about the percentages. If, say, ten percent need to go to hospital, then ten percent out here is a lot less than ten percent of London.

But still, if I have to wear a mask, it will not be a medical one, it will be outrageous. It will be scary and yes, I will have to hype up the scariness. Can’t help it, it’s what I do. I might even put a pointless posy in that plague doctor mask, just as in the old days. What the hell, they’re already primed for a scare. I just can’t let that pass.

There is no point telling people they are being silly. They are too scared to accept it. They have to be shown just how silly it all is and they have to realise it for themselves. Before it’s too late, before they hand their lives over to total control because there will be no way back from that.

How silly has it all become? Well, this is a modern baptism…

This is a watergun baptism.
Because we've figured out how to get the church out of state, but not how to get the state out of church… pic.twitter.com/lZLlKDvlAn

— Stephen J. Caggiano (@StephenCaggiano) May 24, 2020

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I think it needs a clay pigeon launcher. The priest gets one shot and if he misses, the child belongs to Satan. If you’re going to be scared, let’s take it all the way, eh?

Speed of Life

When I was just a tiny bundle of pestilence, hardly anyone had a landline phone. Nobody had central heating except for schools and other public buildings. They ran it from a coke-fired boiler, usually, with massive cast-iron radiators. There are still a few of those around but there are few, if any, still in use.

Heating at home was a coal fire in the living room, cooking had just passed the ‘fire’ stage so we had a ‘proper’ cooker although the kitchen was heated in winter by firing up the old cast iron range. I don’t recall my mother ever using that for cooking. I remember being repeatedly warned to stay away from it.

I remember our first television. It had a tiny monochrome screen and it was in the kitchen. I’m not sure if that was because the ‘rabbit ears’ aerial only worked there or whether my parents didn’t want it in the living room. Anyway, we had it in time to watch the beginning of Dr. Who in 1963. It took about 50 more years, when I got those first episodes on DVD, before I realised that most of the Daleks were just painted on the walls.

My parents had a tape recorder. It was the size of a small suitcase and used big reels of tape. Nobody had a video camera, although I do remember ‘Super 8’ cameras that rolled a strip of film wheich then had to be developed and you needed a projector and screen to see it.

Still cameras used rolls of film that you had to wind forward to the next frame, then take it to the chemist to get it developed and printed. I still have cameras like that and fortunately I have darkroom equipment because finding a photographic shop that even recognises a roll of film is difficult now.

There was no way to record a TV program. If you missed it, you missed it. There weren’t too many of them anyway, and you had BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. That was it.

I remember the invention of cassette tapes. Then came those Walkman tiny portable cassette players. They were expensive, now they are museum pieces. Likewise the laserdisc, VHS and Betamax battle for recorded films. It was 1980 before I first saw a VHS player/recorder. I didn’t own one until 1985. Video cameras became available about that time, if you had a lot of money and a good strong arm to hold the thing. They became smaller over time until they disappeared altogether, to be replaced by hard-disk tiny videocameras.

I remember watching ‘Tomorrow’s World’, that old show about flying cars and monorail trains and all sorts of wonderful future machineries. The CD was the only thing they showed that actually came true, I think. The CD is long gone, replaced by the DVD which is soon to be replaced by Netflix and other streaming services.

Vinyl records fell to the CD and now we have music streaming services too. No more shelves of tapes or disks, you just tap in your selection and it plays.

All these things are now on your phone. You don’t need a bulky music system, just a Bluetooth speaker system linked to your phone. You can read books and watch films on your phone. You can have a camera at your front door so you can see who’s there – on your phone – even if you’re not home. You can control your heating remotely to warm up your house before you get home. You can even speak to other people with it if you can work out how. That’s a long way from the ‘press button A’ phone in the phone box I remember at the end of the street.

Is there a point to all this? Well, consider. In sixty years I have seen inventions come and go, I’ve seen the telephone move from a box at the end of the street to a device that does everything and which almost everyone has in their pocket. My starting point was fire as the only source of heat, now everyone is terrified of a wisp of smoke. I started when playing a song meant lining up a needle with a groove in a plastic disc, now it’s just a matter of tapping a few buttons and you can get the video too.

This, today, is the starting point for modern children. They will look at a floppy disc from the 1990s and think someone has 3D-printed the ‘save’ icon. When I started life, computers cost millions and filled whole rooms and had a tiny fraction of the computing power of a cheap modern phone. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 in 1981 and you had to type in programs in BASIC then save them to cassette tape. It had a massive 16 kilobytes of memory. No internal or external drives, just the cassette.

Even that seemed amazing at the time. This tiny box held considerable computing power. Imagine how impressed I was with Amstrad’s later PCs, and those 2 Mb hard drives. Ten years after the ZX-81 I bought a 286 with 512 Mb internal memory and a 30 Mb hard drive. So much computing power, so much storage space! You couldn’t even get a modern operating system into it now. The advances in those ten years – and since – have been incredibly fast.

Anyone remember daisywheel printers? Basically, an electric typewriter linked to a computer. If you want a different font you have to change the typing wheel. Then dot matrix, then fantastically expensive laser printers, now you can get a colour printer with scanner and wifi so you don’t even need a wire… for about £30. Sometimes it’s even cheaper to buy another printer than to replace the ink cartridges.

Think about the world you started in and then consider what modern children are starting with. To them it’s normal to have a supercomputer in their pocket. They will grow up with the normality of contactless payments with their cards. That’s a step too far for me, I don’t like it, but to those young now it will be normal.

They will look at vinyl records and record players in museums and marvel at the primitive sound systems of the ancient past. They will scoff at the way ancient peoples had their film and music collections on separate discs instead of having it all available to anyone, any time. They will not understand how we could have filled our houses with books when all they need do is tap in a title and read it on screen. We will become the Ancient Ones in a couple of decades, possibly while we are still alive.

They will not understand how all those things can be restricted, censored and changed at any moment, while the fixed versions could not be.

They will delight in getting those chips implanted. I would absolutely refuse any kind of chip implant for any reason. If I worked somewhere that required I be chipped to, say, open a security door, I’d want to know what happens if I move to another job. Do they dig it back out? I can easily hand back security cards, I cannot easily hand back an implanted chip.

To the modern child though, it will be normal. As they grow, they will have everything implanted. It will not seem at all sinister or strange to them. Why risk losing your contactless card? Have it implanted. That, I think, is where it will start but not where it will end.

So, how far fetched is the world of Panoptica? How far fetched is the medichip that transmits your medical information, including mood, to a central monitor? Can it ever happen?

It’s already begun.

Meanwhile, in China … pic.twitter.com/FQVMTK85D7

— Tony (@Mrtdogg) May 9, 2020

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If I have that right, clicking on the video should play it here.

The children see nothing wrong with wearing those headbands except that they are uncomfortable. Implanted chips will solve that problem.

There are so many other things that today’s children are being brought up to see as normal. Adults rebel against these things but to a child, it’s just part of their world. They will accept it. They won’t know any other world. Just as I could not know the world of my grandmother, born before the invention of the automobile, never mind the Wright Brothers. She saw the world move from horses to cars to planes to landing on the moon. I suppose every generation will see an equivalent massive shift in humanity’s abilities – and moralities.

I wonder what the children will see? And I wonder whether it will be good or bad.

____

No competition this time, I still can’t get to a post office to send the prize from the last one. So here’s the answer.