Hysteriavirus

Does anyone remember necrotising fasciitis? An absolutely horrible disease that runs, very fast, under your skin using the lymphatic system. The only hope you had was to be literally skinned alive and face months of skin grafts afterwards – and that’s only if you survived it. It killed in a matter of hours once it took off so very early diagnosis was absolutely essential.

That was a bacterium. Antibiotics would work but you just didn’t have time for tests. It would take a couple of days to work out the best antibiotic and you’d be dead by then. There were tales of people literally dissolving on train journeys. Which never happened, of course.

That disease was a rare one and killed a total of eight people one year. The media frenzy was astonishing. People genuinely believed they would melt on the way to work.

Then we had swine flu, Ebola, and so many others that were going to end the human race and somehow didn’t.

Now we have coronavirus. It’s a virus. Antibiotics will do nothing at all to it. Antibiotics work by messing up some aspect of cell metabolism and viruses have no metabolism. There’s also no vaccine because there are so many variants. Basically, if it gets in, you have an infection.

This latest one started in China. It’s now global. This, like all the other infections blamed on climate change, has nothing at all to do with climate change. It has everything to do with modern human mobility – and no, I definitely do not advocate us returning to the horse and cart mode of transport.

It’s even appeared in Scotland. I live in Scotland. Am I terrified? Nah. I’m a smoker and a drinker and if you believe the hype, those things each give me a 50% chance of dying from them so I’m doomed anyway. This latest coronavirus is killing 3% of those that catch it. It’s an amateur. Diptheria, typhoid fever, many other currently extant diseases are laughing at it.

Oh I know it’s cold comfort if you happen to be one of the 3% but you know, you’re much more likely to be one of the 97% who catch it and survive.

Even more likely to be one of the very many who never get it at all. Like all these terrible pandemics, it’s being hyped as the End of Humanity. I doubt any other species on the planet takes such delight in imagining themselves being eradicated from existence. Still, as a horror writer, it’s a useful trait to have in the audience.

There are many videos of people wearing dust masks in the streets. Viruses are not dust. Viruses are so small you can’t see them with a microscope because they are smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. A dust mask, to a virus, is like driving a truck into the mouth of a large volcano. It’s not even going to touch the sides. Those dust masks serve only one purpose – to make people think they are safe.

Of course, you can’t provide people with filter masks that could stop viruses. The holes in the filter would be so small you would have trouble breathing through them. What you need is a multi-layer filter which would still not be perfect but which would be a hell of a lot better. A fluted, deep multi-layer filter fitted into a rubber mask that covers your nose and mouth would be the best thing here.

You know. The sort of thing an ex-microbiologist who’s spent a career working with pathogens and who has recently closed his lab might have lying about in his shed 😉

It’s a little sobering to recall that I visited China almost 30 years ago. It was work, not a holiday, so I was treated to genuine backstreet Chinese restaurants. When I came back, after ten days, I had lost ten pounds in weight and was, for one of the few times in my life, actually pretty trim.

Was I sick from the food? No. The food was wonderful. Not at all like the Westernised junk we get here. I lost weight because of the Chinese way of eating. The food is on plates on a lazy-susan in the centre of the table and all you ever have on the tiny plate in front of you is what you are about to eat right now. You stop when you’ve had enough. There is no mound of food on a plate that you have to clear. You take a little bit at a time.

Okay, some of the food was a bit strange. I tried it all anyway, even dog. Yes, I had to take rabies shots before going to China and they were pointless. They’d eaten all the dogs.

Of course, dogs aren’t the only carriers of rabies. Bats are another potent source. But I didn’t get offered bat, fortunately. Nor was I offered live baby rat nor the still-writhing remains of a squid. I have eaten most things, even steak cheval (in France) but bats, rats and the still wriggling seafood would have been a challenge.

I did manage to disgust them by eating a raw garlic clove and telling them what was in haggis. Yes, I managed to eat something that made the Chinese go ‘Ewww!’ I should have that on my gravestone, I think.

Now we are regaled by images of a Chinese man eating live baby rats and the tale of a Chinese woman who ate a whole bat. I don’t know why that’s remarkable, bats aren’t generally all that big. This dietary regime, apparently, is the cause of all ills. Well, as a smoker, I’m happy to have a day off from that particular blame game. Let the foodies have it for a while.

