Out of book limbo

Yes, this place has been through another of its silent periods. I was preparing two books for publication at once. How? Well, both authors had supplied cover images and Cade F.O.N Apollyon stepped in as editor for Ruth’s book. That saved me a lot of time and work.

Now available are Mark Ellott’s ‘A Moment in Time’ and Ruth Bonner’s ‘Just Call Me Roob‘. If you have an Amazon allergy, the ebooks are also on Smashwords. Hopefully they’ll also soon spread to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, and more. Most of the rest have, there just seems to be an issue with Underdog Anthologies at Smashwords that’s a pain in the arse – but they make so little I haven’t yet bothered to worry about it.

There are three more I’d like completed before Christmas, plus the Christmas anthology of course. Then I might do something I never imagined I’d do when this all started with the Underdog Anthology in December 2016. Heck, back then I thought I was optimistic to call it Volume 1, and the Christmas book will be number 13! Which would have been a bad numbering sequence, but for 2020 it’s probably quite appropriate.

In December, I might actually need to close to submissions for a few weeks.

Yes, in four years I’ve gone from wondering whether I could find enough authors to fill one slim volume of stories, to actually having to close submissions for a few weeks so I can catch up! I’ll close on December 1st so if you have that massive tome of a fantasy novel spanning ninety generations of elves all set to send, you can still send it. I won’t guarantee to do anything about it before Christmas though, three books and an anthology plus some progress on my own writing means I’ll probably manage to take a half-day off for Christmas day. Well nobody can visit, might as well do something useful with all this time.

I still have to do the three volume annual thing but since I cut all the anthology prices to the bone for the duration of this nonsense, there doesn’t seem to be any hurry. I couldn’t charge more than $1.99 for the eBook version at the moment anyway.

If only all this work made any money. If you’re looking for a surprise stocking filler for Christmas, do take a look at the Leg Iron Books selection. There’s something for everyone (except the Gary Glitters and convicted councillors) in there. The authors will appreciate every penny of royalties, they’ll appreciate it even more if the royalties are more than a pound. Seriously, there’s some talented writers on sale at bargain basement prices over there. I even have a range of my own books in there of varying thicknesses to suit almost any wonky table leg.

Anyway, I have not entirely withdrawn from the real world – well, no more than usual. Today we did manage to visit Son and the grandchildren. Granddaughter is nearly three, her mother worries that the lockdown means she’s not developing social skills. She’s my granddaughter. She has no need of social skills, she just needs blade and crossbow lessons. Grandson is eight weeks old and has already mastered the art of the disapproving scowl. They are both developing perfectly normally. If Billy Gates Gruff wants to mess with this DNA, good luck. You have no idea what you might produce.

This vaccine is really gaining some acolytes. They think it will fix everything. The fact is, this vaccine isn’t a vaccine. It’s going to insert mRNA into your cells to make them produce proteins that are foreign to the body. This is, by any measure, not a good idea. You can pretend that sex is a construct to your five-or-seven-chambered heart’s content but biochemistry – trust me on this – is fixed.

At this point the Vaccine Brigade will call me an anti-vaxxer. I am a retired microbiologist. I have been vaccinated with every legitimate vaccine going. Some that the general public never get offered because they aren’t working with the horrible things I’ve worked with. My children and grandchildren are vaccinated. The only vaccine I have ever refused is flu vaccine because it’s money-making crap. I will definitely refuse the Billy Gates Gruff’s not-a-vaccine.

Real vaccines work like this. You take dead cells or attenuated (they can’t infect) live cells or even just appropriate bits of protein and inject them. Your immune system finds them and says ‘What’s this? What’s all this infecting? We’ll have no trouble here’ followed by ‘This is a local body for local cells, there’s nothing here for you’ and proceeds to wipe them out with antibodies.

The antibody production then declines. This is normal. It does not mean you have lost immunity. It means the immune system doesn’t waste time, protein and energy producing antibodies against something it’s already defeated. It would be like an army going through a battlefield eternally re-shooting the enemy it’s killed. Waste of bullets.

Instead, the immune system cells are able to store the information to make particular antibodies against things they have seen before. They don’t need to make them all the time. When the same pathogen appears, the immune system doesn’t need to go through all the ‘What is this and how do we kill it?’ routine. It just goes ‘Oh yeah, that one. Load up Antibody 73 and get firing, lads’.

The Billy Gates Gruff ‘vaccine’ does not do this. Bear in mind that the immune system recognises antigens – bits of surface material, not whole cells – and destroys the cell carrying them. The entire cell.

So, the Billy Gates Gruff ‘vaccine’ makes your own cells produce surface proteins that your own immune system recognises as foreign. It does not simply block the protein. It kills the cell carrying it. Your own body cells.

This is not a vaccine. This is an autoimmune disease in a syringe. I don’t care if they never let me enter a pub or restaurant or travel on a plane again. Not that we will be able to afford planes once the budget airlines have been wiped out. I am not going to be injected with this monstrosity.

You want to believe it will save you from what has turned out to be a bad flu? Fine. You go ahead. I won’t gloat, I probably won’t be one of the six people allowed to attend your funeral anyway.

You want to call it tinfoil hattery, go ahead. Or get two degrees in an appropriate subject, live through an entire career dealing with infectious disease and retire with a shed filled with lab equipment, like I have, and then maybe you’ll give it some thought.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’re excited to be injected with an experimental not-a-vaccine that claims 90% effectiveness against your own immune system’s 99%. Maybe you really want the aches and headaches of approaching arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Maybe you hate yourself so much that the agonising death of your body, cell by cell, is a delight to be savoured.

You just know it’s going to be called ‘Long Covid’, to get more idiots to take the thing, don’t you?

Meanwhile there is nobody sensible in charge. Boris is the Henpecked Premier, doing whatever his squeeze tells him to even though he must know, deep down, it will utterly destroy the country he was elected to lead.

That other bastion of Western Civilisation, America, seems to have no idea what it’s doing any more. That last election was a farce that would have embarrassed even the EU presidential election. Still nobody knows who won and I think it should be down to a cage fight between Trump and Biden. Go on, America. Election by Thunderdome. Two old fogeys enter, one old fogey leaves.

Maybe we should choose leaders who have a future beyond a rich retirement in the Cayman islands.

