Police State

I am working on content for the new Leg Iron Books dedicated website. It’s developing pretty fast thanks to help from someone who actually knows what they are doing. This was not helped by a nine-hour power outage last night due to a storm. Engineers were not going out to fix anything in that weather and when I consider the idea of meddling with high voltage lines in high winds and rain, I don’t blame them at all. I wouldn’t do it.

Still, at least nobody in a Robocop suit turned up to beat me with a baton. So there’s that.

In France, Belgium and increasingly in other countries, something called the ‘Yellow Vests’ is gathering pace. The police in those countries are responding with tear gas and beatings and the levels of violence on both sides are increasing. Is it war? Does that count when one side has guns and the other side has rocks? I have a feeling we’re going to find out, in many places around the world, very soon.

In the UK, the yellow vests are mostly just getting in the way. Real Brits don’t really ‘do’ en-masse violence until pushed to the limit and then we do tend to go a bit over the top with it, it all gets a bit hazy then you wake up next morning and there are heads on spikes and other messy unpleasantnesses to deal with. So far though, the UK protests are not much more than a bloody nuisance. 

The Yellow Vests seem to want different things in different countries. In France they were banging on about fuel taxes but that issue was resolved and the protests have not stopped. Maybe something else is still riling them up? It’ll soon be illegal to talk about that, including in the UK.

The UK ones seem to be mostly about the utter incompetence and sheer two-facedness our government has shown in over two years of pretending to implement Brexit.

In Brussels… I don’t know. A sudden and unexpected wine shortage seems likely.

So will the EU have to impose a police state? Let’s be honest, they would delight in it. They have already set up an unelected dictatorship run by a W.C. Fields drinking competitor and a bloke who looks like the one who played piano in Sparks. We cannot vote for or against them, they are ‘appointed’. It wouldn’t be so bad if they appointed sane and sober people to those posts but the sane and the sober already have real jobs.

The thing about a police state is… it requires an absolutely obedient and brutal police force. Basically, Daleks in human form. France has always had that, really, but this time it’s much, much bigger than a few English football fans getting pissed and annoying the painters along the Seine, or some truck drivers shrugging and frowning around their Disque Bleue.

This time they are bashing their own people, lots of them, hard. Very hard indeed.

Once day a policeman is going to swing a baton, shoot pepper spray or fire a tear gas canister right into the face of his brother, father, sister, daughter. The way things are going, maybe a live round.

It’s going to happen. When it does, that policeman’s conditioning might well break.

And when one breaks, it will spread. Like one bad apple in a barrel, the whole batch will go off.The Robocop Virus will turn most of them human again.

Soon I expect to see French police controlling Italian riots, Belgian police in Finland, and so on. Even the wine-soaked leader of the EU will eventually realise that this will have to happen.

Let’s hope he doesn’t sober up in time.

Save Europe from the EU. Send him a case of fine Chardonnay.

By the time he wakes up it’ll all be over.

‘Alt-right’?

What the hell is ‘alt-right’ and how many more classifications do we have to segment the human race into?

Someone once tried to explain it to me. I didn’t ‘get’ it and still don’t. As far as I can tell it’s the new word to replace ‘racist’ which has been thrown at all but five people on the planet so far. There was ‘far right’ for a while but I suppose they pushed that as far as they could and had to go sideways. Hence ‘alt’. ‘Bigot’ sems to have fallen out of use since those last five have now been labelled bigots and the trolls stopped calling everyone ‘paedo’ because the Ctrl-Left (see, I can make up pretend classifications too) now want to make that the New Normal.

Well I don’t want it normalised. My own kids are grown up and now safe from paedos but I have a granddaughter and any paedo trying it… well they won’t be equipped to try it again. I might go to jail but as you get older, a life sentence is much less of a threat than it used to be. Besides, the elderly are looked after much better in prison than in ‘care’ homes these days.

I note that even those on the left are now being labelled ‘alt-right’ by… those on the left who think they are the moderate ones. You know, the shouty, violent moderate Marxists who the courts used to lock up in the days before insanity descended on the entire planet. Soon, the last five people will be labelled alt-right and they’ll have to come up with another made-up insult.

When they started using ‘racist’ to shut down anyone who disagreed with their lunatic ideas, it worked. People didn’t want to be called that. Now? I see tweets calling pretty much everyone a racist with abolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that accusation. It’s not even connected to the matter being discussed. You want Brexit? Racist. How dare you want this country to be able to make its own laws and trade agreements? That is (somehow) racist.

Now everyone is racist for absolutely anything. You want to play Christmas songs? Racist! ‘White Christmas’ eh? Why not just dress up in KKK robes and have done with it. Yes it is that silly. It has gone beyond silly. Real life is now something Kafka wouldn’t have tried to publish because it is far too absurd.