The Chinese have always eaten this way. With that size of population you eat what you can get and that has been true for a very long time. It really isn’t the fault of the Chinese people that coronavirus mutated into a new form. It does that all the time, and it’s not the only virus to do it. Rhinovirus is especially adept at it, which is why there is no cure for the common cold (that, and the fact it’s hardly up there with the ’cause of death’ crowd).

So yes, this is a nasty virus and it spreads easily, just like colds and flu. It’s going to be a horrible experience to get it and there is a 3% chance it might kill you. There’s also a 97% chance it won’t.

Take simple precautions, just as you would when there’s a cold or flu going around, and chances are you’ll never catch it at all. Don’t put your trust in dust masks, they won’t help in the slightest.

I think it might be time to put out an anti-hysteria infection book, perhaps with ‘Don’t Panic’ in large, friendly letters on the cover.

Killing yourself to live

No competition this time. It’s a Black Sabbath song that should really be the theme song for the Extinction Rabble. They should play it at Davos every time the Doom Goblin takes the stage.

This planet is turning into a lake of toxic waste thanks to mining for the materials needed to make windmills and solar panels. All those trees lost to the wind farms and short-lived suncatchers… planting a few more isn’t going to bring them back.

(I cut out the original poster’s ID so they won’t get flak from the loonies)

I have even seen a ‘scientist’ declare that the phrase ‘CO2 is plant food’ is an ‘unsubstantiated claim’.

Really. That’s the level of intelligence running the show here. Biology so basic that no university lecturer feels the need to even mention it. If you didn’t learn that at school you really have no business in any biological science subject of any kind at all.

So they remove acre after acre of photosynthesising plants that are absorbing atmospheric CO2 and releasing oxygen, only to replace them with panels that absorb sunlight and turn it into electricity. Those panels neither remove CO2 nor produce oxygen. They only work in daytime, if they’re not dusty or covered in snow. After 20 years the panels, and all the toxic materials they contain, go into landfill. They cannot be recycled.

Neither can worn out blades from those windmills. They go into landfill too.

The windmills have a finite life. When they are scrapped, they leave behind several hundred tons of concrete in the ground. Well what did you think was holding them up? Those huge concrete blocks will be marvelled at by future archaeologists who will write papers entitled ‘How stupid were our ancestors?’

The windmills only work in the right amount of wind. Too little and they don’t move. Too much and they have to be stopped or they explode. If there’s no wind and it’s sunny, they use power to rotate them because differential heating can warp the blades. If the wind is perfect but nobody currently needs power it goes to battery storage. Hahaha! That last line is a lie. The windy millers get paid bucketloads of cash to shut them down when they aren’t needed.

We are told to panic over plastic straws and yes, I am absolutely in agreement that there is far too much plastic waste being dumped. But that is going to pale into insignificance against the toxins generated by the ‘green’ industry.

The Electric Spaceman, Elon Musk, is currently building a massive factory in Germany and is chopping down many, many trees to make room for it. I would have preferred he put it somewhere that was already treeless. In fact I would have thought that would make considerable economic sense. However, watching the ‘greens’ handwringing outrage over this, when they have destroyed massive tracts of forests for their silly lawn ornaments masquerading as ‘sustainable power’, is actually sickening.

The windmills kill birds. Certain styles of solar power, the ones that reflect sunlight to heat a central tower, have been filmed frying any flying wildlife that gets into the path of the beams.

Mass killing of wildlife is apparently okay when the Greens do it. Australia is about to kill thousands of wild camels because they give out the long-debunked ‘greenhouse gases’. Those camels, birds, all the animals that used to live in those forests, must be wondering who exactly the Greens are trying to save the planet for. It’s clearly not them.

It’s not the farm animals either. There is a big push on Veganosity this month, they call it Veganuary (also Dry January, Januhairy, and other things, all of which is childish silliness which I have ignored). Lots of nonsense about farm conditions (although some farms are shit and end up prosecuted, most are not).

Photos of pigs in restraining pens, with the story that they spend their entire lives in there. This is bollocks. The restraining pens are called ‘farrowing crates’ and the sow is in there so she doesn’t inadvertently lie on her piglets when they’re born. A full grown sow can reach 300 kg and she won’t even notice a 5 kg piglet under her arse when she takes a nap. The restraints give the piglets a fighting chance to get out of the way.

Once the piglets are weaned, the sow goes back to roaming around with the other sows. She isn’t in that pen forever.

