The madness of the modern world

Well, it’s here. The world is now officially insane.

Tessie May took her time about visiting the Grenfell site. That was indefensible, and she’s been rightly pilloried for it. However, she has not sought to blame anyone for the fire.

Labour on the other hand have used the tragedy to whip up local people into a frenzy. ‘It’s the Tory cuts!’ ‘May must resign.’ ‘Take to the streets to remove this government.’ Yes, that last one is real. They are officially fomenting rebellion over an accident.

When the Islamists blow up children or go on knife rampages in the streets, all the politicians on every side call for calm. Muslim leaders play the ‘we are the victims’ card while laughing at the kaffirs’ idiot leaders.

This fire was caused by a faulty fridge and was made so much worse because the building was covered in cheapskate cladding that let the fire spread very quickly indeed.

Sadiq Khan, already linked to the companies who supplied the non-fireproof exterior cladding for the building, is insisting the Government release the true number of people who died in the fire. There are even pretend reports that there is a D-notice on the casualty list. There isn’t. The Government cannot release that figure because they don’t know what it is yet – and might not know for weeks.

Searching a burned-out tower block is not something you can do in an afternoon. Every step has to be taken cautiously. One wrong step on the fifteenth floor and you might find yourself heading for the ground floor at considerable speed.

There are likely to be a lot more casualties in there. It is indeed a tragedy and I can understand that people who have relatives missing will want to know whether they are among those casualties. However, nobody can find that out quickly. Storming the council offices will not speed up the process.

Blaming the Tories is ridiculous, when one of the members of the board that ran that building is now the MP for the area. Yes, the Labour MP for a Labour constituency with a Labour council and Labour mayor. The Tories have no control here, they do not decide on how buildings are maintained, they were not in government when that tower block was commissioned and built and they did not order that cladding. It’s all Labour.

And yet it’s the Tories who are being blamed. They are strangely silent on this. It’s ordinary people who seem to be digging out the information here. Labour MPs and activists are using the deaths to incite people into a Tory-hating frenzy and it’s going to lead to riots. Why are the Tories silent on this?

There are two possible reasons that I can see. Maybe there are more but these two seem most likely.

One – the Tories are letting Socialism show its true, violent face. Letting Labour voters see what they have voted for. Then they can call another election and use footage of the incitement and riots all through their campaign. That would be a sensible, if callous, approach.

Two – and worse – there is still the Civil Contingencies Act. Labour’s ‘enabling act’ that was installed under the Blair/Brown government. The Tories didn’t put it there but it’s now available to them.

It’s basically the same as Hitler’s ‘enabling act’ that allowed his to take over as a de facto dictator. In the event of a national emergency, the government can take complete control. They no longer answer to the people, elections are suspended, the government can make emergency laws unopposed… you think this is a police state? Oh you haven’t seen anything yet!

Corbyn and co. have been stirring up a coup to overthrow the Government. Not in secret, they’ve been doing it on TV. May has a minority government who needs the support of a small hard-line party. She’ll have to cave in to some of their demands. They have her over a barrel and they know it. We don’t yet know what they’ll get but anything they get is going to send the socialist snowflakes into an apoplectic rage.

The EU is gleefully pressing to start Brexit talks and they are offering to take us back on an even worse deal than the one we’re leaving. They expect to clean us out before we go. This shouldn’t be a problem since Labour are also pro-Brexit so should be supporting the talks. However, they hate the Tories so much they are willing to send an army of maniacs onto the streets to start a war, and are still claiming they won the election with fewer votes and fewer MPs than the Tories.

If Corbyn gets his way, the streets of London will soon be out of control. If the EU get their way, those ‘austerity’ measures are going to look like ‘luxury’ measures. We’re going to be another Weimar republic after the EU is finished asset-stripping us. Money that is worth less than the paper (or plastic) it’s printed on.

With a minority government, May can’t restore order or keep any hold on the economy without invoking the Enabling Act that Blair/Brown put in place.

Then, the rounding up of the useful idiots who gave them total control will begin. Oh and Islam? They won’t need you any more either.

After that… it’s jackboots time. For all of us.

And who put this all in place, ready for this day? Hint: It wasn’t the Tories.

I bet they get the blame though.

The Pen is mightier than the Sword

…but it seems Le Pen is not as mighty as a Macaroon.

France has a pro-EU, Brussels puppet as its leader. Well, it’s what they voted for. I don’t know how much real power the French President has – don’t his pronouncements have to go through Parliament? I’ve no idea, perhaps one of the France-occupying readers can tell us. Not our problem, since the UK is now on a no-going-back route out of the EU. We’ve even been deleted from their propaganda leaflets.

At least there aren’t likely to be riots, at least not by the French. It seems clear in modern politics that one side always accepts losing a vote while the other side scream about voting being non-democratic because they didn’t get what they wanted. Then they have protests to overturn the vote in the name of democracy. These are usually violent.

It’s always the same sides too.

It’s rather like the Church of Climatology’s thought process. It gets a little warmer, that’s global warming. It gets unusually cold, ‘weather is not climate’. In the same way, Socialism only recognises democracy if they win the vote.

This kind of doublethink is endemic now.