Something Zaphod pointed out on Twitter – you cannot be neutral on any subject now. It’s true. If you don’t fully support a thing then you must be absolutely against it. ‘Don’t care’ is simply not an option.

I have occasionally been asked if I support gay marriage. The answer is ‘no’.

Therefore I am against gay marriage? The answer is still ‘no’.

I am not gay. I have no religion. Other people being gay does not affect me. Other people having religion does not affect me (excluding the ones who want to kill me for not having the same religion as them and it’s not just the Islamists). If two people who are gay want to get together under a legal framework called marriage, this has absolutely no effect on me whatsoever.Even if I was religious and believed they were condemning themselves to Hell, well that’s between them and God. I’m not getting involved in that and if there is a God worth having then he, she or it has no need of human help. Tip: If your God needs your help to do anything at all, that’s not a real God.

If there is a God, I will not wonder whether he/she/it is alt-right or ctrl-left. I will only wonder why he has not yet pressed ctrl-alt-del. It’s way past time.

I do not feel the need to either support or condemn something that is, in my life, of no consequence whatsoever. I simply do not care.

That is not allowed any more. Everything is binary. No shades of grey, no ‘doesn’t matter to me either way’ issues. You support the de-gendering and sterilisation of people or you are dead set against it. I have two views on this.

If an adult feels strongly enough about it and decides, for themselves, without coercion, that that is what they want then let them go ahead and do it. I don’t want to pay for it through taxes but I will not put any obstacle in their way.

However, when a so-called charity pushes children, even infants, into saying they are transgender, gets them put on puberty blockers and cons them into living as the wrong gender, I have a big problem with it. They are ruining those lives. Puberty blockers will delay development. Forcing them into surgery will sterilise them forever. There is no going back from that. Oh they can have more surgery and cosmetically transition back but they will never have children.

Those little lives are already ruined for political ideology, a bit of parental virtue signalling and a lot of taxpayer cash into a so-called charity. And I know I will get called ‘alt-right’ for saying that. I don’t care. You might as well call me jinglebells, toadbasket or flapweasel. I cannot be offended by words that have no meaning to me. Heck, no matter what you call me, I’m sure I can always say I have been called worse in the past. I have, for over half a century, been a deliberately irritating little bastard.

There has been a trend lately for parents to refer to a baby as a ‘theyby’ because it is gender neutral. Okay. Which gender is ‘baby’? It’s already a damn gender neutral word! ‘Theybe’ should be a warning sign to Social Services that they should keep a close eye on these parents because they are quite clearly bonkers and probably should not have bred.

Unfortunately Social Services, like everything else, is so infused with political correctness they dare not do anything sensible in case they are fired or arrested. I actually considered ‘Common Purpose’ to be a conspiracy theory until a few years ago when they started putting their deranged ‘leader’ on YouTube. Using ‘subtle’ body language you could have seen from five miles away in fog. Really. It was exaggerated to the point of semaphore. Politicians use it, and it shows. Oh, it’s comical, but so many fools fall for it.

People are now called ‘alt-right’ and apologise for it without knowing what it means. People call other people ‘alt-right’ without having the first idea what it means. There is only one sensible response to being called ‘alt-right’.

Reply with ‘I don’t know what it is. Can you explain it?’ My bet is they’ll switch to ‘fascist’. They don’t know what that means either.

If they did, they’d definitely keep quiet about it.

Madness

There’s a lot of it about.

Brexit, of course, is a shambles and is likely to see the last days of the Tory party. If arch-liar Tessie Maybe and her sidekick, Oily Rubbings, manage to get this travesty of a ‘deal’ passed, the Tory voter base is all but gone. A lot of irreversible damage has already been done so if Tessie the Liar leads her party into the next general election then they will lose it.

If they stop this pantomime and deliver a proper, genuine Brexit then they will still have a party in opposition. But they cannot now win a general election. Too many blatant lies and broken promises, and we now know for sure that manifestos from either side are just recycle-bin fodder. No point reading them, they aren’t going to do what they say.

We have just had a ‘day of remembrance for trans people who were killed for being trans people’. Hot on the heels of the 100th Day of Remembrance for millions who were killed just for being unfortunate enough to be the right age to be dragged of to war, that seems a bit sick to me. Especially when, on this 100th anniversary of the end of that war, our current government plans to render all those lost lives, all of that war and fighting, a total waste of time.

Sure, it’s horrible that someone is killed just for being themselves, but this rarely happens to trans people in the West. The figure of several hundred killings is global and guess where it most often happens? They don’t want to say it. Can you guess why?

A female judge has ruled that FGM is perfectly legal in her country and that a law that was passed against it must be struck off the books because it is contrary to the constitution of that country. FGM is now a constitutional right in… America.

In London, street acupuncture is a daily occurrence now, although unlike the traditional acupuncturists who take their time placing small needles in various locations, this new breed of street acupuncturists favour a much quicker method. They use a big knife instead of lots of tiny needles and get the whole show over in a second. Unfortunately, their success rate for cures is really, really bad.

