Apocalypse when?

Well, submissions have closed for Underdog Anthology 9. We have 8 authors confirmed and one more still to confirm. Not much editing to do this time, everyone has put in well pre-edited work. I should have this one done by October 10th.

Then two more and then the Christmas anthology. It’s all a bit frantic right now but if it ends up with an easy Christmas, it’s worth it.

It’s all a bit mad in the outside world. The American health nuts want to ban vaping because some idiots used the devices to inhale cannabis oil. Well, let’s be honest – they want to ban vaping because smoking rakes in so much more in taxes. So we are hearing a lot of outright lies now.

The UN are now claiming that toilets won’t flush because of catastrophic sea level rise. The Maldives are still there. The ice caps are still there. There have been glaciers receding and a couple have vanished. Elsewhere, glaciers have grown bigger. I live in Scotland, a country of rolling glens carved by glaciers over millenia. There are no glaciers here now and we don’t really want them back, thanks.

Earth’s climate changes. Always has and always will. Looking at 40 years of weather means nothing at all. There were times in the past when the oxygen concentration in hte atmosphere was so high, spiders could grow to the size of dinner plates. You really want that climate back? There were times when it was so warm there were no ice caps and times when it was so cold most of the planet was covered in ice. Life, believe me, preferred the warm option.

We are now told that a rise in temperature of one or two degrees will kill us all. Really? Then every Brit who went to Corfu for their holidays died there. None could possibly have survived that much of a change in temperature.

It’s all complete crap and have you noticed how panicked the Church of Climatology is at the moment? It’s because their controllers know what’s really coming and they have to push their agenda very hard indeed before it arrives. Not long now. By January, all those demanding the closure of power stations will be demanding they reopen. Too late. The time for discussion has passed. Reality has arrived. Governments have been preparing for the wrong Armageddon.

In politics, we have the panicked shrieks of globalists as they see their plans fall apart. They are doing all they can to bring down their opponents. I mean. look at the current attack on Boris the Prime Monster in the UK. Some woman claims he squeezed her thigh 20 years ago and the press is pushing it as if he’d dismembered a baby and walked around town using its head skin as a hat. All I see is, ‘if that’s all they have on him, he must be pretty clean’.

It’s happening all over and none of it matters. This civilisation is done. We have men pretending to be women so they can get into women’s prisons where they rape women. Nobody is allowed to question it. We have weekly riots in France that nobody is allowed to report on. We have so much fail, this civilisation simply cannot survive.

In a story called ‘Pandora’s Lost Luggage‘ I used the idea of a previous, long forgotten civilisation destroyed by a god called Moros, but now I wonder…

Maybe they didn’t ‘go back to the stone age’ as I had thought. Maybe they really did wipe themselves out entirely. Maybe it will happen to us too.

We don’t need to go back to any stone age. There are already people on this planet living that way. Isolated tribes in South America who have no contact with the outside world. The island off India where the natives kill anyone who comes within range. Other places too. The seeds of our replacement are already sown.

It’s said that humanity originated in North Africa (I know, it’s disputed, but it really doesn’t matter where that first small tribe started). Maybe in a few thousand years, historians will tell their people that humanity started in South America. Without ever realising that they weren’t the first, but that they were the only ones left. Then they will marvel at the remnants of structures ‘created by the primitive ancestors’. We have that now – who built the pyramids and the Sphinx, when it is clear that they predate the Egyptians? How about those Inca walls that we can’t even replicate now?

Maybe it’s a cycle. We get so far then wipe ourselves out, and another remote tribe gradually explores the planet and starts the cycle again. How many times can it have happened?

And is it happening again?

I have a dream…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all in the distant past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are not a special species. Adapt or die.

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

#What’sThePoint?

So the Lib Dems have voted in some hyperactive tart as leader, who has already shouted about the ‘Big Bus Message’ as if it was a lie, which it has already been proven not to be. She will do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop Brexit and in the process, destroy all faith in that voting system that is the cornerstone of democracy.

