Round 2

An interviewer once pointed out to Bill Gates that the initial terror over Covid had abated and people weren’t scared of this pandemic so much. Billy Gates Gruff, with his trademark smug-faced smirk, responded with ‘The next one will get their attention’.

All viruses are capable of mutating and, as they spread, they tend to mutate into less vicious forms. The reason for this is simple. The initial deadly version kills its victims fast and it kills at a high rate. People learn to isolate those infected – and the infected ones aren’t in any mood to move around spreading the disease. They are generally bed-bound.

A milder mutant, that doesn’t make people ill quite so fast, and doesn’t kill as many, is able to spread more easily. The infected aren’t all confined to bed, they might have a few days of spreading before they show symptoms, so that variant will spread further and faster before it’s noticed. If you catch that one (and survive it) it’s close enough to the original that you’re immune to that too.

So, the deadly original will gradually die out, the still-nasty-but-not-quite-as-bad variant will throw out another, less dangerous variant, and the process continues until the virus becomes no more than an inconvenience.

Of course, this doesn’t always happen over the course of one infection season. It can take decades, or even hundreds of years, depending on the mutation rate of the particular virus. There will be a few that might never get weaker until after we all go extinct. Most, however, will.

Respiratory RNA viruses mutate so fast that they will soon, often over a spell of years rather than decades, join the ranks of viruses that cause the common cold. This is good for us and also good for the virus. The cold is a mere inconvenience – but if the virus remained deadly, then, as with smallpox, we would go all out to eradicate it from existence altogether. We get annoyed with cold viruses but we aren’t going to have a massive program to wipe them out. It wouldn’t work anyway, there are so many different ones now and new ones keep appearing.

This is clearly happening with Covid although it’s complicated by the lunacy of mass vaccination with a lousy vaccine while the virus is highly active. It’s what happened with Marek’s disease in poultry and I’m not going to go over all that again.

The decline to a relatively harmless variant depends, a lot, on how vicious the little sod was in the first place. Covid started with a kill rate of less than 1% of those infected, no worse than flu, so it won’t take long to decline into a cold.

Ebola is a whole different ball game. And we have a suspected case in the UK now.

There is some evidence to suggest that it’s declining in deadliness with new variants but this bugger started with a kill rate of up to 90% of those infected. It’s now down to around 50% so it’s still a very very long way from being described as ‘mostly harmless’.

Of course, the case might not be Ebola. It has not been confirmed. Early symptoms are similar to a lot of other common illnesses, like Shigella, the gut-emptying shit-through-the-eye-of-a-needle bacterium. That little swine can be common in crowded places, like schools, because it’s so very contagious. It doesn’t last too long outside the body but it just takes one carrier to grab that toilet door handle without washing their hands and… kaboom. Literally, for the next poor bugger to grab that handle.

If it’s Ebola, it progresses from feeling terribly ill to wishing it would hurry up and kill you. I mean, you might think ‘man flu’ is really bad but that’s a stubbed toe compared to Ebola. Your chances of getting out of it alive are roughly 50/50 and there might not be much left of you if you do. You will start to spontaneously bleed, internally and externally. Every drop of that blood is infectious. Nobody wants to touch you. Even your decaying corpse will remain infectious for years.

But… it’s not as bad as it sounds. You’d have to come in contact with the bodily fluids of someone infected in order to get this. It’s not airborne. Although it can be in droplets from, say, sneezes, it’s not free-floating like a coronavirus. If you have a mask that stops droplets, it can stop droplets containing Ebola. It still won’t stop a free-floating virus like Covid but if we get an Ebola outbreak, Covid will be nothing more than a welcome excuse to isolate yourself from the disease-riddled zombies.

Now, when I say ‘bodily fluids’, I know exactly what you filthy minded lot are thinking. Trust me, if you do get this thing, you are not going to feel up to emitting that particular bodily fluid. It’ll be in every fluid that comes out of your body. Spittle, urine, faeces (these are not normally considered a fluid but if you have this, they will be), tears and sweat. In the later stages, it’ll be in the blood that leaks out of everywhere.