It doesn’t matter now. The game is on, Panoptica is approaching reality at a horrifying speed and it’s too late to stop it. Like climate change. It’s happening, it can’t be stopped, it’s not going the way they think it’s going and it’s adapt or die.

Darwin was right about that. It’s not evolution unless we turn into White Walkers. It’s adaptation.

We’ve done it before.

The big question is… how many of us have the guts to do it again?

Into the Abyss

Pretty busy here. Brakes are fixed, now one tyre has developed a slow leak. I think I might just keep pumping it up until 2020 is over. If I fix it, it’ll just set something else off. This one is easy. I even have a compressor.

Okay. Currently looking at a 12 story book for Halloween with some absolute beauties in there. The quality of writing from the authors just keeps getting better, there was hardly anything to edit this time. I suppose it’s the result of practice but whatever it is, it’s definitely working.

The deadline for closure is still 22 hours away and since all editing is up to date we can handle a slightly late one or two, as long as we know it’s coming. Contracts aren’t out because I’m still haggling over the title (it has to be on the contract) but that has to be decided by tomorrow night. This could be in print in a week. There are already two stories in for the Christmas anthology, even though it’s not yet officially open for submissions for a week or two yet.

I have one in there that stems from the logical result of eternal lockdowns, and wouldn’t you know it, the government have now enacted laws by edict that make it possible. Parliament is now just a shouting house, the government are taking no notice of them and not telling them in advance what they are up to. We don’t have a Parliament. We have a junta running the country.

So why are we paying the rest of them?

More local lockdowns are coming on the basis of less than ten positive tests. Hospitals are empty, you have to make an appointment to go to casualty and if they sold off the NHS now, hardly anyone would even notice it was gone. They’d only notice when the TikTok dancing nurses videos stopped. It’s been effectively closed for months for most people. Matt Handoncock is definitely in the ‘sell the NHS’ camp and the NHS are determined to help him do it.

The masks are not going away any time soon. I’ll have to get some even scarier ones. Criminals are loving it. Before all this, if you went into a shop masked you’d immediately raise suspicions. Now you get shouted at if you don’t. I await the first massive bank heist in which the CCTV can’t tell who is robbing it and who works there.

Masks don’t do a damn thing to protect anyone, but so many people have signed up to the Religion of the Mask now that they will not hear it. The masks are their saviours, they will not let them go. Ever. They genuinely don’t realise that there is no going back, there is no return to what we used to consider normal, and that they are the ones responsible for that.

We are staring into the abyss, and the edge we are standing on is crumbling.

The University Prisons

Well, the mechanic is getting all the parts and I should be rolling by Monday, maybe sooner if he gets them by tomorrow. This guy could be a regular for fixing the car (assuming lockdown makes the inactive metal box seize up something else, which is likely). I’ve used one tank of petrol since March and flat battery has happened twice already, despite having a new battery last year. This car is used to driving between Aberdeen and Cardiff, it doesn’t like the sedentary life. Still, it’s all part of the Boris plan to eradicate personal transport, I suppose. Might need to rebuild that old stable.

On the plus side, we are all up to date on story editing for the next anthology and there’s still a week left for submissions. Last minute submissions will pose no problem. I’ll be sending out contracts as soon as I think of a suitable title, then payments, and we are on course for a first week of October release. I can’t use ‘lockdown’ again even though I have a story about where that leads in the book. I can also use the time to dream up a cover – perhaps making use of that plague doctor mask, or the skull mask… I have so many now, and not one single overpriced and useless surgical mask. ‘Maskquerade’ might be a contender.

Nine stories so far, including one new author. I’m delighted to note that every anthology has introduced at least one new author so far. Not bad, considering this is number 12. There’s still time – and I have another story brewing.

My mother had scheduled a visit in October but of course that’s not going to happen now. She’s rescheduled for November, if the twats in charge come to their senses by then. It’s now public knowledge that both the CSO and CMO, who are running this through a grotesquely compliant Boris, stand to profit from a vaccine. I thought everyone knew about that months ago but the news is treating it as if it’s a scoop.

So we have to suffer until they can sell us a vaccine that won’t work. The annual flu vaccine is being pushed again, it’s that time of year, and that has an estimated success rate of 40%. The real rate will of course be a lot lower since some of those who don’t get flu wouldn’t have got it anyway. You might as well rattle a gourd at people and claim that if they don’t catch the disease, it has worked. You’d probably get very close to a 40% success rate.

No vaccine against any coronavirus has ever worked. Vaccines against stable viruses work. Smallpox was eradicated using a vaccine, it is still the only disease to be truly eradicated from the planet. Even the Black Plague is still around although now we have antibiotics and can deal more effectively with its major vector – rats.

Cholera is easily controlled by water supply treatment, even my tiny treatment plant here (filter and UV) will deal with it. All the diseases, apart from smallpox, are still around and this new cortonavirus is going to stick around too. Get used to it. It’s currently killing a lot fewer people than the annual flu and a hell of a lot fewer than cancer, heart disease and the rest.

Yet people are going around in plastic tents and someone is selling a space helmet with a pump sending air in through filters. Idiots are paying a lot of money for these things. I have a plastic Bane mask that is just as effective (as in, not at all) but a lot more fun. Especially as they can’t make me take it off. I’ll carry around my Saw puppet mask in case they insist I change it.

Now, in Scotland at least, Wee Nippy has confined thousands of university students to their rooms, enforced by police patrols. They cannot go to the pub, they cannot go to the shops, lectures are all online and they cannot even visit each other’s rooms. They’d be better off in prison.

Why even let them go back? Well, they are paying fees (unless they are Scottish or EU students, which has mysteriously never included English students who do have to pay fees – but the SNP aren’t anti-English despite their ‘go home’ signs at the border) and they are paying rent. Yes, they are all paying a lot of money to be in prison while rapists and murderers get it all for free. Isn’t that fun?

Even the non-fee-paying Scottish students, who I suspect are a major part of the SNP’s core vote along with their parents and families, are in the University California. No pubs, no going home for weekends even if they live a short bus ride away, no visits from family or friends or other students, lectures all online. Which all those students could have done equally well at home. They might not be paying fees but they are paying rent. I hope this devastates the SNP vote next election. If it doesn’t then the Scots are idiots.