The police would very much like to deal with that, however they have been reallocated to ‘online hate crime’ and waste their days reading crap like this, looking for something to take offence at.

In Ireland, a judge has declared that a rape victim was asking for it because she was wearing a thong. You  know, those cheese-wire knickers that, if you give someone wearing one a wedgie, will cut them in half.

Presumably she was wearing it under other clothing that the rapist would have had to remove before getting to the cheese-wire, but in this judge’s mind, that is irrelevant. Soon, rape will be legal in Ireland.

In Sweden… oh forget it. Sweden is utterly fucked.

Half of America is drooling at the prospect of impeaching a President who doesn’t seem to be doing much wrong other than looking a bit of a boorish idiot. He’s not the one with street gangs trying to silence opposition and threaten people in their homes. He’s the one who has produced economic growth and jobs that Obama initially said could never happen and is now trying to claim the credit for. But they hate him with a passion. There is no reasoning behind this really, it started the moment he was elected and it has not abated at all since. Well, that’s for America to deal with. We have our own problems, we have absolute arseholes running the UK and while Trump’s motto is ‘Make America Great Again’, the UK government is doing its damndest to delete the ‘Great’ from Great Britain.

Italy is coming to its senses. They’re about to give the EU a dose of proper Italian swearing and might well be out of there before we are. Along with Poland, Hungary, and other eastern countries who only just got away from Russian communist control and who can see exactly what the EU is up to.

Spain has threatened to veto Brexit if they can’t have Gibraltar. Well, they can’t veto it. They might be able to scupper the ‘deal’ we don’t want anyway, I hope so, but they cannot stop Brexit.

Neither can Tessie Maybe, nor even Oily Rubbings and his gang of lawless madmen. It’s done. That part is over. Deal or no deal, we are leaving. With the ‘deal’ on offer, no deal is a better option.

Staying in is not an option, not least because the EU intend to trash this country as a warning to others. Oh yes, even if we go cap in hand and beg to stay they are going to hit us hard. No-deal Brexit is now, by far, the best option available. Besides, that ship is sinking and this particular rat is very happy to desert it.

There is still a place of sanity in the world. Those who live there will kill you if you try to visit because for the last 30,000 years they have lived on an idyllic, bountiful island while the rest of the world has gone to shit. They are keeping it as it is, and I don’t blame them at all.

No, don’t even think about trying to join them. Even the British gave up on trying to colonise that place. You cannot talk to them because no visitor has lived long enough to learn their language. They are not interested in discussion. They are not interested in hearing your side of any story. You want to migrate there? They will kill you and probably cook you up too.

They have no money. None. They have no nuclear weapons. No guns. No cars, not even horses. No electricity. They have not bothered to invent the wheel and yet for 30,000 years they have never been invaded. Everyone who has tried has soon decided “Whoa, leave these people alone”. India has put a five mile exclusion zone around their island and have an absolute ban on letting anyone visit. Not to protect the islanders – to protect idiots who try to go there.

We could learn a lot from them. Especially those who like to meddle in the lives of others.

_____________________

In other news, the Christmas book will be called ‘Christmas Lights… and Darks’ because the stories are split between the whimsical and the diabolical. I’ll start sending author contracts shortly even though there is still a week to the deadline.

The end of November is also payment time for those on royalties and I have to clear out my lab by Christmas. It’s a hellish busy time.

So, I’m not immune to a bit of madness either.

 

 

You can’t have sharp things

The Christmas anthology is under way and I need to stay on my game for this one. It has to be loaded up in the first days of December if anyone is going to get a copy in time. As with every anthology so far, there is at least one new author in this one and I hope to see a lot of the regulars too. Although, it’s a busy time of year so I can’t really press anyone.

Anyway, more on that when I have something concrete to report.

We have a total ban on hand guns in the UK. Absolute. If you have a handgun, even if you have no ammunition and it doesn’t work, you go to jail. Judges have no discretion in this, if you have a handgun in the UK, jail is automatic.

This even applies to the British Olympic shooting team. They have to go overseas to practice.

It does not apply to MPs’ armed guards of course. They have to defend MPs against people who don’t have guns.

This ban has been so successful that it has increased the rate of people getting shot in the UK to about once a week. How did it manage that? Simple. When they said ‘hand in your guns’, the law abiding people of this land handed in their formerly-legal guns.

The guns held by criminals weren’t legal in the first place. Making them more illegal had no effect at all. So the criminals not only kept their guns, they now knew for certain that any house they broke into had no guns.

