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.

 

 

Witchfinders

The anthology progresses. Six stories from six authors so far and there’s time for more. It’s keeping me busy.

Anyway, even though it’s a Halloween anthology, it’s not what this post is about. This is about the witchfinder mentality.

In the mid 1600s, in the UK, most of Europe and even in rebel colonist land in the USA, if you were accused of witchcraft you were guilty.

The hysteria about witches meant that once accused, you were, basically, fucked. Trials were based on the presumption of guilt. Torture was used to obtain confessions and if you think waterboarding was bad, believe me, what these accused went through makes waterboarding look like a relaxation method.

You would be accused of sailing in sieves and flying on brooms and you had to prove you didn’t do it. How the hell do you prove you didn’t do something? How do you prove that the sudden death of your neighbour’s cows or sheep was nothing to do with you? It’s the ‘teapot orbiting Betelgeuse’ fallacy. I’m pretty damn sure it’s not there but I can’t definitively prove it. I’ve never tried, in fact, because I don’t actually care what’s orbiting Betelgeuse as long as it’s not me.

Modern science can’t prove a negative. What the hell chance did a 1600s peasant have?

They didn’t have to prove you did it. You had to prove you didn’t. In those days, roughly a century before Van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope, how do you prove it was a disease that killed the animals, and not your evil magical jiggery-pokery? It was simply not possible. Once accused, you had no way out.

Then you had the mob. The masses were primed to hate witches by the King James version of the Bible which included the new line ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. It’s not in earlier versions. Mid 1600s, if you didn’t go to Church you were a reviled heathen. So you’d go whether you believed or not. And there really wasn’t much else in the way of education going on for most people at that time. Other than how to milk cows or plough a straight line of course.

Lucky for me, in the event the silly buggers out there ever vote the Greens into power, I can do both those things and also use a scythe and set a snare.

Hey, it’s [the current year] so we’ve outgrown childish tantrum-hate and automatically believing accusations against people we don’t like, haven’t we? Or have we?

I have very limited understanding of American politics. It confuses me that their right side is red and the left is blue because it used to be the other way around in the UK before we switched to communist and ultra-communist options. Now we have red and very-red options here.

I don’t know how Donnie Trumpton became president when most of his own party and all of the other party seem to hate his guts. But he did, against massive odds, and I have to give him kudos for that.

I live near Balmedie in Scotland where there is a Trump golf course and the locals are not happy about it. It’s been an object lesson in the arrogant fuckwittery of the very rich and he is not well liked in this part of Scotland because of it. We don’t actually care about American politics. He might be the best or worst president the USA ever had but here, his people have been behaving like utter bastards for decades and we blame him.

Anyway. Maybe he’s actually a nice guy. I’ve never met him and most likely never will so it’s benefit of the doubt time.

He has been nominating judges for the US version of the High Court in the UK. It’s his right as president as far as I understand it.

He nominated a guy called Kavanaugh. The left don’t like him. Well, they wouldn’t, naturally. So they sent in an accusation that he did some kind of sexual assault at a party when he was in high school. The accuser can’t remember the date or even the city it happened in and both the ‘witnesses’ she named deny seeing anything. One has no memory of the event and the other denies being at a party with her.

Yet all over the Internet, people are believing her unconditionally.

I have known, online and in real life, people who were abused sexually. So many that I have wondered if I was the only butt-ugly child it didn’t happen to. A co-worker in Local Shop had to take time off to testify at a trial of his abuser.

They all had one thing in common. An absolutely precise memory of what happened and when, and who was there. Some things you do not forget.

There are things that happened in my life that I will never forget. None of them, fortunately, involved a trauma such as sexual assault but if it had happened I am sure I’d recall every detail.

I cannot accept this accusation at face value. It goes against everything I have ever heard from genuine victims of such assaults and there have been many. So very many. And it’s too convenient, an anti-Trump accuser of a Trump nominee. Who can’t remember where or when it happened.

Now there’s another one. Her best friend has no recollection of the event and states she had heard nothing about it before. None of their ‘witnesses’ remember anything at all. The claim is that Kavanaugh waved his dick in front of this woman’s face in college.

If I had been at a party where that happened, no matter how smashed I was, I’d remember it. And I was pretty smashed but I remember the time someone set fire to an empty toilet roll tube in the toilet and filled the place with smoke and caused quite a panic (possibly because it was me) and also the time a girl hid in my room with me because her abusive boyfriend was outside (that one wasn’t my fault).

Some things burn into your memory even when drunk. Those I just mentioned were pretty damn trivial compared to being sexually assaulted. If that had happened to me I am sure I could relate the place precisely and the time down to the second and who was there down to their goddamn blood group. Most of the real victims I have met could do most of this.

Yet the mob accept the accusation with no trial and no word from the accused, no more ‘innocent until proven guilty’. We are back to Witchfinder mentality. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.  Let’s have a trial. Oh, too late for that, he’s guilty because the mob says so.