I suspect sweat would be one of the biggest spreader sources. Why? Well, Ebola outbreaks are mostly in equatorial Africa, where it’s always hot. It’s never appeared in Scotland where a really warm summer is when it gets above 20^oC. If you want to get really sweaty here you have to put quite some effort into it. At the equator I suspect you start to sweat from the effort of opening your eyes. I would certainly be incapable of drying myself there.

Here, north of the Ice Wall, touching someone who is sweaty results in ‘Ewww!’ It’s not normal to us. I can envisage that, living in a place so hot that everyone is sweaty all the time, it would feel just as odd to touch someone whose skin is dry. Well, you know, I speak as someone who avoids most contact with pretty much everyone most of the time so I can’t claim to speak for everyone here.

Anyway. If you have a disease spread by bodily fluids – including sweat – it’s going to have a much easier time spreading in hot countries than in cold ones. If you want to get Ebola in Scotland you’re going to have to find someone willing to sneeze, bleed, pee or shit on you and while I recognise that those things aren’t entirely out of the question in certain places, for those of us living in the rurals it’s not really an issue.

If you live in equatorial Africa, you just need to be in a crowd of equally sweaty people. Brush against someone, you have a thorn prick or insect bite in your skin, it’s in. Gotcha. People don’t tend to wear multiple layers there because it’s so warm. In Scotland the virus will have to get through layers of clothing to reach your skin and those layers also make us pretty much thorn and insect proof too.

So, yes, Ebola is a very, very nasty disease but it is not a winter disease. It’s not like the respiratory viruses. It really needs a warm, preferably hot climate to get going. It needs people to actually touch, and without layer upon layer of clothing in the way. Winter is the least risky period for this disease. Certainly in the UK and definitely in Scotland.

So, I know they have an mRNA pretend vaccine ready to go. I’m not taking it. And I won’t be taking any PCR tests for something that, if you have it, you know all about it. It’s not asymptomatic, this one hits you like a speeding truck. You have a 50/50 chance of survival.

That’s actually a lot better than what you get by interacting with modern medics.

Resistance is futile. You will be vaccinated.

Okay, before anyone gets out the ‘antivaxxer’ accusations, I spent my entire career in microbiology, working with some nasty things. You bet your ass I’m well loaded with vaccines! But I also understand how vaccines work, which is why I won’t take any more. Especially not these insane new ones. You see, I also understand how PCR works and what mRNA really does.

When you get vaccinated against tetanus, the bacterium Clostridium tetani is grown in a lab, killed, checked to make sure it’s dead, and injected into you. Your immune system still gets to see the proteins its made of and makes antibodies against it. If you ever get a live one in your bloodstream, your immune system is ready to smack it down before it does any damage.

That’s a simplistic explanation but it’s basically the idea behind vaccination. This is not how mRNA shots work. I can’t call them vaccines. They aren’t.

The mRNA shots cause your own body cells to produce foreign proteins. This makes your immune system thinks those body cells are infected with something and the immune system does the only thing it knows how to do – it kills the infected cells. I called this insane idea ‘an autoimmune disease in a syringe’ when it first appeared and I have not changed my mind on that.

I fully expected a rise in arthritis, rheumatism and other autoimune diseases, and judging by the plethora of ads for treatment of those things lately, I was right. I wondered about reactivation of suppressed and dormant viruses, and judging by the sudden push for shingles and other vaccines, seems I wasn’t far off there either.

I did not anticipate effects on fertility or pregnancy. Others did. I don’t know enough about those things. I had no idea there could be issues with blood clots, spontaneous bleeds or heart issues. Others warned about those things. I didn’t and still don’t know enough to comment. I could only comment within my own areas of research. Still, the people who did comment were very eminent scientists and worth listening to. So I did. Many scoffed at them because MSM ‘fact-checkers’ said so. Well, that’s their choice. I prefer to listen to people who actually know what they are talking about and who have worked in that area of research for many years. That’s my choice.