Well I didn’t vote for her. I wasn’t asked to vote for her – in fact I wasn’t allowed to vote for her because I am not a member of the Literal Dribblycraps and never will be. It’s hard to believe they descended from the Whigs of old, once one of the two main parties of Parliament. Now they are just a bunch of wishy washy whiners intent on getting their own way and capable of no more than a public tantrum if they don’t. Which, to be fair, doesn’t make them any different from any other modern party.

The general public voted for Brexit, wench. We didn’t vote for you.

Next we get to hear who will be the next Prime Monster. The smart money is on Borissio the Clown, but the Utter Hunt might yet win it. We’ll know soon. Again, I didn’t get a vote because I am not a member of the Terminal Decline party and never will be. The way they are going, soon, nobody will be. The Terrible Maybe is busily salting the earth for her successor anyway so whoever wins is facing a shitstorm. Get the popcorn in.

The general public voted for Brexit, whichever of you idiots wins. We didn’t vote for you.

Meanwhile in North Korea they had a vote on the leader with only one name on the ballot paper. Not surprising – would you put your name up in opposition to Kim Jong Jinglejangle?

And the EU voted in a new Empress with only one name on the ballot paper but apparently that’s somehow different…

It’s rapidly reaching a point, I’ve noticed, where all the leaders of the West are blondes. Didn’t someone, once, have a dream of Aryan supremacy? Hmm… probably just coincidence. I think Ken Clarke might know who it was.

Being a short ginger, I never had a chance at power anyway, although I’ll steal their souls if they ever get close enough.

On Twitter there is a hashtag #NotMyPM where people are already declaring they will not recognise Borissio as PM if he wins. Why? What the hell is the point?

This came from the USA, as do most mad ideas (they have a long way to go to catch up with Japan on mad ideas but they are trying). They had a NotMyPresident thing going where they pretended Trump didn’t win. Now we have NotMyPM where, if Boris wins, they’ll pretend he didn’t. Both of them have the power of their position, pretending they don’t changes nothing.

It does tickle me when these people say they are repressed. Try #NotMyGreatLeader in North Korea and see what happens. Or something similar in China or Russia. You know, the ultimate socialist dream states. Go on, give it a go in Venezuela. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, nobody stops you doing it in these repressive Western states so those wonderful free Socialist states will tolerate it even more, right?

I don’t trust Borissio the Clown but from the choices available he is the lesser of two evils. The Utter Hunt will not implement Brexit and will carry on the Terrible Maybe’s stupid authoritarianism. Borissio might not do that.

There have been a few Cabinet members saying they will resign if Boris gets the job. Including the Chancer of the Exchequer, Phil Hammond. Well so what? Every new Prime Monster chooses their own raft of Underbed Monsters so most of them will get sacked anyway. And let’s be brutally honest – none of them have a clue what they are doing.

They are so full of self importance they cannot believe anyone could fuck up the job better than they can. They really believe we will be terrified by their threat to resign. We don’t care. We know you get the job through arselicking and not by merit, we know you are all useless and only ever get private sector jobs because of who you know and can influence in government. We know that we would never, ever employ anyone like you. So resign. Just go away. We’ll be out waving hankies and smiling as your truck heads into Oblivion Road.

There will be a replacement who will be just as fucking useless as you are. You don’t need to worry about that.

Not one politician matters. Every one of them can be replaced by a new, power hungry control freak utterly selfish avaricious bastard and it will make no difference at all. Threaten to resign? Yes. Go. Do it. All of you. We don’t like you anyway.

In a matter of hours we find out if this country is going to be run by Borissio the Clown or an Utter Hunt.

Next election, I’m voting for an invertebrate. The funny part is… so are you.

The difference is that I know it.

Killing yourself to live

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s put my positions on the line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so we come to those killing themselves to live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because that’s the only thing they can tax.

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

Increase it and the planet gets greener.

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

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

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

And I have the know-how.

Hey, Bill…

Reliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But nobody has.

Abort!

I am no fan of abortion. It sounds horrible for the mother and it sounds like the foetus goes through a horrific ending in many cases too. I am just glad I have never had to be in the place where I needed to make that choice. However, I an not against abortion. I do not believe a rape victim should be forced to give birth to a child who has the genetic makeup of a rapist for a lot of reasons. I do not believe that a mother whose life is at risk from a pregnancy gone wrong should be forced to risk it. I do not believe that parents who could not cope with a severely disabled child should be forced to continue that pregnancy…

…and cue the outrage.