At the same time, paedos and actual convicted rapists are getting a free pass.

Is anyone else wondering about this discrepancy?

Too big for a woman

Get your minds out of the gutter. This is about phones.

Remember the first Yuppie mobile phones? A brick with an aerial sticking out that would cost six month’s income for the average worker. Everyone laughed at the Poserphones – who the hell needs to be contactable when out of the office? It was a gimmick.

Then they got cheaper and smaller and eventually pocket sized. I had (might still have, somewhere) a Motorola Razr flip phone that is tiny. It did the job. It had games but the golf game graphics were so slow to update it was actually unusable.

I got my first one when a pheasant hit my windscreen. Quiet, dead straight country road, full daylight with clear vision ahead, travelling along at a quite reasonable and almost legal speed, a pheasant decided to cross the road ahead of me.

It saw me and stopped. Took a few steps one way, then the other way, finally its pea brain said ‘fly’ just a second too late. It smashed the windscreen.

Well, okay, the insurance covers that so the windscreen repair cost me nothing. While in town though, waiting for the garage to fit a new one, I picked up a mobile phone. It cost about £60, PAYG, primitive but serviceable. I only bought it in case the next collision took me off the road in the middle of nowhere. I rarely used it and gave very few people the number.

That last part is still true. I have a very short contact list in my mobile phone. A couple of them are work ones and they can be a pain on holiday but I rarely bother with holidays anyway. I’m lucky enough to live in a place many people would think of as an ideal holiday destination as long as you like finding skulls in trees and total darkeness when there’s no moon. Also, self-employment means your working hours are when you’re awake. Stop working and nobody is paying you.

Phones got smaller and cheaper… then started to get bigger and more expensive again. And the batteries didn’t last as long because of all the weird shit they can do.

I used to have a Hudl tablet computer. It died, as they all do eventually. I replaced it with an Ibowin Android machine and then another after I stepped on the first one. They cost around £50. Enough to make you swear when you break it but not enough to make you think your financial world has ended.

I do not buy Apple devices. Never have and never will. This is not really about the ridiculous prices they charge, it is much more to do with their declaration that the warranty was invalid for smokers in case a molecule of nicotine in the returned (full of evil and toxic rare metals) gadget killed their entire servicing staff.

They may have withdrawn this paranoid nonsense by now. I do not care. The fact they were so stupid as to put it out in the first place means I can have no faith in their ability to do anything sensible at all. At the prices they charge I expect to see intelligence at every level of the company. They have proved, to me, that this is not so. They employ idiots. I’m not paying their prices to support idiots.

The Ibowin thing I bought runs Android. It’s not fantastic but it does what I want to do and also things I don’t want to do.

It has a slot for extra memory which I instantly filled. Everything important goes on to the SD card in case this one dies. I can then just port it elsewhere.

It also has two SIM card slots. Two. I had to get a £1 SIM just to shut it up because it bleated about having no SIM whenever I turned it on. It’s a phone too! This is as big as an iPad and it’s a dual SIM phone. I am not holding this thing to my face to have a conversation. It would be like talking to an ironing board and people have been sectioned for less.

So, for phone calls I have a Fusion Android phone. It’s bigger than some phones but easily manageable. I picked one I could handle. It’s not a hard thing to do and Android phones are a fraction of the cost of Apple ones.

I had a Windows phone for a while. It didn’t die. Apps were no longer being updated for it and things stopped working, which forced the change. Pity. I liked that one.

Now we have feminists moaning that the new Apple phone is too big for girlie hands.

Well don’t fucking buy it then.

I could use the Ibowin tablet as a phone. A dual SIM phone. I’m not going to because it’s just silly. I’ll use the Fusion phone as a phone.

And you know what? Buying both of them cost about £100.

Imagine what you could do with the money left over from not buying the Apple gadget.

I’m going to spend it on trains and whisky.

Fat or sugar. Make your choice.

There is a current spat on Twitter about the low-carbohydrate vs low-fat diets. Which one is better for weight loss?

Neither.

Also… both.

Anything can make you fat. I have met the occasional fat vegetarian. I was once pretty fat because of whisky. Really. There are around 1800 calories in a bottle of whisky so a daily bottle plus all the food plus the fact that, back then, I spent most of my time in front of a computer, made me into a stunt double for Mr. Blobby. Some nights I became less intelligible than him…

I cut down a lot on the whisky, landed a job as a janitor (times were very, very hard). Very physical working 6 to 8 hours a day, 6, sometimes 7 days a week – the weight simply vanished. I made no changes at all to my actual food intake. It was the same ‘unhealthy crap’ I always ate and still do. Curries, pizza, lemon chicken, anything I can culturally appropriate, I’ll eat it. Except rat on a stick. Everyone has a limit. I’d try it once though.

It’s really simple (as long as we are talking solely in terms of weight loss and ignoring essential amino acids, vitamins etc). Calories in, calories used. If you take in more fuel than you use, your body will store the excess. If you use more fuel than you take in, your body will use its stored excess to make up the difference.