Well, not entirely. In some places, and particularly out here in the countryside, shotguns and hunting rifles are not unusual. I’ve never owned a real firearm but I did get a go at clay pigeon shooting with a shotgun once. At university, I had a go at a .22 live round rifle at a club’s open day. The latter was way before the gun paranoia set in. I much preferred the .22 but as a student there was no way I could afford a gun and regular beer drinking as well. I can see the appeal but it’s an expensive hobby. I had to prioritise.

So, if I’ve never owned a gun, why do I care about a gun ban? Well, if someone wanted to break into my house before the ban, they had to factor in that I might have a gun. A rifle or shotgun can be a difficult thing to swing around in a confined space but the burglar had to consider the possibility that there might be a pistol in the house.

Now they have no such concerns. They know there are no pistols in anyone’s house. There might be a shotgun or hunting rifle but those will be in a securely locked cabinet and the ammunition will be well separated from it in a different locked cabinet. While you are fumbling with keys and cabinets they have plenty of time to shoot you with their own illegal handgun or stab you with their already illegal (hint: they don’t care) flick knife.

How, then, would I defend against an armed intruder? Well, I could get the bow out I suppose. I could ask them to have a cup of tea and a biscuit while I put it together, string it and nock an arrow. Even if they were daft enough to agree to that, I use quite long arrows and the bow is pretty tall. It’s that confined space thing again.

I used to have a crossbow, but sold it when I was skint. I might get another one. Even so, while it’s smaller than the bow it isn’t too useful in a confined space and takes a while to load each bolt. Also I fully expect them to be banned soon, in the modern drive to disarm us utterly.

I do have a powerful slingshot and a bag of steel balls but haven’t practiced enough yet. I’d probably break every window without even inconveniencing the burglar.

No, my defensive weapon of choice would be a blade. Any blade I can get hold of. Most rooms here have at least one blade – hanging on the wall or in a drawer or stuck to the big strip magnet on the kitchen wall. Blades are very useful things. Especially in the kitchen.

I’m pretty good at throwing them too. I’d throw a small one, it won’t kill or seriously injure but it will hurt like hell and give me time to get to the big ones. Or maybe one of the axes. My wood splitting axe and sledgehammer for the log ‘grenade’ (it’s a steel cone you bash into the side of a log until it splits) are in the living room, because that’s where the back door of the house is and that’s where I go out to split logs. There are other, smaller, axes placed near to where they are used. Obviously not outside, that would be stupid.

When I was younger I had a swordstick. They’ve been banned for a long time but I didn’t have to hand mine in because I broke it. It was a cheap one from a little shop in Cardiff and it was legal to have it then. Some years later I tried using it to chop down a bush but it wasn’t up to the job. So it got binned long before it got banned. If I’d known I could never get another one I’d have taken more care of it.

I used to have a butterfly knife in my fishing bag. Very useful. I could open it and close it in one movement, with one hand. Then the buggers banned that too.

I never owned a flick knife. I had a Fonzie flick comb that looked like a flick knife. That might still be around somewhere. And I was never clear on what was meant by a ‘gravity knife’. As far as I could tell it was like a flick knife but without the spring.

I used to carry a lock knife until they were banned. The lock was a safety feature, it wouldn’t close on your fingers while you cut open a box or cut through string. That safety feature is illegal now.

In my school days almost every boy had a penknife. Now they’d be in trouble if they had a butter knife.

It’s closing in. Every new law further restricts what you are allowed to have and what options you have to defend yourself. Now we have this bill to restrict it even further.

The ‘zombie knives’ they talk about – I’ve seen them but would never buy one. They are ornaments, meant to be hung on a wall. They have no practical use at all and are made of cheap steel. As far as I know they have never been used in a knife attack. Those attacks normally use kitchen knives or machetes.

The ‘possession of corrosive substances in public’ will be applied to the bleach and vinegar in your shopping bag and the acid in your car battery. What’s that? You think there will be some common sense here? Hahahaha!

As for buying knives online, teenage hoodlums do not do that. Ever. I do it, I recently bought a machete for garden purposes. Don’t think I need that much blade? Well this is no suburban square of grass. If I told you I recently bought a ride on mower and have a scythe which gets used every year, perhaps that will give it some perspective.

No, city hoodlums don’t buy knives online. They go to Mum’s kitchen drawer and take their pick. If they want something bigger they talk to the dodgy guy in the raincoat at the back of the pub. If they are doing something illegal they do not want that weapon traced to them.

I note the bill places another layer of restrictions on the types of gun that are never used in shootings here. That is not to combat crime. What would you imagine that might be for?

What the bill does, mainly, is to make it a lot harder to get even a steak knife. For anyone. This is going to achieve nothing at all in terms of the stabbings and shootings that are happening daily now. Not a damn thing. That’s not what it’s for.

It’s tightening the noose. Not on the criminals, they won’t be affected at all. It tightens the noose on the rest of us. Soon you will have to learn how to carve a roast chicken with a plastic spoon and a hard stare. And the stabbings and shootings will continue. This bill seems to achieve nothing but it does exactly what it sets out to do. It removes another layer of defence for the public. The next one will remove more.