So now we have young, fit sportspeople and entertainers keeling over dead while doing their jobs. We have morticians showing massive fibrin clots they say they have never seen before. We have a huge rise in cancer cases in younger people – I certainly didn’t see that coming – and sadly, dead and damanged children and a huge rise in stillbirths.

And yet, for most people, that’s all fine. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Well, not too hard for very many people. They line up for another shot of mRNA because the news says it’s fine, and so many ‘doctors’ say that the purpose of vaccination was never to stop the spread of disease or to stop you catching it… they really are saying that. They were not saying that three years ago.

I have seen morons claim that ‘other vaccines need boosters’. Sure. Tetanus needs a booster… every ten years. Not every three months. If you are getting injected every three months with something that has been shown to not stop you catching it and not stop you spreading it… well, just have a little think, okay?

Now we find there are ‘vaccines’ to ‘repair heart damage from heart attacks’.

Spoiler. Heart muscle cannot regenerate. It scars. You get a scar from myocarditis, it’s there for the rest of your life. I have a scar on my hand from a burn. It will never go away. The same is true of all my other scars and yours too, even the ones inside that you can’t see. They cannot be ‘repaired’. They *are* the repair. It’s like welding a plate of metal from a Ford over a hole in your Toyota. The welded on part never becomes Toyota. No matter what you do, that welded part is always a scar.

People will take that shot though. They believe in ‘the science’ even though the true science tells them it cannot work. The principle has been established. They will take another shot every three months for something that they are almost infinitesimal risk from even though it doesn’t work, so they’ll take a shot (probably multiple) for something that cannot work.

And then we have the cancer issue. There has been a marked rise in cancers and it’s not all down to lockdowns.The response? Well what else?

An mRNA ‘vaccine’ against cancer. You people really will believe anything, won’t you? Still I shouldn’t be surprised, since I was the one who told antismokers who accosted me that the lymph glands they could feel in their throats were cancers caused by my second hand smoke and that doctors were paid to tell them otherwise (sorry, legitimate GPs) and so much more. I already knew that so very many people were irredemiably stupid, I can’t pretend surprise now.

When you vaccinate against tetanus, it offers no protection against a closely related bacterium, Clostridium welchii, which causes gangrene.Vaccination against Salmonella does not protect you from its relative, Shigella. And so on. Vaccination is specific because the immune response is specific. You cannot vaccinate against something that has multiple causes – espeically something with multiple utterly unrelated causes.

Vaccinate against one infection, it doesn’t protect you from even a related infection. So you vaccinate against a cancer triggered by a particular infection – as happens now with cervical cancer. That does not protect you from a cancer caused by a different infection. It has absolutely no relevance to cancers caused by chemical exposure, radiation exposure, genetic predisposition or just blind bad luck. Nor any of a myriad other potential triggers.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ vaccine for cancer and cannot be. It might be possible for a single treatment to emerge for all cancers, they all do much the same once they’re started, but they have so very many ways to start that you really can’t pre-empt them.

Vaccines, even just a few short years ago, could well have been called the best thing medical science ever produced. Now? Science is dead, in many areas. Espcially medical science. You might as well get some toothless crone in a wood mask to shake a gourd at you.

At least you have a chance of surviving the experience.

The Devil’s Enzyme

I’ve been reading a lot of bollocks about Luciferase. That it’s a marker that glows under UV light and that it’s linked to Satan, all that stuff.

When I was working on my Honours project for my first degree (1980/81), I had the stinky project. I was working on the gut microflora of Eiseinia foetida, a type of earthworm that lives in compost heaps. Well, the career got gradually stinkier and much nastier after that but that’s not the point.

A friend of mine was working with a marine bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. He grew it in flasks on a flask shaker in an incubator room. When he turned the light off, there were all these rotating flasks giving off a green glow. V. fischeri produces bioluminescence in response to oxygen. How brightly it glows depends on how much oxygen there is, and that glow can be used to detect oxygen down to nanomolar concentrations. Of course, at that oxygen level you can’t see the glow, you need a photomultiplier and associated circuitry, but it really does work. I actually made use of that technique during my PhD, but it was a fellow student who developed it into a useful method.