What should you eat to lose weight? It does not matter. Eat what you like but don’t eat more than you need. Eat less than you need and you will lose weight.

Do remember to stop dieting at some point though. Too thin is actually more dangerous than too fat. Having a little bit of reserve is always a good thing – you never know when you might need that little bit of extra energy reserve. Chubby Venezuelans will attest to this. So will all the currently-villified British fatties if Corbyn gets in.

There is much more to it than weight, of course. Healthy eating does not simply consist of calories. The above considers body weight in isolation, it does not consider what those calories consist of.

Sugar, the naked truth – you don’t need any, other than what’s already in the food. Now before you get all outraged, hear me out. I don’t need to smoke, I don’t need to drink whisky. In fact I know that those things are likely to be bad for me one day. I do them because I like them. I know the risks and accept them because to me, the enjoyment outweighs the risks. Okay I don’t drink as much as I used to by any means but I do still like my whisky. One of the advantages of reduced whisky intake is that I don’t need the swill at the bottom end of the market. I now have smaller amounts of the good stuff.

I like sugar too. I will not buy aspartame sweetened things because I know, from personal experience over many experiments, that aspartame will make the world drop out of my bottom. My guts don’t like it at all.

Then there are the energy drinks, or ‘wakey water’ as I call them. I have, again, restricted my intake to one or maybe two a day and never after midnight. But I still like them. Actually I prefer most of the cheaper ones to the full-fat Red Bull but that’s a matter of personal taste and also wallet strain. One for about £1.50 compared to a pack of six for £1.50, it’s not a heavy decision for a one-time homeless guy in Scotland.

As I said before, calorie-free ‘energy’ drinks are a joke. If you drink those and believe they give you energy you are insane. And probably awake and tired.

We use sugar because we like it. Yes, too much is bad for you but too much of anything is bad. The dose makes the poison – even too much water will kill you. It will kill you faster, too. We do not, however, need raw sugar in the same way that we need water. In an internal sugar shortage, your body can make the sugar it needs from fatty acids produced by bacteria in the gut, and even from protein. There is also sugar in a lot of foods anyway, especially plant foods. Your body can get all the sugar it needs from a salad but, well, salad… chocolate… no contest really.

Oh I eat salad sometimes. With salt, because everything is better with salt.

That’s another issue. The healthists insist we have a daily salt allowance. I do not accept any kind of ‘allowance’ because I’ve always been a rebellious little goblin and always will be. I live by my own rules and often break those too.

The salt thing is bollocks on many levels. If you have a job that involves a lot of physical work you will sweat a lot. If, like me, you really don’t like hot weather because it makes you sweat to the point where you have to replace your eyebrows with rain gutters: If you labour day in, day out at heavy lifting… you lose salt as well as water in that sweat.

If your job involves sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office then you don’t need to sweat much. If you are one of those Satanic hybrids who like hot weather and don’t feel like you’re melting whenever the sun hits you then you probably don’t sweat as much as those of us from normal, cold places. So you don’t lose salt and water so quickly.

A one size fits all approach is horrifyingly wrong. In anything, if it comes to it. I eat a lot of salt. I’ve no idea how far over the ‘allowance’ I am because I don’t care enough to measure it. I carry little salt packs from takeaways with me everywhere and I have been known to just open one of those packs and eat the contents as raw salt. On very hot days, usually.

Your body regulates its salt/water balance. Too much salt and your urine is salty. Too little salt and you die of hyponatremia. It takes a hell of a lot of salt intake to wreck that balance, and you’ll know if you’re heading that way. Your kidneys will tell you with pain.

It doesn’t take very long to die if you have too little.

There is no point drinking water on hot days if you’re not also taking in some salt. You lose water and salt in sweat, you have to replace both, not one, or your body will simply piss out the water to keep them in balance. Modern medicine makes no allowance for this, nor for differences between individuals. Modern medicine uses the British Standard Human as their model and if you don’t fit the manual, well tough. They will let you die.

It used to be enough to have a bag of peanuts or crisps to get plenty of salt. I have, in recent years, had to add salt to peanuts and crisps when I eat them because it’s now been reduced to silly levels. Like the calorie-free energy drinks, we now have ‘ready salted’ crisps to add to our list of false advertising. I remember when crisps were unsalted but came with a litle blue twisted bag of salt to add as much as you wanted. Sometimes a pack had two bags of salt by mistake. I loved getting those.

Let’s talk about fat.

You do not get fat from eating fat, unless you are eating human fat. Or you are eating too much fat. Your fat is not the same as cow fat or pig fat or sheep fat or nut fat. Yes, bags of nuts now have a ‘high fat’ warning. Sigh. They are seeds. The plant has to start growing underground, in the dark. It has to have energy reserves in the form of fats and starches until it can get its leaves into the light and start making its own.