Imagine being a first year student, possibly away from home for the first time ever, and being told you cannot go home and your family cannot visit you. Just think about how that would feel. Doesn’t it feel rather like being imprisoned for no crime other than breathing? You’re in a cell, can’t even talk to those in the other cells, and you’re fresh from home. You’ve committed no crime. How do you feel? I finished writing a Halloween story linked to this last night and it was true even before I typed the last word. It’ll be in the book, and on the blog when the book is published.

This is a taste of an independent Scotland under the Spiteful Nannying Party, headed by Kim McJong Nippy. Note that not a single one of those students has needed hospital treatment or any doctor’s attention. Not that there are any available anyway. If you really want this world you are a total bloody idiot.

Once my car is fixed I will have to take it for long drives. Even if it’s just to buy more petrol for the lawnmowers, the generator and the new brushcutter which I have dubbed the Petrol Driven Bastard. You’ll know why when you see it. This year the garden tools have used more petrol than the car.

I have some battery driven ones too, but the battery strimmer is a gentle stroking massage device compared to the Petrol Driven Bastard.

Better get in some more scythe practice. It’s going to be cutting edge technology again soon.

If Boris the alleged ‘libertarian’ gets his way, soon we’re going to party like it’s 1499.

Initiating Panoptica

Here it comes, and I haven’t even finished the book yet. So here’s a bit of backstory as to how Panoptica came/is coming to be.

The genderless society was a given. 23-David and 81-Mohammed covered that. The method to achieve it is far more efficient than I had envisaged and possibly more horrifying. So I will make adjustments.

The embedded chips… well established and already in use so that wasn’t anything new. Getting people to accept them? All the Strangers covered that. The new fear instilled by what is basically a new flu will make it so very much easier. Has anyone noticed that nobody dies of the flu any more? It used to kill people at the same rate as Covid19 but now it kills hardly anyone at all. Nobody seems to be questioning that.

The hard part was the barcode onesies. I didn’t have a good explanation for where they came from. Now I do.

Facial recognition technology is a way to control people. It’s invasive, it’s very expensive, it needs lots of trained operators, it requires very expensive and very precise cameras and maintenance of those cameras and it’s still not perfect. It is, basically, a dud idea. It’s just more Chinese overpriced tat for sale to the West. There are already lawsuits set up to oppose it and they will win because governments don’t really want it. This is not the control they are looking for. It’s a distraction. Something to make you think you won an argument.

With things like facial recognition, people don’t know they are being watched. That’s no good for control. You want everyone to think – know – they are always being watched all the time. Then you don’t have to actually watch them. They will behave as if they are always being watched even if you haven’t looked their way for months. I think the idiots in charge have realised this.

So here we are. There are people claiming Melbourne is a hotbed of infectious death far worse than New York based on deaths per population size. Melbourne is in the middle of the winter flu season while New York is in summer. Nobody in Melbourne has flu. New York’s handling of this virus has been appalling but even so, they are in summer now. Outside the Death Camps they call retirement homes, almost nobody is getting sick. What is now happening in Melbourne will happen in the northern hemisphere in September/October. The Second Wave is assured, it will be flu season.

Aberdeen, Scotland, is in lockdown because of some new ‘cases’. It is not clear whether these people are sick, dying, or merely tested positive. It was enough to shut down the city.

Even way out here everyone is in masks. On the rare occasion I visit Local Shop now I wear the most terrifying one I can find. I’m building up to Bane and then the plague doctor. It’s all a fucking joke. The masks do nothing. They just deflect a cough or sneeze sideways, which is their purpose in surgery. They stop almost none of it. And yet I see people wearing surgical masks as if they will help. If I have to wear a mask to get a bottle of milk I am going to take the piss. I am not going to argue with them, I have beaten my head against the antismoker and Cult of Climatology lunatics for long enough. I’m not going to play this game. Let them live in terror of nothing at all. They seem to like it.

The masks serve another purpose. They make facial recognition technology obsolete. It can’t recognise masked faces. All it needs now is ‘Oh but you can’t identify anyone!’ and ‘How can we know who is who’ and ‘Muh Individuality’ and bingo – you are all in barcoded onesies that identify you as an individual in the collective.

Then there’s no need for expensive cameras and expensive technology. The barcodes identify you, even if your face is entirely covered (it will come to that). Cheap cameras can do it.

Did you know that most speed camera boxes in the UK have no camera inside? The boxes are cheap. The camera is expensive. The box is a deterrent even if it doesn’t actually do anything because you don’t know which boxes have cameras in them. The same is true of many street CCTV camera boxes. Why?

The real camera isn’t needed. Only the semblance of a camera. It’s been a Panopticon for years and it’s about to accelerate. You need a few real ones of course. You need to catch the occasional nonconformist to keep the rest believing in your illusion. Still, most of your camera boxes can be duds and nobody will realise that.

Now we have ‘hiccups’ as a possible sign of coronavirus. Note that it’s not COVID19 any more. It’s coronavirus. The flu is coronavirus. The common cold is coronavirus. There are hundreds of different types of coronavirus, some are very nasty, some are merely inconvenient. Now there are no deaths from the new one they have moved on to ‘cases’ which means a positive test even if it’s just the common cold. Every other disease has been vanquished, only coronavirus remains.

Winter is coming. Flu season. Flu kills thousands every year. This will be a ‘second wave’ and we will be locked down again. Admit it, most people are scared enough now to accept it.

Now there are rules coming out to say you must wear a mask for an online Zoom meeting even though you really can’t get infected over the internet. It is not about health. Hell, none of the nonsense has ever been about health.

You cannot visit other people, even family members.

Later – you can visit but do not touch.

Stay six feet away from everyone. Touch nobody. Anything anyone else might have touched, disinfect it. Everyone else is a disease-riddled monster.

And now – if you can be seen, even over the internet, wear a mask. Don’t even look at each other. Soon you will not be allowed to speak. Speaking spreads the virus – that one’s already out there.

You are being isolated. Masked. Confused. Frightened. You treat everyone else, even your own family, as an enemy, a pariah. Your fear does not allow you to listen to reason, nor to reason for yourself. You are looking for a saviour, a way out, a way of being accepted back into some kind of normality. It will come. When it does you will grasp at it and embrace it.

