Insularnet

Today it is possible to be globally connected within a narrow bubble-like mindset. A recent departure from Google’s workplace has this take on it. (h/t @RooBeeDoo1 on Twitter).

In the days before widespread internet, we all knew one or two who believed the moon landings were faked, that the new Ice Age was imminent (caused by rising CO2, incidentally), who believed Russia was behind everything bad that happened and that the Earth is flat.

I never met anyone who believed the Earth is flat but all the others, yes. They were harmless. They were entitled to their opinions of course, nobody would force them to change their minds and mostly, the ideas they had were at least entertaining. A diversion from football in the pub chatter.

Now, those ideas are dangerous. All those individual tinfoil hatters have formed, across the Internet, into large groups. Mostly composed of idiots manipulated by a few smart ones with an agenda, they have formed an army of Pub Nutters and they have assumed quasi-religious status.

I recently tried to talk to a few Climatologists on Twitter. They had reached the point where they claimed anyone who does not believe in climate change is an idiot. I interjected at that point, suggesting that the opposite of ‘believer’ is ‘heretic’.

The Cult of the Green God did not approve of the terminology. I said I wasn’t in this fight, they said the only way I could not be in this fight was if I had another planet to go to. More than once in recent years I have wished for just that.

So, the summary is, if I don’t join the ranks of Believers in Climate Change, the Green God will visit Armageddon on us all.

And still they object to this being called a religion.

I gave up when someone pointed me to the ‘facts’ presented by the IPCC. The argument had gone full circle and it was time to step off. It had reached the point in religious arguments where someone says ‘It’s in the Bible/Quran/Torah therefore it is unquestionable.’ You must believe because It Is Written. Not a religion? Really?

The IPCC depends for its funding on the existence of man-made climate change. If they were faced with proof that we have nothing to do with it, that it’s just the same old climate change the planet has always had, the IPCC would all be out of a job. The same is true of many Climatologists now – they have moved from benignly watching it get warmer and cooler to being utterly dependent on man-made chemical death for funding. Admit we aren’t actually responsible and they go back to tapping the barometer and noting the readings. So, would they say ‘Okay, we’ll all pack up’ or would they set their drones to silence the dissent? Give it a little thought, if you need to.

I was presented with arguments including a conflation with being a gravity denier. Gravity is self-evidently real and needs no proof. As someone who was once stuck beneath a heavy rhubarb and who has fallen off a great many things, I am assured of the reality of gravity. The reality of one thing does not prove the reality of another thing. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

Climate heretics are compared to ‘flat-earthers’. Refusal to believe one thing does not automatically indicate belief in another thing. I do not believe in God. That does not mean I worship Satan. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

I don’t believe in Satan either. I have seen and experienced things I cannot prove but I have not seen evidence of any God or Satan in charge of those things. I’ll keep my own counsel on those things until I have solid evidence for them, I get enough derisory comments from those art students who think they know about science as it is. That’s actual science by the way – I don’t want you to ‘believe’, I want to show you data that supports what I say. I do not yet have that data so I keep quiet about it.

As for flat earthers, show me pictures of the edge of the world, explain the lunar eclipse and time zones and seasons and we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll stick with the oblate spheroid with a tilted axis theory. It works for me.

I do not, and will not, simply ‘believe’ anything. There are things I don’t care about enough to investigate myself and many things I’d like to delve deeper into but don’t have time. Just telling me ‘it’s true, believe it or you’ll be damned’ gets you classified as a religion and we’re done. You have not won the argument. I have simply withdrawn from the fray and will leave you to your beliefs. You win the argument when you convince me you’re right and ‘Believe!’ will never do that.

Another thing that makes me give up on you as a waste of arguing breath is ‘the science is settled’ and ‘there is no meaningful debate to be had’. Those statements do not belong to science. They belong to religion. Once you have writings that nobody is allowed to question, you are a religion. Science has no unquestionable data. None. Not even gravity.

Oh we know gravity is there but we still don’t have a definite mechanism for it. Gravitons? Electromagnetics? Angels on our shoulders holding us down? Even something as self-evident as gravity leaves Science with plenty to argue about. Science is never settled.

If a subject area is completely explained and nobody can refute it, then it’s done and we move on to the next. This is not true of… anything yet. Science once had the atom as the smallest indivisible particle of matter. Well that soon changed, and the particles we know about now are still being investigated. They might turn out to be made of smaller bits. Nothing and nobody is science has yet managed to escape debate. Not even Einstein.