‘Oh, but pigs wouldn’t do that to their own babies!’ I have personally rescued screaming piglets pinned against the side of a pen by an uncaring mother. She has so many at one time, she doesn’t worry about losing a few. Pigs are pretty smart but the adults are not cute. They are evil bastards, as a visiting electrician who left without a large chunk of his leg will attest. The Brick Top character in ‘Snatch’ wasn’t using fiction when describing what pigs can do to a human body. These buggers will eat you.

So, are you going to let them run wild? They can’t find food. They don’t know how. Food is brought to them every day. Even then they are not averse to taking a chunk out of you if they get the chance. Imagine a pack of them set loose. In a couple of days they’ll be really hungry. And they will eat absolutely anything.

Cows? Pretty placid most of the time. Take a dog near them – especially when they have calves – and well, your chances are not good at all. An angry cow is not something you want to be within a mile of.

So let’s suppose the whole of the UK went vegan tomorrow. What happens to the cows, chickens, pigs, sheep etc? They all get killed, butchered, frozen and shipped to other countries at bargain prices as farmers try to salvage what’s left of their lives. They are not going to be set free. They are all going to die.

You can argue that they don’t have a great life now, in most cases they actually do, but they have life. Vegans want to end that. Greens want to kill them all too because they fart the long-debunked ‘greenhouse gases’. At least we meat eaters let the animals have life before we kill and eat them. We don’t want them extinct.

Pets… dogs and cats are carnivores. They cannot survive on vegetarian, much less vegan diets. So they all die too.

Ah but we’d have loads of wildlife. Well, apart from the ones the solar and wind farms have displaced, minced or fried of course.

Large areas of this country are lousy for crop farming and I don’t mean the cities. There are huge areas that grow nothing but grass. Not even trees grow there. You can’t plant crops there. So, you need every square inch of arable land to have the slightest hope of feeding a vegan population and you cannot afford losses due to rabbits, crows, pheasant or anything else. They all have to go.

The Green idea of ‘saving the planet’ leads to a sterile world of no biodiversity at all. It leads to a deep-communist world where nothing that is not essential is allowed to survive. Where nobody can question the way of things and nobody wants to. It leads to Panoptica.

Where Panoptica leads is likely to become very clear by the end. It was 10538 Overture by ELO that started that story, but it was another, later, quasi-documentary that really brought it to life.

I’d better get back to it before it all comes true.

Hunger strikes and internet

The final round of visitors for the year have left. Nobody else is likely to want to visit now – it’s cold and wet and it’s dark by 4 pm. We’ve had our first icy patches, a taste of the coming winter, and the days have not yet finished shortening. Peace at last. Just to be sure, I will be circulating rumours about demons prowling the grounds in winter.

My mother has suggested we turn this place into a bed and breakfast. We’ve had a taste of what that would be like this year and it’s an absolute ‘no’ from both of us. See, neither of us actually like people very much and we don’t like getting up early. We don’t like the extra laundry generated by rapid changes of bedding and possibly most important of all, we only have one bathroom.

Add to that the absence of heating in the upstairs rooms and it would take some serious building work to make this place habitable for more than just a few people.

Anyway, the visits are over until at least late March, when the weather usually starts to become a bit less horrible, and that means lots of writing and publishing. I have a short story collection by the somewhat eccentric Gastradamus and editing is under way on the submissions so far received for the Christmas anthology. It’s going to be a big one and submissions are still open.

I have been trying to catch up with the news. Apparently Donnie Trumpton is now to be impeached because of something to do with Ukraine, but I can’t pay too much attention to other countries’ politics. Ours is in such a shambles it’s all anyone can do to keep up with it all.

Boris the Spider has promised to restore 5000 miles of railway and all the stations associated with it for 500 million shiny British pounds. We’ve all had a laugh at Diane Abbot’s flimsy grasp of real life costs, but Boris seems to be no better. 500 million would lay about a mile of track after they’ve paid for and demolished all the buildings that now exist on the old track beds. Most of the old bridges are gone, the ones left won’t be safe after half a century of neglect, and many of the tunnels have been filled in. 500 million? Hahaha.

The Keith and Dufftown Railway is a privately owned preserved line. It runs from the old Keith Town station, through a couple of wayside halts, to the old Dufftown station. It’s a favourite trip for me because it runs the old diesel multiple units I loved travelling on in the Welsh Valleys – the ones where you can sit right behind the driver and get a view through the front window.