And it will be the end of you as an individual because this is exactly how cults initiate new members. Roobeedoo had a good video explaining this, I hope she puts it in the comments because I can’t find it now.

There are those laughing and calling me ‘conspiracy theorist’ now but trust me, I didn’t just make up the stories I write. I research their backgrounds because fiction has to be plausible and sometimes I find things hardly anyone is even looking for.

So… can I stop this? Nope. Not even going to try. You’re on your own. There is no Marvel superhero coming, you either accept this or pretend it’s not happening or fight against it. Entirely up to you. Nobody is coming to save you. Listen to the warnings or enjoy your comfortable compliant conformity in Panoptica. All I’m going to do is document it, hopefully before it happens, although it’s going pretty fast now.

There will be a vaccine. It won’t work – like the annual flu vaccine, it doesn’t really need to – but most will take it anyway. It will kill more than the virus and it will come with a mark or passport that allows you to exist in the world. Without that you will be forever a pariah. The hysteria has reached that point and more. Refuse the vaccine and you will have Bodysnatcher point and scream aimed at you whenever the drones find you.

If you want to pretend I’m an anti-vaxxer, look back in the blog. I’m a retired microbiologist. I’ve benn vaccinated against things you’ve never heard of, but I will not take this one. You can if you like, I will do nothing to stop you.

The flu vaccine claims a 40% success rate. That is piss-poor even before you realise that most of that 40% probably would never have caught flu anyway. If you are vaccinated and don’t get it, it’s counted as a success. It’s like the guy throwing rolled up papers out of a train window in Esher to keep elephants off the tracks. When someone points out there are no elephants, he responds with ‘See? It works’. Coronavirus vaccines do not work. Any of them. They are the paper balls that keep elephants off London train tracks.

They do, however, make someone a lot of money. Hint: it’s not you.

This whole charade is about control. The virus is real but it was hyped by China to wreck Western economies and it has worked. The daft lockdowns have killed more than the virus ever would have (look at the reality of Sweden) and now Western governments are left with trying to get out of it without losing face.

I’d have a lot more respect for any government who came out and said ‘Yeah, we got pranked by the Chinese, you can all go back to normal now’ but I really don’t expect to ever see that. They’d rather be pilloried than admit they were wrong.

Then again, maybe they don’t want to do that because everything is going according to plan. Your initiation into the New Normal is almost complete. So many of you are desparate to be part of it.

Did anyone tell you what your New Normal actually is?

Did you ask?

A new game

When the antismokers were rife, not that long ago, I used to play a game with them. Initially, like most smokers, I tried to debunk the lies they had been fed but it was impossible. I came to the conclusion that these people actually wanted to be scared and that it was my civic duty to ramp up their fear as far as it could go.

Any face to face interaction wit these rabid loonies and I’d get them to feel their necks. Those bumps below the jaw (lymph nodes) became the beginnings of cancer because they’d been inhaling Deadly Second Hand Smoke while sneering at me. There will be doctors who would lynch me if they ever found out I did that. What the hell. Medics were promoting the same lies, it’s their own fault.

ASH told them that cigarette butts never degrade. I told them that all grey dust was tobacco ash that had accumulated for 400 years and now covered the entire country. Well, tobacco waste never degrades, right? ASH said so. Logically, therefore, that fine layer of dust is all tobacco ash. I might be responsible for a few OCD cleaners and bleach footbaths at the doors of homes…

I told a few that niacin was nicotinic acid, derived from nicotine (it really is) and that it was added to foods to make the food addictive, and that was the cause of obesity. I suggested they check the labels. I have no idea how many pellagra cases I might have caused, and really don’t care. There was a lot more.

Remember we are talking about people who care nothing for me. People who would delight in my death and many of them have said exactly that. People who are daft enough to believe any old crap as long as it fits their prejudices. People looking for someone to blame for nothing at all. Why would I care at all about them? Why would I not add to their torment any way I can?

Since moving out to the countryside I haven’t come across any of the truly rabid antismoker nuts. They’re all so tolerant out here. The local shop will sell you booze and baccy with not so much as a judgemental glance.

Basically, I’ve had nobody to play with for ages.

That has now changed. The mask madness is here and the drones are convinced that anyone not wearing a mask is going to kill them. They are terrified. Once more, I see it as my civic duty to terrify them even more. It’s playtime again.

So I bought a mask…

I should really shave my head for the full effect but… no.

Does it work? Of course not. None of them do. This one at least has the advantage that the front and sides are solid and exhalation is directed down. You can stand in front of me and none of my imaginary biohazard breath will touch you. The holes don’t go all the way through but the eternally terrified will think they do. It can also be cleaned just by wiping the inside with an alcohol swab or a shot of disinfectant spray.

It will be clear to the eternally terrified that this does not work to stop the virus, even though it actually works better than their face nappies. I must surely get at least one giving it the old ‘your choices are going to kill me’, just like the old days.

I am therefore practicing my Bane voice and will answer with ‘This is not the time for killing. That comes later’, or simply a cheery ‘Of course’. Maybe even ‘You have my permission to die’. It’s not an easy voice, it’s rather higher pitched than mine, but I am determined.

Ah, I have missed the old games. It’s nice to see them back again.

I’ll have to prepare more terrifying ‘facts’ for them, but with Bozza pretending there’s a second wave coming, this game could play out for a long time. When it’s finally over maybe the antismokers will be ready to play again.

But then, we have the Billy Gates Gruff and his insane RNA vaccine idea. Perhaps I can convince them it will make them immortal, but change their DNA so they have to live for eternity as a lizard. Oooh, David Icke’s ideas could help with that one…

The Bill Gates vaccine will kill a lot of people. All I’m doing is making sure it kills the right ones.

And, incidentally, enjoying myself enormously in the process.

Another ending

There is a theory, not entirely without merit, that humanity has reached impressive levels of technology in the distant past and then lost it all and regressed to pretty much caveman status. The big issue with this idea is – where did it go? Why are there few, if any artefacts of that past civilisation? Where are the books, the buildings… the statues?

The idea that they destroyed it all themselves before falling back to a primitive state has always been the source of ridicule. Why would they do that? What possible motivation did they have for abandoning the pyramids, including the buried ones in other parts of the world? Why was Gobleki Tepe deliberately buried? Did the hunter gatherers of the time suddenly develop extensive stonemasonry skills, or was it the other way around?