You say your science is unquestionable, you are claiming to be smarter than Einstein. I don’t claim to be that smart and I have the hair. Yeah, I should get to a barber before I start looking like Gandalf… but I digress.

We have an army of Green God Cultists predicting Armageddon unless we protect the environment by mining neodymium for magnets to put into vast steel windmills with miles of copper wire inside to protect the environment from industrialisation… yeah, sounds rather like starting three major religions based on the invisible voice that told Abraham to cut the end of his knob off then kill his son. Sorry, religion, but that is how it looks from the outside.

Actually that’s unfair. Most religions don’t advocate doing this to the planet in order to save it. That’s just for the windmill magnets, we won’t go into all that steel and copper wire production, nor the diesel used by the transport and maintenance trucks, and let’s not mention the hundreds of tons of concrete under each and every oversized lawn ornament pretending to save the environment out there…

Climatology is a religion but it’s a religion with a purpose.The dopes who believe in it won’t see that and they’ll laugh it off and call me heretic – or rather the modern variant, ‘denier’. They’ll call me a flat earther and a gravity denier and an idiot while they march to their doom. I have no problem with any of that. You march on, folks. I’ll wait here with beer and a bacon sandwich and watch you march away.

The insularnet is working exceptionally well. The thing we thought brings us all together is the thing that most effectively separates us into insular groups.The Climatologists have no truck with Population Control and no interest in Immigration Insanity and will distance themselves from the Anti-Sex League who will not mingle with Health Police nor with Political Correctness…

…but they, and more, are all facets of one thing. Facets kept separate, specific, isolated on the global net and easily controlled. If they saw the whole thing they’d refuse to take part. Well, a few jackboot-lovers would still take part but mostly, no. You know, the Righteous have learned a lot from their repeated slapdowns over the centuries. This time they intend full control by a series of backdoors. They hope to open them all at once, before any one group realises what is happening.

I’m not going to say any more at this stage. I want you all to break your own bubbles and see who’s been blowing them. Hint: It’s not lizard people. It’s humans. Not very nice humans but they don’t have scales and rarely eat insects.

I have sometimes wondered if Rolf Harris was brought down not because of some insidious political agenda but because of one line he kept repeating. A line that had to be removed from broadcast, a line that might get people to think things they should not be thinking. A line based on an incomplete picture made of a few brush strokes with the rest yet to fit in.

Can you see what it is yet?

 

You’re not paranoid when they really are out to get you

According to some German scientists, smoking makes you anxious and paranoid. Here’s a quick summary of what they did to invent arrive at this conclusion.

They showed volunteers a series of images, just symbols, but some symbols gave them an electric shock when displayed. The volunteers soon learned to anticipate the shock when the symbol appeared. So far, so Pavlovian. Nothing contentious there.

So now they have a group with a ‘learned fear response’. This, they seem to believe, is a bad thing. It’s the response that stops you poking your finger into a flame a second time. The response that makes you steer well clear of tigers and other things that might eat you. Yet, to these scientists, being afraid of something that hurts is a bad thing.

They then showed the volunteers the same symbols but without the electric shocks and with reassurances that ‘all is well’, The smokers tended to flinch at the symbols anyway, despite the reassurances.

Now, from this they conclude that smoking is bad because smokers don’t just accept the reassurances. Smoking, they say, inhibits your ability to suppress a fear response.

Hypothetical stiuation – some bearded loony is running at you with a machete shouting ‘Allahu akbar but it’s okay, I’m from the religion of peace’. Is it better to suppress your fear response because of reassuring words, or is if better to run like buggery and let the idiot who believes the words get sliced into halal bacon?

I’m a smoker. I’ll hang on to my learned fear response, thank you very much.

The ‘fear response’ is not the same thing as PTSD. That’s where they are making their fundamental error. PTSD needs a cure. It’s debilitating. The fear response does not need a cure. It’s a normal and natural part of being a human. In fact, any animal. Suppressing the fear response means developing people who will stick their finger in the flame a second time and who will try to cuddle tigers.

I seem to recall reading about a condition – might be considered the opposite of PTSD – where people have no ability to feel fear and do not learn from being hurt. That’s a pretty dangerous condition to have. Should we all aspire to be so fearless that we will walk back into a burning house because we think we’ve left the gas on?