Also because Keith is the home of Chivas Regal’s distillery and Dufftown has the Glenfiddich and Balvenie distilleries. It’s where the exceptionally smooth Singleton of Dufftown comes from. If you like ancient buildings, the ruin of Balvenie castle is also worth a visit. It’s very close to Glenfiddich’s distillery.

Now, just for once, there is a point to this digression. The old Keith Town station, now privately owned, is not too far from the main Keith station that is still operated as part of the national network. There is no longer any track between them, but the track bed is intact. The private railway would dearly love to reconnect to the main line but it costs far too much. If they could do it they would be able to provide the distilleries in Dufftown with a rail link to the main line. Yeah, there would be considerable profit, allowing the private line to actually pay the volunteers who run it now, and it would also reduce the numbers of huge trucks leaving those really big distilleries to transport whisky along the terrible roads in the area.

Boris, that might be a good place to start.

Jerry Cordite has promised free broadband for all. Yeah, right. We are still on copper-wire phone lines on posts out here. I don’t think he’s costed the more remote areas, you know. I actually get faster internet using the phone on 4G as a hotspot – but that only works in the right parts of this place because mobile reception is shit too.

Besides, as several commenters on Twitter have pointed out, if you’re going to make something free, why not water? Or electricity or gas? You know, stuff everyone needs. Not everyone uses the internet, even now, yet everyone will have to pay outrageous taxes so Jerry can give out his freebies. The taxes wouldn’t seem quite so bad if they were covering something as basic as a reliable water supply.

Ah, but it’s not really about free broadband. You’ll never see that. The first stage in making the internet ‘free’ is, of course, for government to take total control of it. Then they won’t make it ‘free’ in any sense. The government once owned British Telecom, the railways and the postal service. Was any of that ever free? Once they own something, they profit from it. You pay the costs, they take the profit. That’s socialism.

The internet under government control will be censored, monitored, and, as has just happened in Iran, switched off when the population cause the government problems.

Don’t imagine the Tories are any different. Tessie Maybe salivated at the prospect of internet control for many years, and tried to get it more than once. Government control of the internet is a terrible idea, no matter who is in charge.

I see Extinction Rebellion have rebranded as Election Rebellion, which is no surprise. They were always obviously communists using any pretext to force their ridiculous and deadly world view on us all.

They are now going on hunger strike for a week for some reason or other, I don’t know what they hope to achieve and don’t care. A week? They’ll be in Pret as soon as the sun goes down on day one. They cannot go 24 hours without their avocado toast and gingerbread lattes.

A week. I am singularly unimpressed. Muslims do this every year and they do it for a month. So the feeble watermelon warriors are going to try it for a week, once, and I bet not a single one of them makes it to Wednesday.

I once co-supervised an Indonesian student through his M.Sc. Brilliant guy, we ended up with a very good paper on ruminant microbiology from his eight weeks with us. Needless to say, he passed easily.

He was Muslim. This was back in the 1990s when we weren’t assailed with Islam this and Islam that from all sides. We thought nothing of it. He was a devout Muslim but he never mentioned it. Never tried to convert anyone. Never threatened anyone. Never demanded a prayer room or any kind of special treatment. His religion was personal to him, as it should be. And he was a very nice guy in general.

It was Ramadan, in June, in Scotland. The sun was up before 5 am and still there at 10 pm. He wasn’t eating or drinking anything during daylight hours. The poor bugger nearly passed out before we figured this out. And yet he produced work of a quality good enough to publish. While slowly starving to death.

The Watermelon Warriors, the ones who haven’t given up by Tuesday, will, on Wednesday, be on Twatter and Farcebok telling the world how they are suffering for their cause. I’ll tweet them pictures of plates piled high with food to help them cope.

Still, I suppose they’ll be well practiced for their dreamed-of Socialist future under Corbyn.

Then they’ll finally find out what ‘hunger’ really means.

Night of the Lying Dead

So, we have had Nightmare on Downing Street, multiple iterations. We have had Halloween Brexit, the Horror that Never Happened, and now we have an election on Thursday 12th December with the results on Friday the Thirteenth. I really hope the BBC announcer is dressed like Freddy Krueger.