I bought New Scientist this week. First time for ages. There is a feature article about air pollution. Apparently, at least in the West, it’s not so bad. China, India, Bangladesh… well they are effectively going through their industrial revolution phase and that’s always messy. The cities in those countries get smog like London used to get. Pretty pointless pushing to ban smoking there – but they do anyway.

The article carries a chart showing causes of death. Predictably, smoking is near the top. What’s interesting is that nowadays, nobody just dies any more. Everyone dies of something that could have been prevented if only the NHS could force them to live pure lives. It seems based on the premise that if we remove all risks from life, nobody will ever die again. Except… of boredom.

While the article shows a rapid fall in air pollution in the UK, the editorial laments the UK government’s failure to tackle air pollution. It’s headed with a picture of a smoggy street which is quite clearly not in the UK. The cars are on the wrong side of the road and the no-parking lines are red, not yellow.  They didn’t even bother to spend five minutes with Photoshop to make it half-convincing. What really hurts is that PhD level scientists will read that crap and not question it.

The editorial calls for some kind of legally-enforced action from the government while the article claims all major atmospheric pollutants are in decline in the UK’s air.

I don’t mean the smoke from half a gram of burning leaves. I mean properly toxic stuff. The UK’s air is getting cleaner. Remember that when the new anti-motorist regulations come into force so that the Green Men can breathe pure air in the cities. I’m glad I don’t live in one.

We now have the latest big push from antismoking to classify vaping as smoking. It’s clearly not smoking. For one thing there’s no smoke. No tobacco either. It’s getting to where rechargeable batteries and USB connectors are likely to be classified as tobacco products – and politicians all over the world can’t seem to understand why they are now openly ridiculed. If there is one thing more likely to see you more universally despised than being a smoker, it’s becoming a politician.

The antismokers say they want us to stop smoking but only using their approved methods. You know, the ones they get paid to push. Not some independent method that’s been shown to work for an awful lot of people, oh no, can’t have that.

“Nicotine is ‘addictive and deadly’. To help you escape its clutches we’ll sell you patches and gum loaded with… nicotine.”

What they really want is to get you ‘addicted’ to their own nicotine delivery method, so they can cash in.

Warnings on cigarettes, warnings about the alleged addictiveness of nicotine on vaping gear… seen any warnings on the patches and gum? Of course not. Seen any public shouting about people under 18 getting hold of patches and gum? Neither have I.

Approved nicotine is magically safe to prescribe. Non-approved nicotine is deadly and will kill you along with everyone in a 100-metre radius. Every time a smoker lights up in public we are like slow motion suicide bombers. That is what modern medicine, and our Governments, actually believe.

Really. They genuinely believe it. In the old days, schools used to teach chemistry and anyone from those days will have no trouble finding the chemical structure of nicotine. It’s a simple molecule. The nicotine in patches is the same as the nicotine in tobacco. The same as the nicotine in vape steam.

I’m still amazed no doctor has been charged with attempted murder for prescribing nicotine patches after telling us it’s deadly and addictive. Why hasn’t that happened? It’s wide open, that goal.

You know, some vapers don’t even have nicotine in their steam. Some have found that it’s the action of smoking they like. The taste, blowing smoke rings, all that stuff. The nicotine isn’t really necessary. I’ve tried it in my own Electrofags. Nicotine isn’t the biggest part of smoking, it’s the taste and the action that matters. That’s why Electrofag has worked for so many people. Not for me, not yet. The strange flavours are a lot of fun but I haven’t found a tobacco flavour that tastes just right. Maybe one day.

It must be difficult to keep a war on smokers and a war on motorists going at the same time. A war on all forms of transport, in fact, other than electric Noddy cars and trains made by Hornby. They have to ramp up the same pretend risks for both wars without anyone questioning how you can die twice. They seem to be managing this quite well because the general public have failed to notice.

There have been several Dalek and other alien invasions of Earth. Remember those? Nobody does, and in subsequent episodes the Doctor puts it down to the human ability to blot out anything that doesn’t fit their worldview.

He’s right. Humanity is easily controlled. Has been easily controlled for a very long time. It’s a herd. The oft-used sheep analogy is not misplaced. Those of us who won’t run with the herd are treated as anomalies and freaks – and perhaps we are. We like it that way.

Some of us will always refuse to obey. Some of us will snarl back at the sheepdogs. Some of us will remember and write it down for the future’s annoying buggers to know they are not alone.

The pen is, still, mightier than the sword.

Just watch out for macaroons…

Size matters

Today is 370 years since the opening paragraph of Jessica’s Trap. That story started on April 30th, 1647, the eve of Beltane. I have to find out what’s going on with that book, the contract with the publisher expired over a year ago and I’m still not sure whether it’s been taken off sale. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. It’s going to come back under Leg Iron Books.

But to get to the point, this one is about sugar. Specifically, the sneaky lies around the subject. Also about the bollocks we get now, in general.

Today the Daily Fibber states that some ready meals have more sugar than a doughnut. Do they mean pro-rata? No, they mean in absolute terms. Basically, they are saying that you are better to feed your kids a single doughnut for lunch rather than a pasta bake or a curry with rice.

Among the worst culprits is Kirsty’s Kids’ Kitchen Chicken Korma With Brown Rice. It is promoted as a ‘nutritionally balanced’ meal with ‘no added sugar’.