A big confounder in this whole experiment is that smokers have a ‘fear response’ to the entire medical profession that has been drummed into us over decades. We know they hate us – it’s not paranoia, they are in the news every day delighting in new ways to make our lives miserable. So when a doctor says ‘Now this time we won’t electrocute you’, the smoker is far less likely to believe it. Basically, medical profession, we don’t trust you, and you made that happen.

The nonsmoker has no such conditioned response. They don’t take their septic finger to the doctor knowing they will be nagged about how smoking causes septic fingers and be told a lot of lies about how they have to give up smoking or the antibiotics won’t work. The smoker forced to interact with the medical world now does so from an initial position of anxiety that is caused not by smoking, but by the incessant nagging.

The article goes on to bemoan how PTSD sufferers smoke much more than us laid back hippie layabout smokers, and calls for ‘interventions’ to stop them. Interventions to stop anyone in a job such as the military, fire service or police from smoking in case their smoking triggers PTSD.

Seriously.

They are claiming smoking causes PTSD. Not attending a crime scene where the walls are decorated with blood and three sets of intestines are tastefully arranged into a semblance of a Christmas tree. No, it’s smoking that gives you PTSD. Not combing through a burning building, knowing it might collapse at any moment just as you come face to face with a charred corpse. Not cowering under heavy shellfire and watching your best mate blown into a thousand pieces right in front of you. No, it’s the smoking we have to deal with.

Seriously. They want to stop soldiers smoking because that’s the biggest danger they face. They want to stop police officers smoking becasue being stabbed by a loony is not so bad, really. The best one is still the firemen. The ones who routinely venture into clouds of choking smoke and flame are not allowed to burn half a gram of leaves and inhale.

This piece of research clearly had the conclusion ‘smoking is bad’ prewritten. It does nothing to advance any kind of treatment for PTSD or anything else. The only thing it advances is the antismoking agenda. Soon you will not be allowed to join the police, military or fire brigade if you smoke.

As the experiment has shown, only those whose natural fear response can be easily overridden will be allowed into those professions. They are the ones who will take unnecessary risks that will put themselves and their colleagues in danger. The smoker who says ‘Whoa, hang on, if we do that we’ll probably die’ is to be banned from the professions altogether.

Military, fire service, police. Three professions where the alleged dangers of smoking are utterly trivial when set against the dangers they face every day. Yet here we have a piece of ‘research’ designed to eliminate smoking from those professions.

Why?

Puritanism. It’s the answer to everything now.

Dust off those saddles…

I have broken my tablet computer. Terminally. I had left it on the floor by the bed, the phone rang, I got up to answer it and crunch. To top it all there was nobody on the phone. It was probably one of those timeout sales calls.

Fortunately I had opted for a cheap Chinese-made one so it won’t hurt too bad to replace it. And it did mean I got to take it apart. I’ve always wanted to see inside one of these things. So I now have two very small good quality speakers that will fit easily inside a model train with a sound generator, a couple of tiny cameras and a microphone (not sure how to wire up a camera but I can find out). Best of all is the ‘vibrate’ motor. Runs on 3V and is less than a cm long. I can fit that into something very small indeed, along with a couple of tiny button cells. My model building interest is rekindled!

I might make a tiny electric car. Might as well, we won’t have any petrol or diesel ones soon. Then again, I’ll be 80 in 2040 so probably won’t want to do much driving. My kids will still be driving age though. They’ll be stuck with those God-awful electric cars. Not even hybrids – the petrol and diesel won’t be allowed.

Suddenly, cars are the cause of all ills. Does that let smokers off the hook? We’ve been saying for a long time that the smoke from a cigarette is nothing compared to a passing truck, nor even a drive-by in a Mini. Nobody wanted to hear it.

It doesn’t let us off the hook because it was never about health and neither is this.

Ministers believe it poses the largest environment risk to public health in the UK, costing up to £2.7bn in lost productivity in one recent year.

Ministers believe whatever it is in their interests to believe, as always. But their thinking is in terms of lost productivity, not health. Sick drones don’t work as hard. That’s how it was sold to them. Same as with tobacco, booze, salt, fat, anything. They don’t give a shit about you. You exist to pay taxes to them. You exist to work so they don’t have to.