Look, I know, you can be born disabled and still lead a good and happy life. I had a narrow escape myself. My mother was pregnant with me in 1959, she had morning sickness, she was offered Thalidomide. Thank all the Gods anyone has ever worshipped, she refused it.

Consider parents at an ultrasound scan who are told their baby will be born severely handicapped. Some will say ‘We’ll deal with it’ and that is a noble and brave decision. I’d like to think I’d make that decision but honestly, I can’t be sure. I was never faced with it. Some will not have the family support or financial ability to deal with it even if they want to. Some will be utterly repulsed by the deformed child and that child will soon learn that it is hated and resented by its own parents. Would you want to be the latter child?

I wouldn’t. But maybe you would. Still my opinion is that abortion should be available for parents in that situation who could not cope. I believe that forcing them to go ahead will just result in three miserable lives.

On the other hand, I do not believe that abortion is a valid form of birth control – except in instances where birth control failed, as it sometimes does. Certainly not as a routine way of getting rid of mistakes.

I’m unkind, that’s how I’ve got to be. (competition – which band, which song, which album is this line from? To win decisively include the name of the singer and the year and the record company. I have it on vinyl here ;)) But I have to feel that idiot couples who get pregnant when there are so many birth control options available – in the UK most can be had for free – are not people we want to encourage to reproduce.

Also, I believe there must be a limit. A time limit set where the woman can no longer be unaware of her pregnancy but not to the point where the foetus has a chance of living on its own.

In America, some Democrat places have decided to allow abortion up to the point of birth. This is absolutely horrifying to me – premature babies can survive, if you’ve had that child in you for nine months how can you change your mind at the end? You’re not clearing out a clump of cells at this stage, you are killing a baby. There is a big difference, to me at least. Once they get this in, the death penalty becomes ‘retrospective abortion’ and then, well…

Sure. ‘a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body’ and all that but for fuck’s sake. Make your bloody mind up a lot sooner than the day the contractions start. I know women are famed for taking ages to decide on things but nine months is just taking the piss.

At that point you could just give the baby up for adoption. Why kill it? Well, there are reasons… and I have a Halloween story in mind. It will, of course, be fiction.

Republican states have reacted to this Democrat baby pogrom. They have not done the British response of ‘Hey, hang on a minute, that’s a bit off’. They have done the American thing of going to the other extreme. Sometimes, America, it might have been better if you had stayed British.

Some states have now made abortion so illegal that a woman can be jailed for a miscarriage. Miscarriages happen. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. It is neither parents’ fault. It just happens.

Rapists can expect their deadly genes to be carried on with full State support. If a ten year old is impregnated by Stepdad Filthy, she has to have the baby even though it could kill her.

That is going way too far the other way. Republicans could have had a sensible response to Democrat baby-killing but there is no sense at all in their over-reaction.

Look at this –

Sweet home Alabama, eh? Not if you start an argument, get shot and your baby dies. It’s all your fault and the baby’s death is manslaughter and even though you were the one shot, you’re the one getting charged.

This is because the anti-abortion laws mean tthat the woman is responsible for the death of her baby even if it’s a perfectly natural miscarriage, if she gets pushed down a flight of stairs, or if someone shoots her baby in her womb.

There are people protesting Sharia law. This is far, far worse and it’s coming from American lawmakers!

Republican lawmakers. Trump, you fat orange fucker, do something about this. Stop those Alabama banjo players for a start, and if you said ‘Alabama law is what you get when cousins marry’ you’d likely get a round of applause.

It’s become ridiculous but it’s not funny. In Democrat places, killing a viable baby is okay. In Republican places, any loss of a baby for any reason sends the mother to jail. There is no sensible middle ground any more.

We are reaching peak polarisation. This is just one example. There are so many others.

No middle ground. No compromise. One extreme or the other.

There’s only one way this is going. Pick a side. There are currently about a hundred to choose from.

Peterborough

I’ve passed through on the train a few times but never actually visited. So I have no idea what it’s like to live there. The station is nice though.