But the small print reveals it has a total sugar content of 14.8g, almost four teaspoons, more than twice the 6.2g found in a McDonald’s Sugar Donut.

If you were to compare the sugar content as sugar per 100g of product, the doughnut would win hands down. If you were to compare actual nutritional content, the curry would win every time. However, that does not allow you to pretend that all ready meal companies are subsidiaries of Big Sugar, charged with shifting as much of the stuff into kids as possible.

The whole article is utter bollocks, but then it is the Daily Mail so we’re used to that. Even so, this kind of shit is what politicians believe, because they have no minds of their own and have to have signs on their headboards so they can find their way out of bed in the mornings.

Honey, fruit juices and agave syrup are high in sugar but are not labelled as such.

That’s because they are made of sugar. I wouldn’t expect to see ‘high in sugar’ on a bag of Tate and Lyle’s best granulated sucrose. I fully expect that bag to contain 100% sugar.

It is claimed that we eat more sugar than we used to. I don’t think that’s true at all. Sugar sandwiches were a staple of my youth. Pancakes were coated in golden syrup and sugar. Syrup on toast was a favourite. Sugar mice were mouse shaped blocks of sugar with a hint of food colouring and a bit of string for a tail. You can still get them – a sweet shop in a nearby town sells them.

Yes, a sweet shop. It’s called ‘The sweet shop’. They sell sweets. Nothing else. Just sweets – including ice cream in cones that have been dipped in chocolate and sugar sprinkles. It’s the anti-sugar brigade’s equivalent of a tobacconist or an off-licence. I’m sure they get palpitations even knowing it exists. They’ll go into full meltdown if they find out that, just along the road, is another shop called ‘The chocolate bar’ which sells only chocolate. You wouldn’t burn the calories in a single cube of chocolate fudge by walking between those two shops – and there’s a pub in between in case you get peckish on the way.

There were many sweet shops when I was a kid. All within easy reach of school. We didn’t get fat – well some kids did but really, only a few. Like now. Look at the feral little groin-fruit scampering out when school closes. There are a few fat ones, some chubby ones (who will lose it all when they hit the growth spurt of puberty) and a lot of scrawny little urchins.

They are probably, on average, a bit heavier than my generation but we didn’t have computers and Xboxes, we did most of our playing outside. Then again, we did have Scalextric and train sets and toy cars and soldiers and a lot of really good board games so we did a lot of sitting around too. Especially in lousy weather, which we get a lot of in the UK.

People have been getting larger as generations progress. Look at those antique dining chairs. They are far too small to be useful now. So this generation being a tad larger and heavier than my generation is not an anomaly. It’s normal.

If modern kids are getting fatter it has nothing to do with sugar. It has more to do with mollycoddling. They aren’t allowed to climb trees. They can’t wander off in the woods in case Gary’s Gang is lurking. Even the toys are no fun any more.

I had a chemistry set. It included magnesium ribbon among other dangerous things. Of course I burnt the magnesium. Who wouldn’t?

I bought my son a chemistry set when he was young. It was the most boring, God-awful waste of time I have ever seen. It had safety glasses! Mine didn’t have those. Safety glasses in a set that was based entirely on the safest experiments you can imagine. Growing copper sulphate crystals is fun the first time but the novelty soon wears off. Where’s the stuff that burns and/or goes bang? Not in the set? Then what the hell are the safety glasses for? He wasn’t much interested and when I looked it over, I saw no reason to push it.

Plastic test tubes and pipettes. I had glass ones. I bought more in the local chemist. I learned how to draw out a pipette into a flexible capillary long before getting chemistry lessons in school. I think I still have a piece of one in my thumb. It only twinges occasionally as a reminder not to do it again.

That set would never kindle anyone’s interest in science. It makes it look extraordinarily tedious.

All this dumbing down in the name of ‘the cheeldren’ is too easy to laugh at. It’s really very dangerous. Making children super-slim means they have no energy reserves for that massive growth spurt at puberty. A lot of us looked like bean bags at 11 years old and like panel pins at 14. No intervention was necessary. It was nature.

I’m still wondering whether the introduction of spectacles when I had blurry distance vision at 11 was a bad idea. I was in that growth spurt time. Things were changing and not all at once. My eyes might have been short-sighted because the eye sockets were growing at a different rate to the eyes in them. It might have corrected itself.

When (if) it did, it adjusted to give me correct vision without realising I had glass lenses in the way. Now I have to wear them – not all the time, only when I have to look at things.

My close-up vision has definitely deteriorated with age though. I could see things clearly less than 10 cm in front of my eyes which is why I could paint the eyes onto 1/72 scale figures. Can’t do that now without a magnifier, but that’s normal. My closest clear focus is now 25 cm without any lenses between.

Yet I wonder, would my long vision have corrected itself if my growing body wasn’t looking through those lenses? I suppose I’ll never know.

I used to laugh at the daft pronouncements and at the anenecephalic politicians who just lapped it all up. That was before I realised how deadly it actually was.

There are people claiming that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. It’s steam! I have seen, recently, claims that there is antifreeze in vape. No, antifreeze is ethylene glycol. Vape contains propylene glycol, a harmless food grade thickening agent found in yogurt and many other things. Including asthma inhalers, in case you want to jump up with ‘Breathing is not the same as eating’.