Seeds are full of stored energy. That’s why we eat them.

In fact seeds – cereals, grains – are so full of stored energy that you can get very fat indeed eating those things. Even if you never eat any meat based fat at all.

When you eat a bag of nuts or cereal or rains you are not eating pure carbohydrate. You are also eating some protein and a lot of plant fats. So don’t tell me you are ‘avoiding fat’ by eating those things. You are avoiding certain types of fat by eating loads of another type.

In the end it doesn’t matter. Any fat you eat is broken down by your cells and if it doesn’t need to be used, it is reassembled, along with any excess carbohydrate, into human fat and then stored. Fat does not make you fat. Carbohydrate does not make you fat. Taking in more calories than you use is what makes you fat.

There’s a lot more – there’s enough for a series of lectures in this topic!

Some vitamins are fat soluble and you will not get them at all on a fat free diet. They only exist in the fat. They are insoluble in water. Vitamin K – ever tried to make a bacterial growth media where that was an essential ingredient? It just sits on top in a little blob.

So much more, but this is just a little backwater blog and putting whole lectures up feels somewhat futile.

Protein is worth a mention. Some years ago, the Atkins diet was all the rage. No carbs, just protein. Everyone on it was instantly recognisable because they had acetone breath. Their bodies broke the protein to make sugar and dumped the excess parts as nitrates and acetone. Sure, you can live like that but if your only goal is weight loss it’s pointless. All it does is make you smell like cleaning fluid.

All you need for weight loss is to take in fewer calories than you use. That is all there is to it. There is nothing more complex involved and it will save you money, not cost you money. You spend less on food. Alternatively you can spend more to have someone else to tell you to spend less on food. Can you see how silly that sounds?

Diets are expensive. You pay people to tell you to spend less money on food. You pay more than you save. Does anyone see the scam in this?

Look, it’s really simple.

Are you happy with your health on your curent diet (ignore weight)? No? See a dietician. A proper, quialified one. Yes? Your diet is fine.

Are you feeling like you have to lose weight but answered ‘yes’ to the first question? Just eat less and/or exercise more.

Are you feeling like eating a cake of yourself and don’t give a shit? Good. Carry on.

All of those are correct answers. If you want to lose weight, take in less than you use. If you are feeling bad, and you think it’s because of what you eat, see a dietician. If you are happy as you are, carry on.

Modern medicine will never get it.

So the diet scammers have an open field for profit, when losing weight should, by any definition of logic, cost less than whatever you spend on food now.

You can change your life and body without outside help.It does not depend on how much you want to spend.

It only depends on how much you care about it.

Wind Power

No, no, no, I have not made another baked bean Madras. Once was enough for anyone’s lifetime. I have never felt so deflated, nor so totally empty.

This is about the Green God’s Gadgets. Again, no need to worry. I have not grown a straggly beard and had all my arm muscles replaced with lentils and string beans. I am still of the firm opinion that the entire man-made global warming rubbish is a control freak scam and believe me, smokers are currently best placed to spot those. Especially smoking scientists – which is what I am.

However. I am and always have been attracted by the notion of free energy. Okay, yes, it’s never really free. You have to buy the thing that turns sun or wind into electricity and it only works when there is actual sun or wind around. I get that. It’s not just about electricity bills though.

Living way out here, internet is best described as dire. Sometimes teeth-grindingly slow and sometimes it will die out for short random intervals. I have been looking into a 4G connection. That will work if I place the receiver at a certain point at the kitchen window (yes, it’s that bad) but it can work.

It still won’t work if there is no electricity. It doesn’t matter how many phones or tablets or laptops you have fully charged, when the power goes of and the router stops, it all stops. Unless you stand in exactly the right place with your phone. A little restrictive, I think you’ll agree.

Two issues here. Recently, someone drove a truck or tractor into the phone line pole at the end of the drive. Phone and internet were off for a day until it was patched up, and off for another few hours another day while they fixed it properly. A small issue? Yes, but it can happen again.

The phone line passes through trees and trimming back those trees would be a job for a tree surgeon. Get it wrong and you’d bring the line down right now. Ignore it and one day, one of those branches will fall on the line and bring it down. It will happen.

The other issue is the electricity supply. This is prone to random outages. The local distribution transformers are at the top of a hill – safe from flooding but not from lightning. It’s not too frequent but sometimes there is no electricity.

This is a bigger issue for us than for most. Cooking is not a problem, we have a hob powered by gas bottles outside. Heating is a small problem, we have a wood burning stove in the living room and an entire elm tree cut into small bits in the barn, so could huddle up and survive an extended blackout.

The big problem is water. Our supply comes from a well via a pump. The well head supplies the pump tank by gravity but the pump supplies the rest of the house through filtration systems. That has to have power. No power, no water.

I have considered buying a generator. There is an old huge rusty one here which could probably be put in working order but the amount of fuel and oil those things can go through in regular use is horrible. I am still considering one as an emergency backup. It would really only need to run the water pump as the most vital component of the system, so a small one would suffice.