Remember when the antismokers checked carbon monoxide in breath tests on smokers in the street? On busy streets. They never tested nonsmokers and never tested themselves. If they had, all the results would have been the same because the CO and other stuff from exhaust fumes on a busy street will overwhelm anything a cigarette can do.

And yet, at that time, the buses and cars rolling by were totally harmless compared to half a gram of burning leaf.

When my grandmother was born there were no cars. They are really that recent, starting in the early 1900s as rich men’s toys. You had to have a man with a red flag walking in front to warn people you were coming so they wouldn’t be startled. That might come back with the electric car because those things are almost silent. They’ll need sound generators like model trains have, so they sound like a real one.

The Cult of the Green God is not satisfied because like all the other ‘mememe’ groups out there, they are never satisfied. They want cars banned right now. Except theirs of course. I mean, how do you get to the next conference on stopping oil use if oil products are banned? Walk there, like a common pleb? They are far too important for that.

Seriously, imagine a world where you can’t speed around in a flash Audi or BMW and have to try to pick up girls in a glorified disability cart. See it happening? The car industry can adapt of course, they just make electric cars instead of petrol ones and then charge more than the car’s value for new batteries.

But the oil industry? You really think they are going quietly into oblivion? Oh no, this isn’t going to be like the tobacco wars at all. The antismokers never wanted to ban tobacco. That would put them out of work so they work with the tobacco companies to reach a compromise where they both profit. Can’t happen when you completely delete all use of a product. The oil wars are going to be a lot more vicious.

Really though, it’s about our ability to go places without being controlled. They don’t like that. They didn’t like us having places to gather and talk so they wrecked the pubs and everything like them. There has been a war against personal transport for a long time and it was always going to be banned one day.

Your 2040 electric car will have all the latest gadgetry installed. No need to worry about speeding, it will be incapable of exceeding the limit, even in an emergency. No need to worry about it getting stolen because the authorities always know exactly where it is and have the power to turn it off remotely.

A lot of people are going to think that’s all good.

Until they are driving somewhere the authorities don’t want them to go…

The Mark of the Beast

Revelation 13: 16-17: Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

I’m not religious, still. I’m not convinced of the existence of any God and yet, the Bible was written by some very interesting people. And, as a writer of scary stories, I have had occasion to dip into the Bible (as well as some *cough* ‘rival publications’ for fact-checking and inspiration). The Mark of the Beast is a big story plotline which nobody seriously thought would become reality.

Well, here it is. (hat tip to @Raven80504432 on Twitter).

And also here (another hat tip, this time to @Leahurst66) The last line of this one contains a typo –

“I want to be part of the future,” she laughs.

Surely she meant ‘furniture’. They hold parties where unchipped workers get to be assimilated for free. It’s not yet compulsory to be chipped to work there but it’s going to be damn inconvenient to be unchipped when the card readers start breaking down. Who wants to pay maintenance costs on obsolete equipment? There’s no need to ‘force’ compliance. Just make non-compliance a hassle.

These are all volunteers. They’ll be delighted with their new Borg implant that lets them open doors and operate vending machines. How long before there are doors that can only be opened by the chip? You don’t have the chip, you can’t go in there. How long before it’s simply too inconvenient to be unchipped? How long before it’s mandatory? How long before you can’t open your door or ride a bus or start your car without one? How long before resistance is genuinely futile?

Oh, the technology has been around for some time. Implanted chips are years old. Implants in pets are actually compulsory in many countries now, and you can already pay for stuff by tapping your credit card on the machine rather than going to all that hassle of slotting it in and pressing four buttons. I’m still a Luddite and use cash most of the time, and absolutely refuse to get involved with contactless when I use the card.

I can keep the cards in a screened wallet so they don’t get scanned by passing crooks, but what if it’s in your hand? Will we have to wear chain mail gloves?

Yes, people welcomed contactless technology and as I suggested at the time, if pressing four buttons is such a hassle, wouldn’t it be so much more convenient if you didn’t have to bother with the card? Why not have that contactless chip embedded in your hand? You can’t forget it or lose it and it’s unlikely to be stolen. You’d certainly notice if it was. I said at the time that it wouldn’t have to be mandatory. People will welcome such convenience.

Remember, a few years back, the calls to have children microchipped like pets so they could be traced if they went missing? Oh that met with absolute outrage! It died out and went quiet. Well it’s back now, except now they will get adults to demand them rather than force them on us all.