When I was at school, there were the compulsory subjects for O level: mathematics, English language and English literature. The rest were options. I took French because I thought it might be useful but since 1976 I’ve been to France twice so I’ve pretty much forgotten it all now. I took chemistry, biology and physics because that’s what I was interested in. I also took an optional one year O level called Engineering Science and passed it without knowing, to this day, what it was really about.

I had one option left to fill. The school had just merged with another and for the first time, metalwork was an option. If it hadn’t been I’d have gone with woodwork, which was fun, but metalwork was something new. So I opted for that.

I would never have been a blacksmith but basic stuff, easy. I can temper and anneal. I can braze and solder. I can cast. I can take a decent bit of scrapyard steel and make a knife so sharp you won’t be able to see the edge. A full tang blade with a wood or leather handle, heavy, forward weighted, and very sharp indeed.

Making a knife is not difficult. It’s just much easier to buy one – at the moment. I don’t have a forge but if I start with something already strong, say a car/truck suspension leaf spring, the forge isn’t needed. It’s all cutting.

I have never attacked anyone with a blade of any kind. I’ve been attacked with one but never used a blade on anyone else. But I can make one. Heck, if it came right down to it, there’s a lot of flint lying around here and I could learn flint-knapping.

You cannot ban knives. They are easy to make. You can make a stabbing weapon out of a pencil, for Pete’s sake. This new bill will have as much effect on criminals as every other weapons ban. None at all. It’s not for them, none of it ever is. It’s for us.

Maybe I should learn flint-knapping. The way things are going it’ll be the only way to carve a roast soon.

That’s if the proposed meat taxes allow any of us to afford such luxury.

 

 

Armageddon outta here

The world is accelerating into chaos at a rate popcorn manufacturers are going to find it hard to keep up with. It is logical to assume that a pure ‘anti-christ’ would be a woman, and to keep the ‘anti’ total, she would be born to a man. Impossible, right? Not any more. With all this gender reassignment crap, one person can now be both mother and later father. The scene is set.

Supernatural? Not a bit of it. Those behind the scenes might well believe it but it’s really just manipulation to get what they want. The world’s religions all expect Armageddon, a day of judgement, and whether there is to be a real one or not, there are moves afoot to make it appear to happen. I’ve said many times that it does not matter whether you or I believe in the supernatural. What matters is whether those in control believe they are doing its bidding. Or indeed, whether it merely provides a conveniently credible backdrop for achieving total control.

And so, we have madness that does indeed look like the End of Days. I can’t cover it all in a blog post nor even in a book, it would need to be updated daily and would never end.

In Pakistan, a woman caled Asia Bibi was condemned to death. Why? Because she is Christian and she drank water from the same cup as a Muslim woman. ‘Two girls, one cup’ is illegal in Pakistan. Yes, I am taking the piss and yes, they deserve it. It might well be their culture but it is unquestionably silly. Sure, they can be silly if they want. And violent, they seem to like that, but I will never go there so I don’t care all that much. There is plenty to worry about at home without concerning myself with other countries’ lunacy.

Asia Bibi was acquitted of heresy after nearly a decade in prison. The mob response? Kill her anyway. Kill the judges who acquitted her. Kill all Pakistani Christians. Yeah, we import these people by the boatload and that is a Good Thing.

We don’t seem to import many Pakistani Christians but then they tend not to do things the elite enjoy, like setting up paedo rape gangs and blowing up teenagers. I’d say we should take every Pakistani Christian to the UK and leave the mad buggers behind but I know I will be called racist for that even though they are all the same race. What the hell. We are all racists now. It really doesn’t matter any more.

Meanwhile in America, something called mid term elections is happening. In the UK we do it the sensible way and elect a bunch of idiots all at once so we don’t have to do it again for years. America elects part of its government for 4 years and then halfway through, elects the other half. Bloody rebel colonists, they just have to make it complicated.

Anyway, lunacy has been firing up over there for a while. Red vs Blue, the other way around from the UK and you can’t take the middle road because that’s Green and is dafter than either extreme. I just wish I could vote infrared or ultraviolet or microwave or something because the visible spectrum is entirely occupied by maniacs.

There is now the Blue Wave and the Red Wave over there. In the UK that would probably come out as the Red Wave and the Very Red Wave because we don’t have Conservatives any more. I don’t want to get into the merits or demerits of either side at the moment because I don’t live in America so, as with Pakistan, as far as I am concerned they are free to do what they want to each other. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in many places over there now, one wrong word and you’re classed as one side or the other even though I’d have no vote. I would quite like a MAGA hat though, because I like hats in general and because it would confuse the hell out of British voters. A Conservative message on a red (Labour) background is baffling to us. Over here, turn up to vote in that hat and they’ll have a really hard time working out where you stand.