But… could I sustain the pump with a Green God Gadget using 12V batteries and an inverter? It does of course depend on how long I’d have to do it for but it’s possible, at least for a short outage.

I looked into it. Solar is a bit of an issue this far north. When the problems are most likely to arise – winter – the sun peeks over the horizon, says ‘ screw this shit’ and ducks back down again. You can’t charge a little garden solar light in winter here.

How about wind? We get quite a bit of that, being on top of a hill. Well, okay, but it’s not really reliable. On a still cold day after a storm there’s nothing to charge the batteries to run the pump.

Both options are very expensive to install. The Green God might be here to save mankind but he ain’t doing it for free. No sir, he’s an expensive consultant indeed.

Maybe these things will pay for themselves eventually. Maybe not. There’s only one way to find out and it’s risky. What I need is a Scotland-oriented reliable power generator.

Rain. Rivers. Streams. I have never seen a hosepipe ban in Scotland. Water is not short of supply here, it drops out of the sky most days. So, if I get a windmill, put cups on the ends of the blades and dip it in the stream next to the house…. I have something far more reliable than wind power.

What if I install little waterwheels all along every downpipe from the roof? Each one only generates a little bit but if there are 20 or more per downpipe it would add up.

Sun power is sod all use in north Scotland in winter. Scratch that one. Wind power is a bit better but windless days happen – and often when it’s really cold. Water though… there’s a lot of it and it’s always moving. Best of all, you get no energy from the water itself.

Water power is actually gravity power. 20 waterwheels in a downpipe or drain – how much energy does the water lose from one waterwheel to the next?

None. The energy is not coming from the water. The water is a vector. The energy is coming from the gravity pulling the water down, and that is inexhaustible. It does not matter whether you have 10, 20, 100 waterwheels in that downpipe. The last one gets the same driving force as the first one.

The same is true in rivers and streams and our ancestors knew this. They could build one or forty watermills along a river. It made no difference at all. If you were in watermill 40, you saw no difference in river speed from watermill 1. No energy is extracted from the flow of the water because that’s not where the energy is. It’s gravity. Water flowing downhill. It would work the same if it was dry sand flowing downhill. Gravity is the energy that cannot run out.

Nobody seems to care about this. It’s all ‘buy solar panels, buy little windmills’ and they will work some of the time. As I said, here in north Scotland, solar panels work when you don’t need them and wind can be capricious. But the river always flows.

I have a map of this place dated 1768. Both the main river and the stream are on the map and both are still here. Neither have any record of ever drying up. They flow and they flow and a watermill will not slow the energy in that flow by a single joule because it is not the water that is the energy in the flow. It’s gravity. That is the real free energy but the Green God’s Followers don’t want to exploit it. There’s no money in free stuff  😉

So I am wondering. I have candles for lighting, I have all sorts of backup batteries for computers (enough to keep the little ones going at least), I have alternative heating and cooking arrangements, so really I need to power the water pump and possibly a 4G router in a total outage. I don’t really need a big generator.

You know, if it came right down to it, I could bypass that pump and use the gravity-fed water from the well. Unfiltered and risky but better than nothing and boiled, it would be mostly okay.

So. If I get an old car dynamo or alternator from the scrapyard, fit it to a waterwheel with sufficient diameter to ignore the seasonal rise and fall of water level, and dip it in the river, I could have a more reliable bank of backup batteries than anything the Green God’s Gadgets have on offer.

That river is not going to stop flowing tomorrow. The wind might.

The Censors Are Coming

I see YouTube have completely removed Alex ‘Shouty’ Jones and the Infowars/Prison Planet channel. There has been much wailing, gnashing of hair and rending of teeth on Twitter today.

Also much smugness. Those who wanted Shouty Alex silenced are filled with glee at the news.

As for me… I don’t care. All I see is the free market in action.

This is not suppression of free speech. This is a Lefty-run site doing what you’d expect of a Lefty-run site. Same goes for Farcebok and Twatter. At the moment the Infowars people are still on Twatter but I won’t be surprised if they get banned from there too.

The bias on these sites has been obvious for a long time. Get a bit too right-wing and they will silence you. Get all SJW and call for the extinction of white people and they hail you as a hero. So really, getting banned for talking outside the echo chamber is no surprise and I think I only get away with being there because I only have a small following. And I don’t call people ‘cunts’ so don’t draw undue attention to myself.

True suppression of speech would be the forced closure of the Infowars/Prison Planet websites (are they the same thing? I’ve never been sure). That has, so far, not happened. Okay, they can’t advertise it on the SJW-run sites but really, those sites are losing the kind of audience Infowars wants to reach anyway. They are turning into pointless echo chambers and their share prices are starting to reflect this.

See, advertisers don’t want to advertise to penniless wannabe commies. They want to advertise to capitalists who have spare money to waste on stuff they don’t actually need.