They could replace passports. Yes, you can be scanned remotely as you pass without even knowing your credentials are being checked. Isn’t that convenient? Any government authority can know where you are and who you’re with at a moment’s notice. Does that make you feel safe? I bet many people will answer ‘yes’ to that.

The amount of calories in your shopping could soon be displayed on your till receipt and from there it’s just a small step to a siren and red light announcing ‘too many calories!’ at the checkout. Most people will be shamed into buying fewer calories. Personally I’d see it as a challenge to set off that red light every single time.

Buying too much booze? Buying too many chocolate bars? Buying another can of fizz when you bought one only last week? Does it really sound so unlikely when even now, you buy something on Amazon and get related ads popping up on Facebook and other sites. Use your store card and they send you vouchers for money off stuff you buy. Oh yes, it’s all great until you start thinking about how much data is really stored about your life.

Your medical records can be stored on another chip. How would you sell that to people? Well, suppose you were in an accident or passed out on the street. If an ambulance crew could just scan you and get your records, it would save vital minutes and ensure they know what to treat you with right away. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Link it to your home Wifi and the medics can tell if you’re suddenly taken ill. They can also tell when you’re smoking, drinking, overeating…

All this, and the total removal of even the concept of gender, is already in Panoptica. The story I wonder about finishing – and wonder whether I should have written it at all. It seems to come true as I write it.

Although I didn’t have calorie counts on till receipts. There are no till receipts and your shopping is assembled for you depending on your State-defined dietary needs. That hasn’t happened in real life.

Yet.

 

No more

I have been a defender of ordinary Muslims. Not the terrorist ones, they can die a slow death and I’ll watch with popcorn. No, the ordinary people who just happen to worship an old Persian moon god. They’re fine with me. Waste time worshiping the supernatural if you like, it doesn’t care anyway.

I have often said that the Islamic terrorists don’t represent all Muslims any more than the IRA represented all the Irish. I have said that, over and over.

No more.

The attack on the pop concert in Manchester is the last straw for this particular camel’s back. A deliberate attack targeting children and young people who have never attacked any Islamic country and who probably, due to educational indoctrination, would have supported their cause.

Muslims kill children. Yes, Muslims, you do. You ‘honour’ kill your own children for stepping out of line. Where is the honour in that? It’s the most evil, disgusting thing a parent can do and you call it ‘honour’. It’s so sick it’s beyond any horror story I’d ever write.

Muslims rape children while killing gay people. It’s allowed and indeed prescribed in their holy book. Yes, Muslims, you do that. You can shag a baby up the arse and then go and throw gay men off a building to watch them splatter on the ground and you can feel all holy and righteous about it. Doesn’t that just fill you with God’s pride and holiness?

No more.

The BBC and most of the news pretend it’s a random attack. It is not a random attack. It is Islam again. targeting the unarmed and defenceless as usual. They don’t have the courage to go after politicians or armed soldiers. They attack the children.

There are worse than Islam out there. The apologists. The ones who demand we smoke in the middle of a field for  ‘the cheeldren’. It seems ‘the cheeeldren’ are expendable when it comes to defending a murderous religion they want to import. Hell, Islam could not have killed all those young innocents without the help of the BBC and its idiot PC pals. It would have been wiped out of this country long before now.

This attack is not something we should get used to. This attack should be the last. The final straw.

No more.

I have defended ordinary Muslims in the past. I will never defend them again. The radical arm cannot be reasoned with nor bargained with. This is it. This is the beginning of the end.

Islam, you have to stop this. Nobody else can other than by killing you all and turning every country you hold into radioactive ash. We can do that, you know. Look at our history and know that you have pushed too far.

Nobody outside Islam can stop it. It has to come from within. If you don’t want to stop it then you support it. Don’t pretend to be surprised at what happens next.

Until Islam openly disowns the shitty parts, until the Imams preach peace instead of death, I have no more support for any Muslim anywhere. You can all go to Hell now. I don’t care to support anything about you any more.

I will support none of you now. Not one.

No more.

The Pen is mightier than the Sword

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

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

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

It’s always the same sides too.

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

This kind of doublethink is endemic now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pen is, still, mightier than the sword.

Just watch out for macaroons…

Size matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I digress, as usual.

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

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

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

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