Which would be more troubling? Lunatics like Maxine Waters (yes, Dems, yes she really is) and the Amazing Occasional Cortex (you know who I mean) getting control of part of the American Government, or Trump’s Republicans having total control of the government?

Neither is good. UK readers – imagine if Tessie Maybe had a massive majority in Parliament right now. The shit she would shovel onto us would be suffocating. DNA database of everyone. Internet controls that would make Kim Jong Jingly Jangly gasp in admiration. She wanted those things when she was Home Secretary and she still wants them now.

Yes, Jerry Cordite and his Loony Crew would do the same if they had power – but they will oppose it because the Tories suggested it. Their refusal to endorse anything the Tories suggest is what is currently saving us from the utter insanity of a Tessie Maybe Panopticon country.

Any government needs an effective opposition. Without that, there is nothing they cannot push into law and no matter how wild they get, there is nothing to stop them.

Now, I do not believe for a moment that Trump is some wild dictator. He’s a wild card, certainly, but I think that, at heart, he is genuinely trying to do his best. However, given absolute power, could he become corrupted? When he comes up with an idea that he thinks is good, and there is nobody on the other side to point out any cracks or flaws, what then?

He isn’t likely to do anything actually evil but he’s a businessman and business can be brutal. Oh, he won’t deliberately do anything evil but when you play chess, does it matter if you lose a few pawns? He does need someone Socialist (there are still some sensible ones) to point out that a country is not a business and real people are affected by government decisions.

Tessie Maybe is a different matter. She really does want total control and is doing anything she can to get it. She is far more dangerous than Trump could ever be.

Anyway, the Rebel Colonist midterm elections are only part of the lunacy surounding us all.

We now have more varieties of gender than we have of Heinz products. There are two genders. Male and female. There is also hermaphrodite, which is rare but real, but that is showing both male and female. It is not something separate.

You might be a man who prefers to sleep with men or a woman who prefers to sleep with women. That does not change your gender, it’s just your preference.You are not a separate gender.

Maybe you are transexual, maybe you feel very strongly that you were born in the wrong body. You are not a separate gender, you are either a male who wishes to be female or vice versa. Still only two genders here.

Maybe you are asexual – this is not a gender at all, it is entirely personal preference. Bisexual, goat shagging, tree humping, none of these are genders. They are how you want to live and as long as you hurt nobody in the process, I really don’t care. Unless you are spectacularly well endowed and can go at least 30 times a night, goats and sheep aren’t likely to be bothered either.

Trees operate on a timescale where a two hour shagging of a knothole feels like a mosquito bite so they really won’t mind. They might reciprocate with splinters but hey, you make your own choices and take the risks you are happy to take.

The mass of genders has only one purpose. To eradicate gender altogether. People are getting in trouble for using the wrong made-up pronouns or for calling a girl a girl when she identifies as a boy. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if gender was totally eradicated? Won’t it be so much easier if we had gender neutral identifiers so instead of being called ‘George’ or ‘Alice’ at birth, we were just assigned a number? Think nobody will accept that? Come on. They’ll be demanding it soon.

That’s followed by being neutered at birth so your kids grow up as compliant, genderless worker bees. Nobody will go for it? They are already grabbing hard on the trend of transexualism, effectively neutering their offspring. This is not fantasy, this is just the next logical step. Does it take a majority? Homophobia. Islamophobia. Transphobia. These are punishable ‘hate crimes’. Are any of them from majorities? Noisy, well funded minorities, even tiny ones, can make it happen. They have before and they will again and they have no idea of the end game they are pushing. I call them Trotskies because when they win they will be airbrushed out. Don’t try to tell them, they won’t believe you. Trotsky didn’t.

The compliance? Oh that’s well under way. I remember when my father was obliged to fit seatbelts to his car. I remember my mother berating him for not using them and his response – ‘I have to have the bloody things but I don’t have to wear them’.

Later, of course, it became compulsory to wear them. By the time I learned to drive, wearing the seat belt was just part of driving. It was normalised, far deeper than compulsory.

Now we have normalised hate. All over the place. Dems agains Republicans. Labour against Tories. People with brains against the SNP and Greens. Even within those divisions there is hate. You can be the wrong kind of Labour MP now. Or the wrong kind of Tory.

We smokers? Well, we just sit back and watch the show now. Vapers hate us so we aren’t all that bothered when their turn comes around. Welcome back to Hateland, you pompous among the vapers. Oh I know they are not all like that but the ones that are surely deserve it. We don’t do the Pastor Neimoller thing because they already came for us and nobody spoke out, so don’t look to us to speak out for you now.

And let’s be clear here, smoking bans are just the way in. Look at this, where a Scottish council wants to ban smoking on breaks.