I will be voting in the dark, naturally. It’s the only sensible response. I might be dressed in my black cowled robe and carrying my scythe just for effect.

Who to vote for? Tory or Brexit party? This place was taken by the Tories from the SNP last time and I really don’t want to let the Spiteful Nannying Party back in by splitting the vote. They’ve already put up the price of booze and stopped me going to the local pub because I’d have to drive there and can’t even have one beer. I can’t smoke in there either, not even next to the log fire. Although I could risk a beer as long as I don’t get caught by hte annual police patrol.

I had to agree with George Galloway today. That needed a stiff drink. He said that Corbyn’s Silly Party had handed the Tories a perfect weapon for an election campaign. They tried to make it legal for non-UK citizens to vote in a UK general election. With all the furore over foreign interference in elections these days, that move was the very epitome of stupid. Oh, Demonic Cummings hasn’t missed that, you can be sure.

They also tried to reduce the voting age to 16. Because they imagine all 16 year olds will vote Labour. At 16. I and my friends were at the point where Atilla the Hun would have said ‘Now hold on a minute’. We were all set to cut our enemies off at the knees and stand them in a bucket of salt. Vote Labour? Neil Kinnock was our local Labour MP and even my father, a determined Labourite, couldn’t vote for him. ‘Ginger hook nosed arse’ was one of the few comments he made that it was safe to pass on.

I think they should have won. 16 year olds are not all socialists, only the noisy few. They do not care about Labour’s long term plans, they only care where their next illicit beer is coming from. Worker’s rights? They’re in school and don’t work. Same for students – and if they say students can vote twice, so can the non-Labour ones. They don’t think any students are non-Labour. In modern universities the non-Labour ones keep very, very quiet. They already did in the eighties when I was in there. The intelligent bide their time. And use the enemy’s weapons.

Likewise with those EU nationals voting. Many EU nationals in the UK are Polish. Many are self employed. All of them know exactly what happens when ‘socialism’ gets out of control. They’ve seen it. A lot of them have only just escaped it. So I say, let them vote. Go on, Corbyn. Try to get those who have just escaped Communism to vote for Communism.

In the end, we have an election. Unless Boris and Smoky Nige get together, we’re utterly fucked. Jo Swindles and Jerry Cordite are already at each other’s throats, Swindles thinks she’ll be the next PM with a cohort of MPs who are half defectors from other parties. She’d have to pull off a miracle that would make Moses bow down in awe.

The Jeremy Corbyn Collective (he should start a band, he’ll probably have about four members after the election anyway) is not going to do well in this election. I really don’t think he’ll be Prime Wurzel and if he is, I have the option to fuck off to Denmark still. Just have to learn that strange language where words mean what you want them to mean.

Jerry’s mob cannot stay in the EU. If they stay in they cannot implement their Soviet dream. In which Corbyn gets airbrushed out of photos with McDonnell because that’s how it works.

They are trying to pretend they will stay in and also leave to appeal to voters on both sides. It is a bollocks strategy. You want to leave? Vote Boris the Spider to leave a bit or vote Smoky Nige to actually leave. You want to stay? Vote Jo Swindles. The Corbyn Collective offers nothing but everything you want to hear and has no intention of delivering any of it. Just like last time.

They will spend millions on paper for the recycle bin. Manifestos mean nothing. We all know it, nobody with half a brain even bothers to read them now. They are the Lies of the Wanking Dead.

Should have been a Bowie song and probably would have been if he hadn’t selfishly died. Bastard.

A pact between Boriswise the Clown and Smoky Nige has to happen. If it doesn’t we are a new Soviet satellite state until the whole thing collapses.

The future is going to be… interesting.

And surprisingly cold.

Maybe the next film on the Government’s list is ‘Dead Snow’.

Zombie Nazis obsessed with money… it strangely seems appropriate.

I have a dream…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all in the distant past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are not a special species. Adapt or die.

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

Sowing the seeds of hate

Well, the vapers are getting a real taste of antismoker hate this week. With one important difference.

The Puritans won’t ban smoking. Too much tax income involved and too many rich peoples’ pensions are locked into tobacco company shares.

Vaping has no such backroom protections. The Puritans can openly hate us smokers but they’ll never ban it because of the cashflow. Vaping doesn’t generate that cashflow.