Civilisations have risen and fallen throughout currently recorded history. Many have conquered the known world of the time, only to lose it and fade into obscurity. You don’t see a lot of Byzantians or Romans around these days. So many great civilisations, fallen into dust, in just our short record of human history.

Every one of those past civilisations believed they would last forever. None of them did. So why do we believe ours will be the ‘special one’? Because all the old ones did. It’s human nature. And yet every civilisation falls in the end. They become complacent. They become tolerant. They become weak.

This time feels different. It’s not just like the fall of Rome, it’s global. The whole shitshow is falling all at once. They are smashing their statues, renaming their past, destroying their history. Burying their monuments and closing down their civilisation. They have nothing to replace it with.

Most of modern knowledge is in digital form. What if it was in that form in the past too? Paper books will rot away anyway, but digital? How can that be lost?

Who has a BBC computer with a Cumana disk drive and Cub monitor? (hint: me). 5.25-inch floppy disks. The bee’s knees 40 years ago, hardly anyone would know what they are now. How about cassette or even VHS tapes? Betamax? Laser disk? 3.5-inch disks? All gone, a whole generation has no idea what those things are and yet none of them existed when I was a teenager. CDs. Invented and gone. DVDs losing out to streaming. Vinyl, tapes and CD music… are there many households still using them? (hint: there’s one, it’s me)

What will future archaeologists make of CDs? Some kind of decorative mandala perhaps? They will have no means to play them so they are likely to assume them simple jewellery items made by primitives. With that in mind, look at what they consider ancient jewellery now.

People now store information, documents, photos, in ‘the cloud’. When the power source fails it’s all gone. No need for mass burnings and destruction. Flick a switch, all traces vanish. Nothing for a future archaeologist to find other than some mysterious boxes with wires and disks inside. Well, those that haven’t rusted into dust, if any. There might be an Antikythera mechanism still around.

Will they be able to figure out how to read them? We have 8-inch disks and reels of computer tapes from the past we cannot access now, and we are talking much less than a century. I personally have files in WordStar on 3.5-inch disks that no modern computer will accept, much less read. I’ve already burned a lot of them, they are of no use now.

I have lost whole years of digital photographs while my mother has traditional film and print photographs from before I was born. Digital is so very easy to erase. One solar flare and this world is lost. The paper photos will last a few hundred years but not much longer.

What if it was like that before? An information storage system we cannot access because we have no idea how it worked, nor even that it existed? We have lost so many of our own information systems in a few decades, how can we hope to guess how the builders of Gobleki Tepe stored theirs?

Oh sure, we can say ‘but they were primitive people’ and pretend it’s not simple arrogance. Those ‘primitive people’ built enormous pyramids with geographical precision in a way we ‘advanced’ people can neither replicate nor understand. The temples of the Incas were built on top of stones that were laid in a way far more advanced than they were able to replicate. Even so, we cannot even replicate the Inca methods of building now. Can we be really sure we know all there is to know about those ancient people?

There are many theories as to how, why and when the pyramids and other structures in Egypt and all over the world were built. Not one of them stands up to scrutiny. They were not tombs, that is now clear. They would have taken a very long time and a hell of a lot of work to build, so they must have been important. For what? We might never know.

Gobekli Tepe is an intricate structure with many carvings, some of which are echoed on other ancient monuments. The ‘handbag’ image is particularly interesting in this regard. What is it? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else, including those who have spent their lives studying this stuff. Maybe the 3.5-inch disk will gain similar notoriety in ten thousand years. Already it’s hailed by the young as a 3D print of the ‘save’ icon. Its real purpose has already been forgotten.

Many times, including in recent memory, we have not just forgotten our past, we have actively deleted it. Iraq pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue. How many of the under-20s even know who he was? When the Soviet Union collapsed, many statues of Stalin fell. Germany refuses to allow any mention of Hitler and model planes of the second world war have no swastika decals for the tailplane. Every second world war plane of the Luftwaffe had that insignia. It’s history. Deleted. They have deleted the past, so future generations are doomed to do it all again.

Now we are in the process of deleting all of it at once. All power generation failing due to an imagined apocalypse that has been ten years away since at least the 1950s. All food production to be deleted because ‘why do you need farms when you can just buy it in a supermarket?’ I am not kidding, that is a genuine argument.

The world has gone insane. Except in parts of Africa, that reservoir of humanity that still lives in the old ways and is ready to repopulate the world once this all falls to the ground. They will once again meet neanderthals, the residue of the white race in the northern lands and it will all start again. Different technology, most likely. Maybe it will work out next time, or the time after that.

It is not inevitable. People could still come to their senses and see they are heading back to massive starvation and a residual hunter-gatherer life. They could still avoid it, although the signs are not good. They seem to want that ending, they want to go back to primitive life but they want someone else to pay for it. They are going to be unhappy to find that that is not how it works. They have brought their own destruction on themselves.

I have lately written about a character called Moros. This character is not fiction, it’s mythology. The difference is that fiction is entirely made up, like my dishwasher goblins or the genie in a beer can story. Mythology is often based on a fictionalised remembrance of something in the past. A story passed down like a Chinese whisper, embellished and sensationalised on the way.

Moros is a character in Greek mythology. He does not kill you, he drives you to destroy yourselves. In this modern world he might have accumulated enough wealth to simply pay you to destroy yourselves while taking no part himself. He might even use a twist on his name.

I know, I know, take out shares in tinfoil companies but do you really think the human world isn’t in a super-self-destructive mode? Do you believe history is not being rewritten and deleted before your eyes? Do you have to wait until the Empire State Building is felled and buried?

There is much talk of ‘people will rise up’ but you know they won’t. They never have. So many believe in the indestructibility of their way of life and consider history ‘the past’. The Fall of Rome. the destruction of the Library, the collapse of the Pharoahs, it’s history, it can’t happen again. Even though it has happened every time before.

The ones who take over think it can never happen to them too. It always does.

Then you get the global one. The ultimate deletion. The one that wipes out everything right down to knowing how to grow plants. As in Seattle’s ‘death zone’ now. Not one of them will survive a reset but that is what they want.