We are not talking about banning ‘smoke breaks’ which are portrayed as ‘additional breaks’. We are talking about banning smoking on scheduled breaks. We are talking about the council effectively controlling their employees’ free time.

At the moment, many are against it. But the upcoming generation will be all for it. They will accept controls on their home lives. Why?

They have grown up with the Lunchbox Police. Schools control what they are allowed to have in their packed lunches and they will accept that their employers can do the same. They will readily accept that smoking is not allowed on breaks just as they will readily accept that their employers can dictate the food they bring for lunch. And they will not see any connection. NPC10538 will never step out of line, personal pronouns ‘it, it’s, thing’s’ and when it does it will be quietly retired.

You don’t want this world? Of course not. You have not been brought up to want it. Just as I grew up in a world where smoking was just something people did. Where I could come back from a camping trip and walk the streets of Cardiff with a rucksack and a fairly hefty camping knife on my belt and nobody cared. Where I could carry a locking pocket knife and nobody minded at all. Where I could walk around the streets with a .22 air rifle (broken open) and nobody batted an eyelid.

I didn’t want the world we have now. I could buy fireworks when I was 12 and sodium chlorate, sulphur and (the other ingredients) when I was 14. Oh, and all those ads telling you that putting a banger in a bottle will make it explode? Lies. I tried it over and over and it never worked.

Kids can’t do any of that now and the restrictions are getting tighter and tighter and children are taught that this is normal. No, you do not want the future I paint but I didn’t want the one that we have now. Those that came after me were taught to accept it and to want it.

As the next generation are being taught to accept and to want the next phase.

The Church always taught Armageddon as a quick thing. A day or two, a sudden apocalypse. They never taught it as an incremental takeover over a few generations.

That’s why we don’t notice it happening.

 

Chips with everything

A long time ago, I made a statement that not everyone agreed with. Well. Actually I do that all the time but I’m talking about a specific one here. I think it was during the controversial proposal that children should be microchipped so if the Glitter Gang kidnap them, or they fall into the well when Lassie isn’t around, they can be quickly tracked and found.

I was not keen on the idea because those children will grow up, and then you have a completely trackable population. Forget number plate recognition and CCTV. Every step you take, and in which direction, will be recorded on a central database. Further, those chipped adults won’t think twice about having their own kids chipped. In one generation, being microchipped becomes normal, and anyone refusing is seen as odd. That bothers me for some reason.

Children are always an emotive subject, and any suggestion of doing any kind of invasive procedure on a child will get a sharp ‘no’ from any parent worthy of the title. The scheme was dropped.

What I said at the time was along the lines of ‘Adults will be microchipped and they won’t resist. Far from it. They will fight to be first in line’.

Implanted chips that allow access to restricted areas have been around for years. Really though, they are only in use in limited areas so far – but their use is spreading.

Contactless card payments came out a while back. You don’t have to slot your card into a machine, you just tap it on top, because that saves you at least three seconds of typing in a number. I don’t like them, and it was obvious that the next step would be to implant the card’s chip in your hand. Sounds ridiculous?

It’s here, and the chip makers are struggling to keep up with demand.

My phone has a 48Gb micro SD card in it. You can buy much more memory in the same size package. A tiny glass-encapsulated chip could hold a hell of a lot of data. The code for your house and your car, your bank details,your medical records… they’d hardly make a dent in the amout of memory that could be in there. It could hold so much stuff.

There are already cars with keyless ignition. I’ve driven some – rented or courtesy car, I won’t buy one – and you just need the fob in your pocket to start the car. There is no physical key, no keyhole on the ignition and none on the door.The freakiest was a hybrid Prius. You press a button, the Star Trek dashboard boots up, there is no sound from under the bonnet even when you start moving! I don’t want one, although the heads-up speedometer on the windscreen was cool. I liked that part. As for the rest of the dashboard, I had no idea what that was telling me.

Why won’t I buy one? What if you drive out to the wilds of Scotland, have a really nice day out, get back to your car and the fob battery is dead? I bet almost nobody carries a spare battery for that thing and if they do, they leave it in the car. Which you can’t open because the battery in the fob is dead. Implanted chips don’t use batteries, they work something like RFID (I’m not an electrical engineer so don’t ask me – I’m sure someone in the comments will have the answer). So they would be an easy sell to anyone who’s experienced a dead car fob.

In the future, instead of stealing your house keys, car keys, bank cards… a criminal will get all those things at once by cutting off your hand. Isn’t that a comforting thought?

I have many such chips in ‘Panoptica’. Nobody has Borg gadgets, all the chips are for monitoring and control. It’s taking a very long time to write for a few reasons. The biggest one is that I have to get into – and stay in – the head of a character who is my exact opposite. Someone who accepts every rule without question, who follows every instruction, who is happy with their slot in society and has no ambition to change anything, ever. Someone to whom the entire concept of saying ‘Oh fuck off, I’m not doing that’ is not even imaginable. Staying in that character’s head is exhausting.