Smoking has risks. They are vastly overplayed, the risk to others is so comical I could never skip the chance to terrify an antismoker. But yes, there are risks. There were risks in my first chemistry set, my first airgun, my first forays (untrained) into meddling with electricity and explosives and I accepted the risk and did it anyway. That will never change for me. ‘Perfectly safe’ is no fun at all.

Perfectly safe is what the idiots in the pressure groups claim to want. What their aims will achieve is the extinction of the human race and in some cases, of all life on the planet.

Bill (wee fookin’ bawbag) Gates has stated that he wants to reduce atmospheric CO2 to zero. Really. Zero. I have thought up a way that it could be done but I will die before I tell a single soul. If atmospheric CO2 was zero, every single plant and alga on this planet is dead within days.

When they die, nothing is producing oxygen. We breathe oxygen, as do the rest of the animals around us. We exhale CO2. My device mops it all up.

The oxygen will run out. ‘Bye. Well, some anaerobic bacteria will be around so the planet can start again. Makes me wonder if that happened before…

That is Bill Gates, multi-millionaire who thinks money makes him clever. He’s not alone. George Soros thinks money makes him superior. So do the Virgin Beard Guy and the rich tart he’s funding (can’t be bothered looking them up, it’s late) to make us vote for what they want, not what we want. Politicians think they are superior because they have money even though they only have money because they extort it from the rest of us in taxes. They produce fuck all. No wonder they support benefit spongers. Kindred spirits.

They want to tax Electrofag. They have paid shills pretending it’s dangerous. Smoking is nowhere near as dangerous as they claim. By comparison, vaping is harmless. Well, mostly harmless. I mean, come on. If you believe breathing smoke is deadly then surely people breathing steam is a better thing?

All the politicians look for are tax opportunities. They would love to tax food and the fat, sugar and salt Puritans are glad to give them enough lies to let them do it. The general public…

…are mostly gullible idiots. I speak from personal experience. I have convinced people of utterly nonsensical things for fun. Tax the rich? They’ll vote for it without realising that as they have a job, they ARE the rich! The really rich don’t pay taxes, they collect them,

I digress, as usual.

Zero salt will kill you. Zero sugar will kill you faster. Zero smoking will kill ASH, which is why they pretend Big Tobacco controls Electrofag even though Electrofag would be the greatest thing ASH could hope for if they really wanted what they say they want.

Too much of anything will kill you too. Eat and drink and smoke whatever you want, if it starts to hurt, slow down.

Oh, I remember when you only saw doctors when you were ill and they fixed you without judging your life…

…and now you have to fit the standard. Be the right size or be shunned.

 

Bunnies and chocolate

The author copies of ‘Tales the Hollow Bunnies Tell’ are on the way to the contributing authors. They are in the gentle hands of the post office sorting gorillas and should arrive in a day or two.

Meanwhile, it seems a Food Guru has been getting paid by a chocolate company and this is an Evil Thing in antisugar world.

Towards the end of that article we see ‘no industry funding of research should be accepted’ which will bring a smirk to the face of Big Tobacco and Big Booze and others. Mine too.

I work for commercial food companies. Tomorrow I’m driving to Inverness to talk about cheese. I do not do dodgy research like the anti-everything shitheads produce. If I don’t think it will work I will tell them that. If they want to pressure me into getting a particular result, I go home. I’m a research consultant, not a PR consultant. You want lies, go talk to ASH or pretty much any politician. If your stuff turns out to be crap or even dangerous, that’s what my report will say. Up to you to publish or suppress it.

The thing I’m going to talk about tomorrow cannot possibly be dangerous. It sounds like it could be really impressive but we’ll see. It would be a nice change for me to work with something that doesn’t come with the proviso ‘one slip and you die’.

I haven’t ever worked for a salt or sugar producer. I’d love to work for a chocolate company, the freebies would be most welcome. However, working for a company does not temper my comments. I don’t much care about money because I’ve never had very much of it and it’s not interesting in itself. It just lets me buy more train stuff on eBay.

I will, and have, lost research work through honesty. I could have taken the money for projects that were never going to work but I told them at the first meeting – ‘this cannot work because…’

It’s all good. I might not have much but I seem to be able to get what I need. It’s not true that working for a company means you are owned by that company – not unless you want to be. Nobody can offer me enough to keep silent if I see something to rant about. I cannot stop the rants. Okay, I’ve never really tried but I probably couldn’t. Research is different. It’s commercial so no details. Company behaviour is fair game.

I know someone high in the ranks of the Scottish Food Standards Agency. She doesn’t like me much. That’s understandable. We worked together on probiotics for a while and we were at loggerheads most of the time. I wanted it to work, she wanted to please the company sponsors. She got the high paying job, I ended up redundant and self-employed.

I think I got the better deal in the end, although it has been tough at times. Even so, my principles are intact. I win. She has riches, I have integrity. I still say I win.

So okay. This nutritionist does a bit of work for a chocolate company. Does that disqualify her as a nutritionist? Depends what she tells them to a small extent. It depends on whether she lets them tell her what to tell others to a much larger extent, and I doubt that is happening. No chocolate company would ever attempt to say ‘choc is good for you’ at this moment. Even when there is real research that shows it is.