I think the reset is coming. I also think it will not be what those who demand it expect it to be.

The secret is, bang the rocks together, guys.

Career suicide

You want to be published by a big name publisher? Here’s how it works.

The likes of Penguin Random House are not going to talk to you. Send them your work, they will ignore it. They will only talk to agents. Why? Well, any agent will tell you why.

A good agent is going to get a bag full of submissions every day. Just imagine what Random House would get if they were open to authors directly! The agent does not read the submissions. They go into the ‘slush pile’.

The slush pile readers will then sort through the submissions and will pass the good ones on to the agent for consideration. The agent will sort through the filtered submissions and pick maybe one or two to answer.

Now, those slush pile readers have a big mound of stuff to get through. They are actively looking for a reason to ditch every one they pick up. That’s not malicious. They might have a hundred, and the agent wants five or less. They have to sort out the dross quickly. Is the cover letter slapdash, is the first page full of spelling errors and bad grammar, is it a tedious opening? You could go in the reject pile in the first three lines of your story.

You have to get past those overworked slush pile readers. Then you have to get the agent’s attention. Then, if the agent takes you on, they have to try to persuade a publisher to take you on. All this is hard to get through. You have to get through layers of filtration before you get to the big publishers. Even then, if the book flops, they won’t be interested in your next one.

So, getting into a big name publisher is hard. It’s worth it, you’d get a big marketing department, seriously professional editors and cover artists, all for free. But it is really, really hard to get in.

It’s also worth considering that agents and publishers are a fairly small industry. They mostly know each other. If you behave like a dick to one agent, your name will be mentioned over coffee and other agents will recognise it when you try submitting to them. Agents are busy people. They don’t have time to assuage egos or play politics or deal with dicks. They have so many submissions that having a name they can ditch at the first hurdle is really helpful to them. Don’t be that name.

Given that it is murderously difficult to get a foot in that door, who would be so stupid as to throw it all away over a tweet?

These four authors just did exactly that.

They think they are making a point but they are not big names. There won’t be a huge list of agencies begging them to sign up – and they have just marked themselves as ‘difficult to work with’. One of them has three novels published. Well… so do I. So does Mark Ellott. Three is not a big number. When you are at Neal Asher’s level of output then maybe you can afford to be a bit shirty at times (he never has been, as far as I know) but three novels? No, you are not a big earner for the publisher nor for the agent. You could have been if you hadn’t bailed over a hurty tweet.

These four authors were signed up to the same agent as J.K. Rowling. I quite like the films, never bothered with the books or merchandise. CStM is a big fan though. J.K. Rowling, loathe her or hate her, is a big name in the publishing world. Being with the same agent is a big win for any author whether they like her or not. It doesn’t, or shouldn’t matter what she thinks of trans people to the other authors.

Heck, I don’t like Stephen King’s ‘woke lefty’ attitude. I still read his books and I would love to be taken up by the same agency. Stories are not real, sometimes authors are not the wonderful people you want them to be, but this is your career here. Are you really going to throw it all away, after getting over those massive hurdles, just because you’re a bit miffed by what another author has said? Well, apparently so. I wouldn’t. These authors just cast themselves adrift over a tweet. Good luck getting another agent.

Heck, I don’t even want them at Leg Iron Books. I am not going to play political correctness, I am not bending my knees unless I drop something. I frankly don’t care about anyone’s sexuality or melanin quotient or whether they have all their limbs in the right order. Leg Iron Books is about writing. If the writing is good, it’s in. If the story is good but the writing needs a bit of work, still it’s in. So far I have enough submissions to keep me busy but not enough to need slush pile readers to filter them.

I am only interested in the writing. I do not care if the author writes while candles burn at an altar to Satan. I don’t care if they have posters of Hitler in their kitchen or Che Guevara in their bedroom. Not my business. Only the story matters. Naturally, I will not publish either white supremacy nor black supremacy nor any colour supremacy nonsense. I will not publish anything that deliberately sets out to incite hate or division.

But… if someone sends in a ghost story they wrote while cross-dressed and listening to Stalin speeches and the story is a good one, the author’s personal preferences are not my concern.

Would I publish an overtly religious book? Sure, but there are religious publishers far bigger than me who would take it on and it would do better with them. The same is true for an overtly gay or gushily romantic novel. They sell really well but there are much bigger publishers specialising in those books. So if you were to send me a story in those genres I won’t reject it (unless it’s a crap story) but I might recommend you try the bigger boys first. They aren’t all tied to agents like the top presses.

The point of Leg Iron Books is to get new authors into print. To give them something they can put on a CV when applying to an agent. To get them noticed by the big names. It’s never going to develop into a rival for Penguin Random House. It’s a starting point. If a big publisher ever wanted to buy out an author contract I am not ever going to say ‘no’.

I don’t care what authors do in their private lives. I am not going to police their social media and I will not be impressed if other authors do that to them either. I am not going to install any kind of ‘diversity programme’ and I am not interested in re-education of any kind. I have a PhD. There is no more education I need.

An author walking out on an agent is of no consequence whatsoever. There are a hundred in the queue behind every single one of them. Every day. It is not only a pointless gesture, it is an incredibly stupid one. These four have just trashed their hard-won careers for no benefit at all. Nobody will even remember them, the agency will take on four new authors and those four ‘woke’ ones will disappear into obscurity. J.K. Rowling continues unaffected.

Still, if you are an author looking for an agent, this one has suddenly acquired four vacancies.

Discordia

It doesn’t make sense.

In Reading today, some lunatic went on a stabbing spree. Three people are dead, three more seriously injured and more have minor injuries. As far as I can tell, all those stabbed were white British.

Some linked it to the Black Lives Matter protest that happened in the same place earlier in the day, but that protest ended a few hours before the stabbing.

Then it emerged that the knife-weilding loony was Libyan, some say ‘fresh off the boat from Calais’ but I have not been able to confirm that. He’s not black. He’s Arab.

British police entering the apartment of the Libyan asylum seeker who stabbed 3 ppl to death today after a #BLM protest in #Reading today. Credible reporter @Sotiridi1 reports that witnesses say the attack was race-related. First case of #BLMterror? pic.twitter.com/mKx1AcpFVj

— BasedPoland (@BasedPoland) June 20, 2020

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Still being linked to BLM, even though the killer isn’t black and the protest ended hours earlier. It could be race related but I suspect it’s more Islam related.