There was also the problem of credibility. A genderless drone population? Solved, the new 57 varieties of gender made that part easy. I covered it in a story in ‘Six in Five in Four‘ last Easter. Getting the chips in was solved long ago, and my argument that it would be easy is now proved.

I have to get more of that written before it all comes true. It’s not easy, every time I write something bizarre it seems to be in the news the next day and as I said, writing a totally compliant drone character is exhausting. I can’t hold that mindset for long, I don’t know how the NPCs do it.

Anyway, I have the Christmas anthology up next. I have renamed Christmas as Earth Day for this new (hopefully imaginary) world and this Christmas anthology needs another tale of progress towards Panoptica.

This one will be the stage where names become numbers.

Look at your wage slip or tax form and tell me that will never happen.

You might be one of those who told me people would resist implanted chips…

 

Coming together and falling apart

The Halloween anthology is ready to go. I’m just waiting for one author’s response to edits and it’ll load up. I’ll be glad to take a rest after this one – my sleeping pattern is now all over the place and I’m losing track of what day it is!

I’d like to get this one out before Theresa May gets kicked out. There’s a reason, and it has to do with the traditional corrupted poem at the end.

It has come to light that when CreateSpace merge with Kindle (Kindle will them make all the print and Kindle versions, which will save a bit of time), the CreateSpace cover creator is not compatible with the Kindle cover creator for print books. Since I load up cover images rather than use their templates, that might not be a problem – but it might mean I have to re-do all the covers. If I do, I’ll make them all one-piece covers.

Anyway, the book is coming together. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is falling apart.

Brexit is a shambles. Theresa May seems determined to put the Conservative party on a level with the Church of the Militant Elvis, aided by ‘Lurch’ Hammond, who intends to have a Brown Gorgon-style raid on pension funds and raise more taxes.  That’s right, Deep Socialism from what was once regarded as a ‘Conservative’ party. This is to pay for extra nannying from the NHS and their Public Health Stasi who are now at the stage of limiting the size of pizza. This is not parody. Parody is long dead now. If ‘Spitting Image’ tried to make a comeback they simply could not do it.

With the Tories now firmly on the Left, what of the original Left? Have they welcomed these totalitarian fuckwits into their fold? Not a bit of it. The Labour party is now so far to the Left, Stalin can’t see them. Ultra Leftie Students in Cambridge have voted to have nothing to do with Remembrance Day. The University has been on Twitter to denounce the abuse directed at their utterly moronic and worthless students even though the whole of Cambridge, if not the whole country, is brought into disrepute by their actions.

In Sheffield University, a visit by Nick Clegg has been cancelled because of threats of violent protest by ‘left wing’ students. Look, if you think Nick Clegg is in any way ‘right wing’, you really need to take a long hard look at your political stance. You’re in a place even Marx never dared venture into.

Police have been told they cannot display poppies on their police cars for Remembrance Day although expensive paint jobs to cover those cars in rainbow colours for the Poofs Parade is actively encouraged. As is dressing police officers in ridiculous outfits and setting them the task of policing online words rather than tackling actual crimes. All so that the oafs in charge can pretend they don’t have enough money. The general public, unsurprisingly, are not happy about this and the actual police officers aren’t happy about it either. Nobody in charge cares, because nobody in charge has the capacity to think ahead. Like Tessie May’s gang, they think about today and money. That’s it.

The EU is collapsing. If our government would only realise it they’d jump ship now with no deal – because we won’t need a deal. There won’t be an EU to deal with, we’d make deals with the individual European countries instead. Just like in the old days. As for Frau Merkel and her Fourth Reich, well even the Germans have had enough of that crap.

Italy will soon begin mass deportations. Austria will follow. Hungary, Poland and friends have avoided that issue by not letting them in in the first place. Denmark is bringing in tougher anti-Islamist laws, even Sweden is starting to drift towards nationalism although I doubt that will be a fast transition. It’s not in their nature, they’ve been driven to it and won’t like it, but they have been left with no choice.

The Middle East has entered a state of perpetual war in which nobody is going to back down. America is heading for a civil war in which people with lots of guns are provoked incessantly by people who can’t make up their minds what gender they are. That will be a short war. America is about to enter mid-term elections and looking at it from outside, it looks as if the Democrats are heading for oblivion. They are becoming increasingly violent and insane, and it is turning moderate and swing voters away from them in droves.

Meanwhile in the UK, we have a Conservative party that obviously does not want to be anywhere near Government for the best part of a century and the alternative is Stalin’s Little Helper and his gang of crazed and violent madmen.

Halloween is coming, and a few days afterwards, Earth gets a visit from a comet that’s shaped like a skull.

I’m not a great believer in cosmic signs but I’d say there’s something very, very big that’s about to change.

It’s not going to be an easy transition.