So which am I? Currently I’m a limited-resource wannabe capitalist. Sure I buy stuff I don’t really need, mostly model railway related, and I would love to have enough spare cash to buy top-class brand-new brass rail track to cover the entire garden. I don’t have the cash and am not likely to so I’m settling for plastic track. What the hell, it works.

The point is, if you have a website with thousands, maybe millions of members, many of whom are well-off enough to buy some not-really-vital things, you attract advertisers. Drive away their target consumers and the advertisers leave too.

Here comes a generalisation. People with money tend to be right-wing because they don’t want workshy layabouts to take it away from them. Workshy layabouts tend to be left-wing because they want free stuff.

That’s clearly not universally true. Some very rich people claim to be socialists but then the ‘redistribution of wealth’ does not apply to them. If they truly believed in it, they could just do it themselves. How many prominent rich ‘socialists’ are involved in tax avoidance, and even evasion? And yet they claim to be socialist.

Also some on the left are not workshy layabouts. They aren’t all in government, after all. Some really want a better life and believe they will get it through socialism. That’s more an issue of the teaching of history though.

I do not claim to be socialist, yet if I had millions and a really worthy cause was floundering, I’d bung them a bag of cash. I’ve been down to ‘homeless and in debt’ and it taught me not to dismiss those in that situation now. I’ve met them. They mostly got there through bad luck or bad decisions. They are people.

It also taught me, eventually, when I was in danger of getting into that state again, to be careful with money. I don’t need much. Give me a billion pounds and I couldn’t even spend the interest. I have no use for private yachts or planes.

I must admit, this conversation on showing a visitor around a huge house I’d lived in for ten years would be funny:

Visitor: ‘What’s in that room?’

Me: ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in there’.

Although I would quite like a restored steam engine and a couple of miles of track.

There is a man who has done something like this on the Dufftown to Keith railway. I’ve met him, he works as station master at Dufftown and sometimes drives the trains – but he owns all of it. He has some DMUs fom the sixties that are restored to their former primitive glory and you can ride those rails at certain times of year. It’s something to aim for.

Socialism gives you nothing to aim for. Everyone gets the same whether they try or not. That’s why it always fails. Why push to make a better product, or any product, when you’re getting the same income as someone who does bugger all? Since there are always those who do bugger all, the socialist system must inevitably collapse. It always has and it always will.

Socialism is kept alive by capitalism. The socialist sites such as Farcebok, Youtube, Twatter etc. make loads of money by selling advertising space. Now, they are banning those the advertisers want to target and keeping the ones who want the advertised evil capitalist companies shut down.

Okay. They are private companies. It’s their choice to do that. But then they can’t cry when the advertisers move on to sites like Gab or PewTube or EyeTube (is that still going? I hope so) because that is where their target market has moved to. They can’t claim to be socialist while their share price drops through the floor and they bleat like failed capitalists using socialism to sucker in the idiots who are not members, they are the product they are selling. To the advertisers whose clients their members are trying to shut down.

I have absolutely no issue with any multinational company worth multi-billions pretending to be socialist and shutting down those who would prevent the real socialists shutting them down, within the confines of their own echo bubble. They own that company, it’s their choice to die of appeasement if they want to.

However, it would be nice if they were up front about it. A hammer and sickle logo or even just a note saying ‘This is a politically correct echo chamber, fuck off whitey’ at sign-up time would thin their herd before they have to do it later themselves.

Gab is in its early stages. I suspect they will let it self-censor to weed out the utter loonies who currently infest it as a non-censored platform in its early days, rather than take the Twitter approach of ‘management does not agree’. I hope they will do what Twitter should have done – let the members block or mute the annoyances while the management takes no action to delete accounts unless they are actually breaking laws. We shall see.

This blocking of InfoWars is a bad idea. I’ve watched Shouty Alex get worked up into a frenzy over trivia and then try to sell snakeoil potions. Sometimes he is right in his rants and sometimes it’s tinfoil time and sometimes it’s just silly. It’s all entertaining. Now it’s a martyr.

It’s not the British way though. We don’t get all shouty and excited about terrible things. We watch and listen in silence and then we politely kill you. It’s etiquette, you see?

For me, watching an Alex Jones shouty rant is discomforting. We don’t do things that way here.

Even so, the plethora of news – especially the smug delight of the Leftie press – brings Infowars to a whole load of people who had never heard of it. Gullible people. I have worked with them and yes, there is a huge mass of people who can be convinced of anything with the right words.

Oh okay, I have played with this in the past, mostly with antimokers. It was enough to show me the truth of IQ. The average is 100 so half the population is below that. That is simple statistics and no mystery. The mystery is why do we keep voting the lower quartile into power.

You can silence outward speech but you cannot silence thought. Never. Not even with NewSpeak. You just drive it to the Underweb.

Where the Underdogs bite upwards.