The thing is, Libya has a current slave market trading in black slaves. Not two hundred years ago. Right now. They are buying and selling human beings today, yesterday and tomorrow. So I really don’t see a Libyan supporting Black Lives Matter because in Libya, they don’t matter. They are a commodity, and a cheap one at that.

I’m not buying this ‘black on white race violence’ in this case, the attacker isn’t black and is from a country that actively enslaves black people. And yet the media have a dilemma. Do they make it a race issue or an Islam issue? Nobody falls for the ‘mental illness’ shit any more. They’ll have to pick one.

I think they’ll call it a race issue to fan the flames of the race war they are trying to provoke.

Now, Black Lives Matter don’t really care about black lives either, as shown by their destruction of black peoples’ businesses all over America. They are a Marxist group intent on installing communism, they say so themselves. The children in Seattle who made mini-farms have set up a ‘black only’ area now. They have also designated one of the mini-farms ‘black only’. That’s right. In addition to a border wall, border guards and strict rules they have now installed apartheid. White liberals treating black people as pets, same old story. Communism in action. You know, nobody ends up free under communism. A lot of people end up dead. Every time.

Twitter is full of black-on-white attack videos. No context, just black people hitting white people. In some cases it’s clearly unprovoked, in others it’s not so clear. Some are not recent, they have been ‘outed’ as past videos. It looks like a setup to enrage white people into retaliation.

There have also been many videos of black people just talking, and they are condemning this whole race war narrative along with distancing themselves from BLM and Antifa, the thug club for the soyboy wannabe Stasi. They are talking sense but I fear few are listening.

The real bad guys are the media. They hyped up COVID19 to sell papers, never grasping the reality that the only reason people bought newspapers in recent times was because they couldn’t get toilet paper. The news has become worthless. It’s sensationalist nonsense and it only serves to cause more fear. Now they are hyping up their race war because they think it’ll sell papers. I don’t think it will. I think this is the hill they die on.

The Grauniad, indeed, was already in dire financial straits before it started the whole ‘delete the ancient slaveowners’ narrative. Now it turns out that it was founded by a slave owner. This must be why handguns were banned in the UK. Lefties kept shooting their feet with them.

It has all become very, very silly. If only these hysterical children would take a moment to google the statues they are destroying, they will find that half of them were on their side. Well, assuming their side is really about anti-slavery and not just about deleting history to fit a Marxist loony-tune idea. It isn’t about black lives, it isn’t about slavery, we all know it.

We know what the real aim is here, kids.

What a pity you don’t.

Street battles

Well, just to add to the delays, our water supply shut down last night. It happens once in a while, the pipe from the well gets an airlock which has to be cleared. The pipe delivers water by gravity feed to a large storage tank in the house and then it’s pumped through filters and UV treated. If the pressure in the tank drops too far the pump can’t operate. Since it happens about once a year we always have reserve water to hand.

It’s fixed now, and it shows one of the benefits of renting. If I bought this house I’d have had to pay Sunday rates for someone to come and fix it. Fortunately the landlord is well versed in the mechanics of this system so was able to repair it quickly.

Right, I am behind with editing and still have to put those novel prices up. It’s complicated by Amazon’s web crawlers which, if they find the book cheaper anywhere else, will flag it up and possibly get it withdrawn from the Amazon site. So they all have to be changed on Smashwords first, let those prices filter through to the outlets they distribute through and then change the Amazon prices.

In case I was feeling a shortage of distractions, the internet is full of stories about the ‘riots’ in London and elsewhere. They aren’t really all that big as riots go, nothing like the Tottenham ones a few years back. Still, people have been getting hurt at them.

It is all starting to look like a clumsily engineered plan of sorts. Last weekend, BLM and Antifa were allowed to vandalise a lot of things and the police pretty much gave them free rein. In Bristol, police stood back and watched as the mob pulled down a statue of someone nobody outside Bristol has heard of and dumped it in the harbour.

This triggered a nationwide demand for statue-smashing. In response, London sealed Winston Churchill in a box.

Yes, really. He doesn’t even have a window.

You see, all of a sudden, Winston Churchill is a Very Bad Man. I’m sure the Wehrmacht thought so too. However, our side thought he did rather well. We did end up winning that war, although it is increasingly starting to look like we needn’t have bothered.

Google even removed his picture, as well as any reference to the period 1940-1945, from their search results for British Prime Monsters. He also no longer appears on a list of world leaders in that war, although Hitler and Stalin are still there. Google likes them, apparently.

Statue smashing is not a new sport. Americans have been playing that game for some time. It’s new to the UK and… well sir, we don’t like it. Okay, I’ll admit to having paid scant regard to statues and monuments, other than Cenotaphs, throughout my life, but a lot of people like them and even a Philistine like me doesn’t want them smashed. They are, for better or worse, part of our history, and once you delete history, what is left? Pol Pot’s ‘year zero’, that’s what.

Those hippie squatters in Seattle’s breakaway state of Soymalia, aka Chaz, seem to be practicing for just that. Although they are really going to have to improve their farming techniques. They might also want to consider what a Seattle winter can be like. Tents are going to be a tough call in December over there.

But I digress.

Last week it was all BLM and Antifa and most of it was just people marching around with signs on sticks. They were protesting about the brutal actions of a policeman in America and many have now been led to believe that the same things happen in the UK. The rowdy element was allowed to have a little tantrum and threaten a lot of monuments and pretend that they have only just been freed from slavery.

There are a lot of bona-fide slaves in East Africa and around the Middle East right now who would trade places with them in a heartbeat, but the protestors don’t care about them. The rowdy element don’t even care what the protest was really about. They have their own agenda which they were allowed to get away with.

Was there a reason? The BBC and Sky and the Scale Model Mayor all lauded the protest as mostly peaceful. I doubt the injured police would agree, and neither would those who had to clean off the graffiti afterwards. Emboldened by their consequence-free tantrum, the rowdies drew up a list of statues they wanted destroyed, some tenuous link to past crimes was devised (usually slavery even though they targeted abolitionists too) and bragged they were out to smash them all.