Anyway, they have just elected another Labour MP. Let’s see if this one can manage to stay out of jail and out of controversy. The latter is unlikely, she’s already been hit with the antisemitism stick. The former… well, we’ll see.

The results.

Labour won it by around 680 votes, 2% of votes. Oh but if we add in the Tories and UKIP, Labour didn’t win it at all! Nah, I’m not going to play that childish game. In UK voting, the winner is the winner even if it’s by one vote after fifteen recounts. Labour won it. That’s how it works. I would say I don’t like it but since I don’t live in Peterborough, nor even in England, I don’t really care all that much. It’s their choice so it’s their problem.

Sure, Labour’s share of the vote is down but there are new kids on the block and the Tories, like it or not, are getting shat on from a great height. If these results could predict a general election (they can’t, it’s just one constituency, but they are a better indicator htan the single issue EU elections) then we will have Labour as the biggest party after a GE, with Brexit Party in opposition and nobody with a clear overall majority.

Basically, a worse mess than we have now.

Who will form a coalition government? Will Labour team up with the Lib Dems, even thought the LDs want an absolute no brexit and Labour want whatever it is they want. They don’t seem to want to tell us.

Will Brexit party team up with the Tories who campaigned at the last GE and at the EU elections on the basis they could deliver Brexit even though the entire planet knows they have no intention of doing that?

You could mention ‘Tories’ to a remote Amazonian tribe and they’d respond ‘Pfft. Can’t trust those buggers’. Whose fault is that? The Tories! They have supported an outright lying leader for so long that nobody can believe a word they say now.

Jerry Cordite, for all his bumbling pound-shop Catweazle appearance, is not a total idiot. Almost, but not total. There were people out shouting that the government should step in to save British Steel. Nobody in the Tories or Labour has pointed out that EU rules prevent the government from doing anything to save British Steel, nor any other company that goes down the tubes because of cheap foreign imports. There is nothing the government can do about it.

Likelwise, much moaning about live animal exports fails to realise that under EU rules, we have no power to stop live animal exports. We do not have that autonomy.

Digression: I recall a pig farm manager telling me about protestors trying to stop him sending live pigs to France. They were breeding sows. Not a lot of use if they’re dead.

Cordite wants to turn the UK into a socialist Utopia like North Korea. He cannot do that if the EU is pulling the strings – well actually it would end up much the same but he will not only not be in charge of it, he could end up like Lenin.

So Jerry wants out of the EU too. Some in his party do not. They don’t want their imagined gravy train to end, even though it could end up against a blood and bullet-hole spattered wall when their usefulness to their masters comes to an end. No wonder they don’t want to learn about history.

If Jerry wants to nationalise things, he can’t do it inside the EU, he has to be out of it. He cannot insist that ships are built on the Clyde, that crappy cars are built in Vauxhall, that British Steel be subsidised and that live animal exports are stopped because the EU will not let him do any of those things. If he wants to actually impose his version of Marxism on us all then he has to have control of the country – and he knows that currently, government in the UK does not have that. In very many areas.

Jerry’s motivations are easy to work out but the Tories are another matter. Don’t they want to actually be in charge? Are they happy to become the petty governers of EU regions and just pass on instructions from above?

I think they do, you know. The money’s good and there really isn’t much work involved, you just sign the papers when they arrive and pass them on. And of course, you are part of the machinery so the laws don’t apply to you, only to the proles.

And, as with the establishment of Stalin’s USSR and the Jingle Jangles of North Korea and the Pol Pot of Cambodia and the Mao of China, there are many useful idiots all fired up to shout and beat it into existence… then spend the rest of their lives trying to escape from what they created while blaming someone else.

It’s very telling that the Eastern European countries are the most opposed to EU diktats. They’ve seen it before, in living memory, and are not keen to go back to that. Socialists decry them as turncoats and heretics but they’ve seen what happens when your world view is imposed, guys. They don’t want it back.

So we have to wait and see who the Tories will decide on to pull their handcart to Hell and it deosn’t matter too much now. They have proved that their manifesto means nothing. They have proved that repeated promises mean nothing. They have proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a Tory government cannot be trusted.

We were supposed to have left the EU in March. Now we are to leave on Halloween.

If we don’t then don’t be surprised when the demons are unleashed.