Her Righteous friends have declared her heretic. She touched the enemy! Yes, they are really that insular.

It’s a witch hunt. ‘You took money from a proper company rather than live like a tapeworm on taxes? A Witch! Burn her!’

Silence her in case she refutes the Doctrine of the Drones. This has happened so many times now and still the drones believe it all. How do these people remember to breathe? I have cultures of bacteria that wouldn’t fall for this kind of idiot programming. People fall for it all – smoking, vaping, global warming, salt, sugar, you name it, they will believe it.

The Righteous have learned how to manipulate the drones. It was never hard. Bread and circuses gave them the way to do it. Labour party and television took their drone lives from them and ripped away all the potential they could have had. They won’t see it, don’t bother. They are lost and they love their oblivion. They are parasites and proud of it. They don’t even realise they have a purpose and a master who controls their thoughts, but it will hit them smack in the face someday soon.

Too late to resist. Their domino will fall and they will look for support – but all the supporting dominoes are already down. The ones who produced, who worked, who made money. The ones they toppled. In the name of Fighting Big Companies For No Reason Other Than That They Exist.

The dominoes are going down. Everyone’s turn is coming. Can you stop it? My domino is already down and I see nobody who wants to help re-stand it. Why would I help with yours? I’ll just drop a hint.

If you want to wipe out an ants’ nest, you have to kill the queen. Then you get peace.

 

Do you see your enemy now? I know most of the readers here already have but one day a curious drone might happen by.

They’ll just mind-wipe what they’ve read though.  Maybe, just one, will understand.

For one, it’s all worth the effort.

Dominoes

No, it’s not about pizza.

Today I was blocked again on Twitter. It’s what the indoctrinated and the one-track-minded would love to do in real life: just silence any alternative viewpoint. Except… it doesn’t silence anyone. It just stops the blocker’s involvement in the conversation.

So I guess the one who blocked me won’t see this. Should I start to care, I’ll be sure to post an update. I’ve given up on these people. They cannot bear to consider any other view and I long ago tired of talking to walls.

His argument was that cattle produce methane, methane causes global warming, so if people eat less beef there’ll be less cattle and thereby save the planet.

I pointed out that if he wants less cattle then he must also restrict all milk products. I mentioned falling dominoes. Twitter’s limitations did not allow me to elaborate the difference between beef and dairy herds and I doubt he’d be interested anyway. Nor would he be interested in hearing about all the other ruminant species out there. I’m blocked now but well, I’m not involved in education any more. The wilfully ignorant are not my problem. He’ll see it one day, when his personal domino falls, but I’m not here to save him. I’m here to save me, and anyone else who will listen.

My background is in intestinal microbiology. My PhD was on the metabolism in the gut of ruminant animals. So yes, I know what I’m talking about here.

I saw the bandwagon of methane reduction when it started. I worked in labs that jumped on that bandwagon. Some actually believed it would make a difference but most saw a good way to keep the department funded. Sadly, that part of science is necessary: experiments don’t pay for themselves. So, many labs run high-profile projects for funding and do the interesting stuff behind the scenes. You only get to hear about the interesting stuff when it finally does something impressive.

The interesting stuff won’t get any funding as speculation, it has to prove itself first. It does that on the back of bandwagon grants.

Methane is trivial as a greenhouse gas. It was long ago shown that water vapour is the major greenhouse effector but you can’t take exhalations and you can’t tax the sun on the ocean. Therefore, carbon dioxide and methane, extraordinarily tiny components of the air, have to be continuously blamed. There’s no money in steam.

If there was that much methane in the air then every time I lit a cigarette, the flare would be visible in Edinburgh. Methane isn’t inert, there are soil bacteria that use if for growth so it does get used up. It isn’t the final end product, it’s part of a cycle. I worked on methane oxidising bacteria as one of those Interesting Things at the back of another project. Didn’t get too far but I did get a paper out of it.

You cannot isolate one single reaction and claim you have the answer to the global ecosystem. It’s a very complex ecosystem. Change one part of it and all the rest will change to adapt to it. Like rabbits or cane toads in Australia – meddle with an ecosystem and all hell can break loose. One change is like toppling that first domino. It’s hard to stop the chain reaction once it starts.

The Green God’s religion does not recognise dominoes. To them, every scientific result is to be taken in isolation and then applied to the entire planet as Gospel. Unquestionable. ‘The science is settled’. Yeah, well, if it’s unquestionable then it’s not science. It’s a cult. They can’t grasp that.

The also can’t grasp that cows are not the only source of methane – in fact they aren’t even the major source. Mud flats, peat bogs, any swamp anywhere is pumping out methane all the time (I spent three years working on bacteria in estuarine mud flats too). And we won’t even start on what happens when a subsea methane clathrate collapses. The ice worms that live in them are cute though.

Cows don’t produce methane. No mammal does, not directly. Bacteria in their guts produce methane and those bacteria are not specific to the gut. They live in swampy ground and anywhere it’s wet and there’s no or very little oxygen. Including deep water. Cows are a small part of the whole ecosystem and yet they are to be wiped out to save the planet? Total extinction will have no measurable effect on methane production at all.

That’s not why they are being wiped out. They are to be removed so we don’t eat meat. There’s a reason for that.