So, we have the moves to ban flavours, very rapidly (not surprisingly) followed by moves to ban vaping altogether. Orange Don has tried to roll back on his ridiculous anti-vape stance but too late. Rolling back on it now is just going to get him tarred with the ‘You don’t care about the cheeeldren dying!’ hysteria. Which, incidentally, is coming from people who support abortion up to the moment of birth. Still, Don fell for that trap, let’s see if he can find a way out. I can’t.

Abortion is a separate argument. Personally I’d support it up to the point where they get elected to government but that’s possibly leaning towards the slightly extreme end of the spectrum. It seems to be all or nothing in the USA though. Some states you can have your photo taken with your newborn and then sell it for spare parts, other states you go to jail for a natural and unfortunate miscarriage. There seems to be no middle ground.

Anyway, back to smoking and vaping.

We’ve had pompous, self-important antismoking vapers since it started. Not all, I hasten to add, but a vocal minority, who delighted in siding with the Puritans against the smokers they left behind. We told them, one day they’ll come for you, but the ones breathing the Holy Steam never listened. I bet they still aren’t listening even as their Electrofags are snatched from their non-yellowed fingers.

It does wear off, by the way. The yellow finger stains, I mean. Change the way you hold your smokes and the stains from your habitual holding pattern will fade in time. Switch to vaping and they’ll vanish forever… until you are forced back to smoking by Orange Don’s Puritan Loonies.

The Puritans took full advantage of their new temporary vaper allies, letting them whip up more smoker-hate, until they realised the effect on their bottom line as vaping became more popular and tobacco taxes declined. So now they have turned on the vapers, and they have turned very hard indeed.

So hard, in fact, that they are trying to turn smokers into vaper-haters.

Yes. Really.

I inhale the smoke from a little bonfire in my face. You really want me to be scared of flavoured steam?

There can be absolutely no effect whatsoever from your nearby Electrofag while I’m actually burning leaves in my mouth. I’d get more effect from a kettle with a vanilla pod in it.

What this study actually says is that a third of smokers have experienced some poor bugger with a steam-stick thrust out into the same cold, inadequate shelter as the smokers. It does not equate to any kind of harm from that experience and it never will – because there can be no possible harm.

It’s fucking steam with a bit of flavour, a dash of nicotine and the chemical they use in asthma inhalers. Damn, if it does anything, it’ll do smokers good! It might even get a few interested smokers to try it for themselves. The price difference is a big pull here (that’s why I keep trying it, even though I haven’t found one to totally replace the real thing yet). That price difference is almost all tobacco tax, and that is why the alternative must be destroyed. Antismokers are losing money!

Get ready, vapers. The Puritans are turning smokers against you. It won’t be hard in many cases, remember how vocal your pompous bastards were in denouncing us? Petty revenge is petty, but you know it’s coming.

You are going to see smokers mysteriously diagnosed with ‘popcorn lung’ which, if it was real, should have been affecting smokers all along. You are going to see smoker cancer cases attributed to second hand vaping. Biologically impossible, but then look at the silly pictures on cigarette packets. You can’t get ‘meth mouth’ from tobacco, but here we are.

We already have ‘danger: contains nicotine’ warnings on packaged Electrofags that contain no nicotine. We do not have that warning on tomatoes or potatoes or the Pharmer’s nicotine patches and gum.

The aim is, of course, to split smokers and vapers further. There will still be the Holy Vapers who see their former compatriots as less than human. There will now be the Holy Smokers who at last have the chance to smack down the smug bastards – and to be honest, who can blame them?

Oh it’s going to work. It won’t take long.

If smokers and vapers were to come together as ‘nicotine consumers’ or similar, under a banner that covers us all, the Puritans would be screwed and they know it.

Will it happen?

Doesn’t look like it.

The Royal Prorogueative

So Mrs. Queen has signed the paper shutting down Parliament for a month in Autumn. Just as she does every year, and as she does whenever they get us to choose who gets to dip their snouts in the trough for the next Parliament.

This is not ‘the first time since the Civil War’. It is not ‘unconstitutional’. It is not a ‘coup d’etat’. It is what happens in September every year and before every General Election. Parliament closes and we all get a bit of a rest from their stupidity. I for one welcome it. The longer the better.

Remain MPs have lost their minds. They have set up a ‘People’s Parliament’ made up of MPs who have mostly changed parties so many times nobody now knows what they stand for. Also Jezza Cordite and Caroline Mucus (the only snot-Green MP in the whole place) and some other useless wasters.