 

 

Here comes chaos

Still working on the Dutch book, slow going due to hot weather that has made it hard to concentrate and almost driven me nocturnal, a couple of nights off the computer due to thunderstorms that could have wiped out whatever I did, plus battling two wasp nests and figuring out how to use a ride on mower that didn’t come with a manual. The blog may stay a bit sparse for a while.

I have been trying to keep up with the news without reading too much of the actual news. It’s not easy, the main news has descended into silliness and every online source has a political bias in one direction or the other. There is no longer any such thing as an impartial and unbiased news source and I’m beginning to wonder if there ever was.

Basically, it’s utter chaos. It’s not going to get better. You can console yourself with the thought that it cannot get worse if you like. You’ll be wrong. It can and it will. A lot worse.

In the USA they have the Trump War. For or against. Nothing in between. Looking in as a disinterested observer, he seems to be doing what he said he would do. Is that bad? Our politicians don’t do that. We vote them in on promises they make but they long ago proved in court that mainfesto promises are not legally binding. So once in, they ditch the lot and do as they damn well please and we can do nothing about it.

Trump is not a politician. He’s also rich to a level I dream of. You can’t buy him.

You know, if I was as rich as Trump or Soros or Gates or any of them, I would have no interest in meddling with the world. I’d buy an island with its own power generation (wouldn’t need much, there won’t be many people there) and the rest of the planet can fuck off into the depths of absurdity. I’d spend it all setting up a place that doesn’t need money.

I don’t want to impose some kind of New World Order. I don’t want to run anyone else’s life. I have my own (possibly short, considering my favourite hobbies of whisky, fried food and tobacco) life to live and I am not going to waste my time managing yours. Your life is your job, not mine.

Make me a billionaire and I’ll vanish. I have wondered how many of them have done exactly that and who now roll their eyes at the Soros thing wasting his declining years trying to herd cats.

Yet these billionaires, people with bank accounts I couldn’t empty if I bought the top shelf single malts daily, want more money. What the hell for? Money isn’t a real thing. It’s numbers on a screen. Everyone is mortal, there is only so much meaningless crap on eBay you can fill rooms with. Why would you die with billions of unreal money in your account? It’s stupid. You have one go at this life. One. You really want to use it to create ephemera?

‘Oh it’s for the cheeldren’. Yeah, like the world doesn’t have enough spoilt little bastards already. Just teach your kids to lounge about doing fuck all and wait for Daddy’s money to let them continue doing nothing useful for the rest of their lives. They can’t even dress themselves. You really want to produce kids so utterly useless? Okay. Go ahead. Do that.

But when it all falls down, and it will, who will dress them then? You have raised rich kids who expect everything done for them. What will they do when a solar flare wipes out their computerised bank account? Your DNA is gone, boyo. Your legacy is ended. Bye-bye, useless DNA.

Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to teach your kids how to hunt and fish and grow veggies and actually survive without having a whole load of people do it for them? But hey, your kids, your choice. Make them useless if you want to.

Trump isn’t immune here. He is doing what he said he would do, yes. He is actually doing what his voters wanted, yes. I appreciate that, it is something the UK longs for in the wasters we keep electing.  But I bet his kids can’t set a snare or tell one wild berry from another. They ‘have people’ to do that. What will they do when it falls down?

They’ll starve. Probably while waiting for someone to dress them.

See, the whole Soros idea cannot work. It’s based on money, which doesn’t exist. Since the introduction of fractional reserve banking, only about 10% or less of money is in the real world. The rest is just numbers on a screen. Chasing money is chasing zephyrs in the wind. Catch it and you hold on to nothing real.

And still we hear of ‘redistribution of wealth’ which shares out the imaginary equally. Get real. This does not matter. I’ve lived most of my life with no money and I’m still here. Money is not life and life is not money.

I have been to where I had a five figure bank account. I have also been, more than once,  to the bottom of the overdraft, where there is no more to take. I didn’t die. I adapted. At the very bottom I did some things I’m not proud of and associated with people most of you would rightly call the police on but I’m still here. Could any of those billionaire kids do that? I seriously doubt it.

We now have the BBC telling us that gender is not defined at birth. Just because your child has a plug or a socket means nothing, it does not define male or female connections, which is probably why Maplin died.

Recent reports state that more and more American teenagers identify as LGBT. They aren’t really, well apart from the small percentage who actually are. Am I sure? Another report states that teenage lesbians are getting pregnant at a higher rate than straight ones. Seems these ‘lesbians’ have not read the manual.

The kids have a world where they can self-identify any way they like. They can identify as a potted plant and nobody is allowed to deny it. Ridiculous pronouns abound and in some places you can be fired or even arrested as a ‘hate criminal’ for forgetting who wants to be addressed as xe, xir, zimbo or diddly-binky-boo.