I remember when butter was suddenly deemed a Terrible Thing. Spread butter on your toast and a heart attack was only hours away. It’s been shown to be bollocks now but it persisted for decades. It coincided with the rise of margarine, then the pretend-butter spreads I refer to as plasticine. Butter, it turns out, is healthier than the synthetics but it took a long time to get the truth past the censors.

Doesn’t matter if the cows are to be eradicated. All we’ll have left are the synthetics. Synthetic milk already exists. It’s horrible but it exists.

Sugar is suddenly evil. Well not really suddenly, it’s been sneered at for a long time. That started with the introduction of artificial sweeteners and has become harsher and more desperate recently as people are rejecting the synthetics in favour of actual sugar.

Today’s new product is insect protein. A whole industry is trying to get off the ground. Faced with the choice, would you pick the burger made from beef or the one made from cockroaches? Yeah, it’s not a hard choice.

So it has to be made a hard choice. Push up the price of meat with ‘greenhouse tax’ and ‘fat tax’ and boost the guilt trips and soon the roachburger is all you can afford. The drones fall for it every time.

I have seen Twitter drones insist that Electrofag is designed by the tobacco companies to keep us smoking. I don’t engage in conversation with that level of stupid, it’s so concentrated it might be contagious. There’s no point.

Electrofag is the biggest threat the tobacco companies have ever faced.  I have several and I like them – although I still like the real ones too. Many have switched away from the real ones to Electrofag, and many new ‘smokers’ became new vapers instead. Isn’t that what those who hate tobacco companies wanted? A big dent in their profits?

It’s not what those who live on other people’s earnings want. Tobacco taxes account for an enormous amount of revenue and Electrofag is denting that too. This should give anti-tobacco governments a problem. Their drones will want to cheer on the demise of tobacco but those at the top can’t allow it to happen. What happens to their funding, their very reason for existence, if we all switch to vaping?

Fortunately the drone mind is easy to manipulate. Just tell them it’s another kind of tobacco, tobacco companies sell it, and all vapers turn into smokers. Those are all total lies, none of them ever happened, but the drones need no evidence. They will believe what they are told and block anyone who tries to tell them anything different.

Twitter is perfect for drone control. They’ll block any reasonable voice and end up talking amongst themselves, just reinforcing the indoctrination they’ve been exposed to until the Cult of the Green God is ready to launch its own jihad on we filthy heretics.

It’s not new. Many cults have used the same techniques to produce blindly-believing followers. This one pretends to use science. Its pronouncements come from academics.

I’ve met an awful lot of academics. Some are at genius level, most are merely clever but some make you wonder how they got in there. I can think of two PhD’s I’ve met who made me wonder if the qualification was really worth anything at all.

Yes, there are idiot academics. They make up for their uselessness by fast-talking and sounding convincing. The cunning ones build a following and the really devious get the press on side. It’s hard to sack someone when the press has built them up to hero status.

Personally I avoid any contact with the press. I talked to one once, was totally misrepresented and had phone calls from genuine scientists wondering what the hell I was up to. Now, I have no comment for any reporter anywhere. Read the journal papers, wait for the data to be published. I’m not talking until that’s done. At the moment I work as a consultant for commercial companies so can’t say much of anything anyway.

I’ve never blocked anyone on Twitter and never been blocked for abusive language. I’ve been blocked twice for agreeing with people, once for sympathising, and a few times for trying to tell them the truth. They don’t want the truth, they want their beliefs.

Let them have their beliefs. I work in science. Everything I do can be questioned and sometimes, those questions reveal to me something I’ve missed. I do not silence dissent. I encourage it. It’s a source of new information. I have no time to play with those who believe ‘the science is settled’.

That’s a religion. I do not have time for religion.

Stupidity

I was listening to a kindred spirit, Foamy the Squirrel, this evening and he had a rant about stupid people. It was the usual totally over-the-top rant but he did have a point. I’m not sure he really made it though.

Here’s the rant for those who can take his wildness.

His point was that protecting stupid people with laws enforcing safety is dumbing down the entire race. We should let Darwin’s Natural Selection operate as intended. Well, we used to do that and while it was messy, idiots only did idiotic things once.

However, I’d go further.

My car has four wheel drive. Not all the time and (to my disappointment) it does not have a big lever to engage four wheel drive. The car does it all on its own. If the front wheels start to slip, it engages the back wheel drive all on its own.

It also has an automatic gearbox which I’ve decided is an idiotic machine. It changes up the gears far later than I would. Every time, I have gritted teeth as the engine revs climb and I’m thinking ‘change up, you bastard’.

I have only once tried to teach someone to drive. She paid for lessons instead.. You either learn it in the first five minutes or I give up teaching. I can teach you microbiology and I know it can take time because there’s a lot of it and some of it is hard, but a car only has a few buttons, pedals and switches. that matter. Mine has some I might never press… and it’s automatic, you don’t even need to learn gear changes.

The sunroof button (yes, the buggers make those electric too now) isn’t likely to get a lot of use in Scotland.

But I digress.

The car has all kinds of safety features that were once only found on Volvos. It means I can drive like a dick and know I have a better than average chance of walking away from a crash that will write off the car. I don’t drive like a dick because I blew my entire car budget on this one and can’t buy another one. But I could.