As an interesting aside, I think it was Mhehed Zherting who pointed out on Twitter that the Green party has twice as many leaders as it has MPs…

‘Military Precision’ Ohdear Jones has called for mass protests. Students have threatened to go on strike. Well, the schools and colleges aren’t back yet so what they intend to strike from is somewhat unclear at the moment. Maybe they’ll mass-delete their Xbox accounts.

What’s so different this time? Bozza has asked Mrs. Queen to close Parliament for four extra days this time. I suspect Mrs. Queen is as utterly sick of the whole circus as the rest of us and was glad to shut it up for a while.

Four extra days. Tyrion Bercow is not Happy (he has never made clear which one he is, my money’s on Grumpy, and I know it’s an old Jethro joke so no need to point it out).

Four days. The remainers’ last functioning brain cells have now collapsed. This is a dictatorship! Even though he has just done what every single Prime Monster has done for every single autumn. This is when the parties have their conferences in which they all indulge in smug self-satisfaction and decide what they are going to lie to us about next year.

It happens every single year. This year it’ll be four days longer than usual.

Oh, but this is a Critical Time and Bozza should not prorogue Parliament at all. Yeah right. They’re all going to cancel their conferences, are they? All going to pass on the annual boozy ‘how to screw the voters’ circle jerk?

Well no. It’s those four days they are so exercised about. Inflated by an online lawyer, no less, to two weeks. I guess he only works two days a week, eh?

They have had three years. What are they going to miraculously pull out of their arses in four days? It’s where most of their policies and pronouncements come from, I suppose, so maybe there’s something in there.

They claim they must stop a ‘no deal Brexit’ but that’s not really true. What they want is to stop Brexit and they are now in a position where they have to. Those MPs don’t stand a pot of Ben and Jerry’s chance in Hell of getting re-elected and they know it. Their only hope is cushy jobs with the EU, which I’m betting have been promised. If they manage to wreck their own country, they’ll get the modern equivalent of those thirty pieces of silver.

There is of course a petition to stop this which has reached over a million ‘signatures’ but… exhibit A –

This is Remainer ‘democracy’. Set up a government coup consisting of swivel-eyed idiot MPs who can’t even decide which party they belong to, led by a bad Albert Steptoe impressionist who knows his only chance at being Prime Monster is to take over by weaselly means (and good luck getting him out afterwards). Have a petition in which every Remainoloon has 50 votes at least and it’s open to non-UK votes too. I wonder how many times Tusky Don and Guy Thermostat have voted on it?

And these people call Johnson ‘undemocratic’. They must be using the version of ‘democratic’ favoured by North Korea.

Now they are in the streets of London doing what they do best – getting in the way of people who have no control over the thing they want changed.

Gin Miller has started a legal challenge against Bozza’s use of the perfectly legal annual shutdown of Parliament. I hope she spends a lot of money on it.

We have been offered free trade agreements with Australia, Brazil, China and the USA so far. The EU has offered servitude and if you look at it closely, you’ll find Hitler would have given us a better deal if he’d won the war. Tessie Maybe set that up and Parliament rejected that nonsense three times.

Now the EU will not reopen negotiations. There is nothing Parliament, not even the silly ‘People’s Parliament’ of and for silly people, can do. If they won’t negotiate and the Tessie deal is dead, then ‘no deal’ is all that is left. It’s not an ‘option’. It’s the default.

Mad Merkin has said that Germany won’t send us any food if we leave with no deal. Pfft. We can make sausages. It would help boost our ailing car industry too if we no longer buy Audi, Mercedes, Volkswagen…

I don’t think the EU elite have bothered to discuss any of this with the companies actually selling us stuff. They might find some CEOs requesting urgent talks.

This next two months is going to be very interesting indeed. I fully expect loonies to stock up on everything as if the world is about to end. One of the scare stories was a shortage of toilet paper. That’s no problem, it would simply boost newspaper sales.

If Bozza holds his nerve we leave the EU on Halloween. They will hit him with everything they have. Their idiot drones will carry out their EU Fuhrer’s orders and call everyone else Nazis, because that’s how it works these days.

There’s just over a week until Mrs. Queen’s signature takes effect and Parliament shuts down.

By then the streets will flow with Remainer mouth-froth.

I have no plans to go anywhere in September. It’s going to get very, very silly indeed.