This is indulging in a toddler’s fantasy world. Worse, it is enforcing that world on the decreasing number of actual grown-ups. Sure, identify as whoever you like. Especially teenagers. Was there ever a teenager who didn’t want to be someone else? We all wanted to be rock stars or actors or demolition experts when I was a teenager. If we had had the option to self-define as a biologically impossible gender, hell yes we’d have tried that.

But the adults would not have indulged us. They might have smiled and shaken their heads, some might have tried to talk some sense into us, but not one of them would have forced anyone else to accept our new identity as a triple-penised female Martian warrior badger. There certainly would never have been a law demanding such acceptance.

Making it illegal to deny the reality of toddler fantasies is another step in infantilising the population. It also helps with the eradication of gender and the ushering in of sexless drones. Babies are increasingly being called ‘theybies’ so as to avoid gender bias – but ‘baby’ is a word with no gender already. Making up a new word serves only to dehumanise the baby and break the parent/baby bond. It also prepares the parent to accept gender reassignment surgery for their child, thus rendering them permanently infertile. Did anyone mention ‘population reduction’ recently?

All these groups will fragment the once cohesive LGBT movement. It’s already started. ‘Trans’ men who identify as lesbians to get access to women are at war with actual lesbians because actual lesbians don’t want to sleep with someone who has a penis. Trans men who have transitioned are well on the way to making it a hate crime for any man to refuse to sleep with them.

It’s not all, not by any means. But, as with every such case, nobody hears from the quiet ones.

The LGBT movement is being destroyed by the addition of more and more bizarre groups. Really. Women who like women and men who like men, those who like both and even those (genuine cases are very rare) who feel very strongly that they are in the wrong body – whether you agree with their lifestyles or not – were still within the realm of male and female genders. Suddenly, gender is a social construct and you can identify as female today, male tomorrow, or pick from a plethora of options for the weekend.

So now you have 50 shades of sexual definition and none of them talk to the others. I do not care. My granddaughter is going to be brought up as a girl with trains and slingshots and archery and potato growing and car maintenance and all the other things a girl needs to know.

She will also be warned about rape gangs. Oh it’s not just Muslim. That is only Level One.

This goes much deeper. The Muslim gangs are being pulled in because they got caught. The names revealed in those investigations have been quietly pushed down. Have you never wondered why the trials are so secret? It’s a new thing, all those high profile people who were accused were subjected to trial by newspaper immediately after being arrested.

More and more ex-police are coming out now. The scale of peado protection is becoming clear. Some big names are named. I will not name the names I’ve heard because I could never afford the lawsuits and I don’t personally have access to the evidence. But they are big names.

Cyril Smith wasn’t named until after he died. The evidence against him was uncontestable but never used while he lived. Quite how that flesh planet managed to find his reproductive organ under his bouncy-castle frame I’ll never know. Perhaps it was a Victorian-style thing – send a small boy in there with a lantern and tell him what to do when he gets there.

The raid on Cliff Richard’s house was filmed. He was not guilty but there was no secrecy around his trial. His was a show trial. ‘We can get you anytime we want’. Let’s face it, if a non-celeb gets that treatment, good luck finding a job afterwards. That kind of mud sticks.

Jimmy Savile was a distraction. I saw plenty of evidence that he was a creepy old man who liked young girls but none that he liked them under legal age. The late Anna Raccoon did a fine job of debunking many of the more bizarre claims. Again, nothing happened until he died. But this time it was so that he could not defend himself.

The paedo reporting shutdown wasn’t just political correctness. That was a useful tool but those using it were not purely Muslim. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) their Muslim rape gang cover, and one of their supply chains, went way too far and had to be reined in.

‘For the children’ rings a little hollow, doesn’t it? When thousands of little girls are gang raped while the government puts in anti-porn internet controls.

Of course, we all know what those controls were really for. It’s now in the open. They want to stop all criticism of politicians. They want to make it illegal. They want to call political opponents ‘trolls’ and ban them from taking public office. And this is the Tories! Big Sister is watching you. Or Big Brother. These days you can define the gender of your own slave master.

The internet-control desire is enhanced by Brexit of course. It can’t be allowed to happen. Other countries might get ideas. The rise of ‘far right’ (as in, the EU doesn’t like them) groups is increasing all through the EU because of their insane insistence on importing more and more benefit scroungers. Why? Because they will vote for free stuff and keep those elites in power. What the elites have not considered is this: they’ll be in power over a non-working benefit-fed population. Who’s going to pay for it? Ask Venezuela.

Except… Venezuela has working people. The EU won’t have any. So the elite will have nobody to sponge off and Juncker will have to learn homebrew very quickly.

The New World Order will have a few people with all the money. But having killed off anyone who produces anything, what will their money buy? Faced with an imported violent benefit class, what will they do? Send in the army? Oh they can pay them but then… what do the army do with money when nobody is making anything?

It is going to fall apart. It is going to be war. It is going to be very nasty indeed because there is no middle ground on any of those issues any more. No room for compromise. No purpose in discussion. The time for talking is over.

When the dust clears, the sun will rise on ruins.