When I was driving my first car, a MkII Ford Cortina I bought for £75, it had no safety features. It barely had a dashboard. The steering was so loose I’d start turning the wheel a few metres before the corner. I took all the rubber plugs out of the floor to stop the leaks filling it with water and often drove it with only the driver’s seat installed. Sometimes it was even bolted to the floor.

It was a shit heap. So I drove very carefully indeed. If that car was totalled in a crash it was very likely to total me too.

Well okay, I did make the passengers jump now and then but the Cortina had corners you could see. Not like the modern ones where you can’t see where the front or back ends are. This was a rectangle when viewed from above and the driver had sight of every corner. I drove that thing through gaps with a quarter of an inch to spare each side. I wouldn’t do that with a modern car. The wavy lines look good but you’re never sure exactly how wide or long it is.

Nowadays I am older and a much more sedate driver (CStM will not mention TruckGate at this or any other point. It happened once and it was perfectly safe!).

I once drove a Ford Focus Estate for six months with nothing but the odometer functioning on the dashboard. I drove my Commer van in the same state for rather longer. Safety? Who needs it?

But to attempt to get back to the point, Foamy’s real argument goes beyond protecting stupid people. All this safety makes the rest of us complacent. Drivers who would have been careful drivers now think ‘well, I have seatbelts, air bags, side impact bars, I’m basically in a tank and I can take risks I wouldn’t normally even consider’.

It’s not just the idiots who crash any more.

It’s the same with tools. I have an electric sander (two, now, since I got a belt sander from my parents for my birthday) and they are festooned with things to stop me sanding my fingers off. I also have old style planes and saws that I am much more careful with because they have sharp edges and no safety features. I am much more likely to damage myself with the tools that have ‘safety’ features because the safety features should protect me – but they don’t always work.

Making safety a law was a bad idea. People expect to be safe all the time now. Even the ones who bang on about being ‘close to nature’. Nature is not safe. Nature is deadly. If you really want to be close to nature, try fending off an enraged badger naked and bare-handed. You have no chance. If you get stitched back together after that one, try a grizzly bear or a tiger – although if you are being all natural, no stitches.

Those are extremes. Total danger and total safety. Not so long ago, the human race had something in between. We called it common sense.

We didn’t go out in T-shirt and shorts when it was -10C and windchill took it down to -20C. We didn’t fight tigers naked. We didn’t drive with the belief the car was going to protect us with its safety features. We treated sharp tools – workshop and kitchen – with respect. We knew how to use weapons without bemusing the enemy by killing ourselves before they had a chance to.

For the upcoming generation, all that is gone.

Now, your personal safety is someone else’s problem and you can sue them for not doing it. Eventually, people will stop selling you anything you might hurt yourself with unless you sign a disclaimer first. Many of the new generation will refuse to sign so they’ll be carving the Sunday microwave roast with a spoon.

That assumes they still have roasts, what with acrylamide and the deadly bacteria imagined to be in everything. I think they can dish out boiled cockroach with a spoon safely.

There are books about the fall of ancient civilisations. They have a common theme. They died because they went soft. Scared of change, scared of anything that might hurt them, scared of death but waiting to die.

Even in fiction, it’s how great civilisations fall. Self hatred kills every one of them.

So did you think our Western civilisation would last forever? The Victorians thought the Empire was eternal and now we have British people wanting to apologise for it! I don’t hear those people demanding the Muslims apologise for the Ottoman empire nor for anyone else’s. That’s by the by, doesn’t matter. As the Brunnen G said, we deserve to die. They believe it as much as our Lefties, the difference is that our lefties don’t think it applies to therm.

This civilisation has run its course. Oh there will be another to follow, also believing itself eternal but it will die in time too. The Soviet Union, Rome, Etrusca, Greece, Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs, all were eternal and all are gone now. Time to move on.

I’m not scared by this. We will have a few fighters left, every time. There will always be those who rise against tyranny just as there will always be tyranny. They might lose but they will always try and there will always be more coming up the line.

Everyone is human. We are the same animal. We are a pack animal with a leader who is bigger and stronger than the rest. Somehow we got to the stage where the leader is more of a total twat than the rest but it won’t last. It never does.

The times, as Bob Dylan said. they are a-changing. For the better? Hahaha! As before they are changing to get to the same.

But there will always be that rebellious streak. Always.

If there is hope, it really does lie in the proles.

 

The laws that aren’t

Many people regard the saying ‘the customer is always right’ as if it’s a law. It’s not. It’s company policy at Marks and Spencer. It applies to no other business, anywhere, unless the business chooses to implement it.

I wouldn’t recommend it. It attracts the most arrogant, self-righteous, pompous bastards to your shop where they know they can behave like spoiled brats and be pandered to. It also wrecks staff morale because if the customer is always right, then by extension the staff member they are arguing with is always wrong. High staff turnover and eternal training costs are the natural consequence.

It’s not a law, no matter how many people think it is. Any other shop can tell you to piss off and never return and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Via @Dick_Puddlecote on Twitter, it seems there is a non-law that says nonsmokers can’t be sold Electrofags. Oh, some bunch of self-important Public Health arseholes spent a lot of time and taxpayer’s money ‘secret shopping’ in vape shops. Will they sell it to us if we don’t smoke?