The Scale Model Mayor of London joined in with this. He thinks all the old statues should be replaced with new ones to reflect London’s diversity. If he suggests one of Mohammed, the resulting collective sharp intake of breath would suck all the air out of the city. So, History and its tangible residue, the statues, are under threat. A few token ones were removed to rile the public and move to the next stage.

What happened next was entirely predictable and, I suspect, exactly what was supposed to happen. A load of enraged people went to London to defend the cenotaph and the statues. All of these people, including many military veterans, were labelled ‘far right’ and ‘football hooligans’ determined to ‘stop legitimate protest’ because they are ‘racist Nazi bigots’.

What has been glossed over is that these ‘far right’ people did not come to attack the BLM marches. They did not come because they are racists who despise black people. They did not come to tear down the notion that Black Lives Matter.

They came to defend the statues and monuments. That’s their only motive. Having seen the police back off, run away, bend the knee and generally let this toddler tantrum escalate out of control, of course they decided to defend the statues themselves. Any idiot, even Khan, saw this coming.

Tommy Robinson (NHRN) saw it coming. He declined to attend. He saw the jaws of the trap and decided not to walk into them. I have to admit, that’s a smarter move than I expected from him, but thumbs up for seeing his opponent’s next move. He’s getting the hang of the game, I think.

So, last week the police were in shirtsleeves, no armour, no helmets, no protection at all. Around 30 were injured (numbers vary), some seriously, in that ‘mostly peaceful’ event.

This week they arrived in full riot gear. Six were injured. The BBC, Sky, and Mini-Mayor described it as ‘carnage’. These far right thugs spoiled their toddler-tantrum fun!

It was set up. They tried the same thing in Glasgow with predictable results. Glasgow turned out in force and the rowdies ran away. Antifa have also threatened to invade Milwall. Good luck with that one. If we ever have nuclear war and run out of bombs, then we will escalate it and send Milwall fans over. I suspect Antifa are all talk on that one.

Why are the police standing back from the Rowdies of Antifa and the militant wing of BLM? They’ve been told to. The same is true in America. Seattle police are not allowed to enter the Soapless Zone, not because the inmates demand it, but because their mayor will not allow it. There are Hell’s Angels and others on the way. I bet the police will be told to stop them, and I’m sure I know which lot the police would rather deal with.

Meanwhile, politicians everywhere insist we stay home, don’t meet even family members, we cannot see dying relatives, we cannot attend funerals or weddings, now we have to wear masks on public transport (well those of you who actually have access to public transport).

Every other toilet is taped off, bus seats are taped off, you have to stay two metres apart and Boris’s ‘experts’ are threatening to resign if he relaxes that rule.

At the same time, mass protests are allowed. No ‘social distancing’. No control at all. You can forget contact tracing. That’s right out of the window now.

The virus was dying out. Scientists were afraid it might disappear before the highly profitable vaccine was ready. It needed another surge.

Brexit is happening. The government have refused to extend it any more. Remain need chaos, pain, suffering, a reason to make an extension inevitable.

The Marxists want to bring down government and delete history. This is the perfect opportunity.

All of this is happening at once. Every faction sees their chance. Every player in their own particular game sees advantage in this. Every maniac is let loose, every scheme for profit, power and gain is running at full tilt now.

Sometimes, two and two really do equal four.

On Kafka’s furrowed brow

Kafka could not have written this reality. Even he would shake his head in confusion at this.

Boris is still reciting his mantra of ‘you can visit family as long as you only meet in the garden and stay six feet apart and you can’t use the toilet in the house’ while thousands of protestors mob city centres all over the world. From the 15th June we are all to wear masks on public transport, which won’t affect me at all since we don’t have any of that around here. It will have no meaningful effect on anyone else either. Meanwhile tens of thousands have travelled all over the country to attend protests, pick up a viral souvenir and take it home.

In Scotland, the Chief Goblin of the Spiteful Nannying Party has declared we can’t travel more than five miles. Well, sod that. A five mile radius around me is farms and fields, the nearest supermarket is 15 miles, even the nearest pharmacy is 7 miles and the doctor’s surgery is another five miles further on. A five mile radius might get you everything you want in Glasgow or Edinburgh but out here it gets you farms and fields.

Boris has a new trick too. He wants to boost the Green God’s new Church of Climatology. Well, Boris, it is now the sixth of June. Two weeks to midsummer’s day. It is currently 7 degC outside and in the daytime tomorrow it is forecast to reach the giddy heights of 12 degC. This, you tousle-haired arse impressionist, is not warming. Twenty years ago I’d have had every window open by now.

I thought Boris or at least his carer, Demonic Cummings, had some sense. This new obeisance to the Green God has blown that out of the water. The sun is dimming, it’s at the bottom of three cycles at the same time. It’s getting colder. Shutting down your power stations and replacing them with shiny suncatchers and spinning lawn ornaments is exactly the wrong thing to do now. You want to cut emissions without killing large swathes of the population? Nuclear is the way. Lots of small plants rather than a few big ones. Small ones have less risk of meltdown and if one does go wrong, it wouldn’t contaminate the entire country and while it’s closed, the rest of the stations can take up the slack.

Chopping down every CO2-absorbing tree and replacing them with concrete and steel and fibreglass blades and toxic waste is suicide. You won’t be able to power anything at all on a windless night.

Then there is the alleged vaccine for the new Flu Manchu. Well, scientists are concerned…

YES! We don't need a Coronavirus vaccine and we don't need Bill Gates to give us a "health advice" any more!! https://t.co/tbsQ7sIsPo

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) June 5, 2020

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Scientists are worried that the virus might disappear before they have a vaccine for it. This, apparently, is bad news. Really. It’s only bad news if you were expecting to make a fortune from a vaccine that nobody now needs. It’s also bad news for those who delight in ultimate control of the population (yes, Wee Nippy, I’m looking at you). For the rest of us, it’s good news.

Flu Manchu is dying, but the restrictions are increasing. The rioting over a career criminal being killed by a dirty cop is on the wane. Only the daftest of the Woke are now kneeling, their replacement displacement activity from clapping on their doorsteps, and it’s time for something new.

Or, perhaps, the resurgence of an already established fearmongering scam.

Yes, we are back to the imaginary ‘global warming’. It’ll do, until the Chinese release another virus.