We appreciate your support @ASHWalesCymru pic.twitter.com/55aiz8iHDi

— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) 10 April 2017

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It’s a vape shop. The only customers who go inside are ones who want to buy an Electrofag. So the shopkeeper doesn’t ask if they already smoke. Indeed, they are not allowed to sell Electrofag as a stop-smoking aid so asking if the customer smokes could be seen as a violation of that rule. They are only required to check the customer is over 18. Electrofag sellers have always done that. There was never any need to force them to do it.

This ridiculous farce is no different to a vegan group secret shopping in a butcher’s and then getting all uppity because the butcher will sell meat to vegans. The butcher will sell meat to anyone who wants it. It’s a meat shop. If you don’t want meat, don’t go in there.

I’ve never been inside a New Look shop. They sell women’s clothes. I don’t want any. Should I go in and buy something then call the newspapers because they sold a bra to a man? It’s really no different to what Public Health have just done.

In all the years I’ve been smoking, I have never once been asked if I’m a smoker or non-smoker when buying baccy. Can we expect ASH and Public Health to raid Tesco and Morrison’s next, because they went in and asked for a pack of cigarettes and the retailer neglected to ask if they smoked? I think the retail response would be ‘if they don’t want to smoke them, why did they want to buy them?’

Every smoker once bought his or her first pack of cigarettes (in my case it was cigars) and every vaper once bought their first Electrofag. So now some people want to skip the smoking part and go straight to Electrofag. Well why not? Would Public Health really prefer them to start on tobacco and then switch to steam?

Honestly. Politicians listen to what these people say, you know. Unquestioningly. It’s seriously time to apply a minimum IQ to anyone wanting to stand for election because we are being led by utter cretins.

As for the medics, well, I have no faith at all in modern medicine. They used to employ intelligent medics but no longer, it seems. Now all you need to become a medic is the ability to absorb indoctrination and to shut down the analytical part of your mind in order to qualify. Where we once had medics, we now have drones. They just think what they are told to think and they diagnose based on personal prejudice rather than medicine.

If only the medics and politicians could see all the parasites stuck to them. ASH serves no purpose beyond being a new Smoker Inquisition. All the lifestyle dictators in the NHS are the reason it’s always short of medical staff and medicines. Get the parasites out, get proper doctors and nurses in, and we’ll have a damn good health service again.

Physicians, heal thyselves.

Now we are told that crisps are evil. Full of deadly things like fat and salt and… acrylamide.

Oh there’s no law on acrylamide content. There are guidelines but not a law. As for crisps, well, is there anyone out there who thinks crisps are health food? They are a snack. A small snack, a fraction of a potato in a bag. There might be a lot of fat and salt and other crap as a proportion of the weight of crisps in a bag, but the total weight really isn’t very much. Diluted by one human body, even a small one, it amounts to bugger all.

This is the same game as ‘there are 600 deadly chemicals in a cigarette’. A typical cigarette contains 0.6g of tobacco. Ignore the fact that most of it is cellulose (it’s made of leaves, I feel I have to point that out considering the level of intelligence we have to deal with in government and medicine these days) and let’s pretend it’s 0.6g of just the deadly chemicals.

Let’s also pretend there is no ash residue and nothing at all comes off as smoke.

That gives us 0.006g of each deadly chemical. The reality is far, far smaller than that. Scared? I’m not. I’m more scared of diesel fumes on a busy street – and I’m not that scared of those either. Okay, that’s partly because I live on a farm at least 11 miles from a town of any size, but I don’t feel the need to cover my face when visiting the town.

I don’t often eat crisps but when I do, I don;t worry about the salt and fat content. I’m not going to worry about acrylamide in crisps because I like the crispy bits on the outside of roast meat. I know there will be many daft sods out there who will be scared. Including every single politician and medic.

The crisp story doesn’t scare me at all because when you change the percentages into real quantities eaten, they amount to… bugger all. Just like the deadly stuff in smoke. Just like the evil thickening agent (no, idiots, it’s NOT antifreeze) that’s food grade and found in yogurts and loads of other things.

Yet again, the news is up in arms over the breaking of a law that isn’t. The idea behind it all, of course, is to make it law. The general zombie population won’t even notice because they already thought it was a law.

And, once vape shops have to check if you’re a smoker before they sell you Electrofag, Tesco will have to check if you’re a smoker before they sell you any tobacco. Having watched how these evil bastards work for decades, their next logical step isn’t hard to work out.

Then you won’t be able to buy drink unless you can prove you’re a drinker… and so on. They can’t stop us so they’ll kill us off by attrition. Nonsmokers will never be able to take up smoking or vaping, nondrinkers will never be able to buy booze. I know, I can feel the shrugs now. If you don’t smoke and/or drink now, why would you?

I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about those currently growing up who might be looking forward to turning 18 so they can try these things. In the future the only way they’ll get to try them will be to buy totally unregulated stuff from criminal gangs.

Won’t happen? Public Health and ASH and the rest of the nannies will tell you it won’t happen.

Like it didn’t happen when heroin and cocaine were made illegal…

Basically, in the future, all your kids are fucked. You think the Righteous care?

They’re doing it on purpose.