This bacterium, and many other bioluminescent organisms, produce light using a compound called luciferin. It’s activated by an enzyme called luciferase. The enzyme itself does nothing without luciferin present, and luciferin is not activated without luciferase. UV light is irrelevant here. The mechanism produces visible light, it’s not activated by outside light. It is entirely dependent on oxygen concentration.

If you’ve ever been somewhere warm, even UK-summer warm, beside the sea, on a nicely dark night, you might have noticed a glow flickering through the water as it rolls against the shore. It’s usually called ‘phosphorescence’, and it’s the light produced by marine microbes when the water gets a blast of oxygen as it hits the shore. This is the luciferin/luciferase reaction. It’s perfectly natural and probably millions of years old.

Some say Monsanto or Pfizer or some other demonic company have patented luciferase. That’s not possible. It’s a natural material and can’t be patented. However, they might have patented a technique that makes use of it. I’ll come back to that.

Incidentally, I am also seeing claims of ‘luciferase’ on the swabs used for the ramrod-up-the-nose nonsensical tests. ‘Proof’ consists of running UV light over the swab and observing that the stick doesn’t glow but the cotton pad does. Cotton pads fluoresce under UV light. Try it with any cotton buds. It’s the cotton that lights up.

Now I’m not saying those cotton ramrods aren’t contaminated, there have been quite a few examples of what could be shoddy production techniques or could be deliberate, I don’t have enough reliable info to speculate on that. However, when you light them up with UV they will glow even if they are perfectly clean and sterile. Luciferase isn’t there, and if it was, it would be a waste of extracted enzyme because it won’t do anything – and won’t even last long – up your nose.

The ‘Lucifer’ link merely refers to the light produced in the reaction. It’s really not sinister at all. It’s been named that for a very long time and it was just some scientist thinking it was funny to name it that. Most of scientific research is unbelievably tedious so we do grab any chance to spice it up a bit. It really isn’t controlled by, nor in any way linked to, any demonic entity.

So, luciferase is nothing to be scared of. It’s an enzyme that catalyses a reaction with a compound called luciferin in the presence of oxygen and produces a rather pleasant glow. So, what nefarious purposes could it be put to?

Not many, really. Enzymes, especially when injected into a living organism, don’t tend to last very long. They are proteins and proteins entering your body are either regarded as food and dismantled, or regarded as invaders and smacked down by your immune system. Injecting yourself with luciferase is never going to get you that lovely Chernobyl glow. Even if it is active, it won’t be active for very long and with no luciferin to act on, it has nothing to do.

I really can’t see how Billy Gates Gruff’s ‘quantum tattoo’ can make use of it. If you want something invisible until illuminated with UV, this won’t work but there are many stable compounds that would. Still, it has become abundantly clear that Billy Gates Gruff is an idiot and there are many researchers out there who are more than willing to take full advantage of an idiot with a lot of money to spare.

The only possible way I can see it working in a quantum tattoo setting is if the tattoo contains a stable form of luciferin (not easy to do) and then you dab a swab of luciferase on it. Then it would glow on its own, no need for UV, in fact it would work best if your hand was in a dark box. It seems an unnecessarily complex way to go about things anyway. Surely it would be much easier to just use a traditional tattoo technique, or if you want to get all fancy, a stable fluorescent compound that will show up under UV.

I guess they are trying for something that can’t be easily faked by a backstreet tattoo artist but getting hold of V. fischeri is really not that hard (for someone like me anyway, I just need a jar of seawater). Isolation on agar is possibly one of the easiest isolations you can do – just look for colonies that glow in the dark. Extracting luciferin/luciferase would take time but I have the equipment here. Then I just need someone with tattoo skills and the pattern it needs to take. So it can still be faked and some of us would make an absolute fortune out of it 😉

I am getting to the opinion that the whole luciferase thing is a red herring, designed to get the tinfoil hats spinning. Sure, it might be possible to produce such a glowing mark, but really it’s far too much bother and far too unreliable to be much use at all. Luciferin is a protein too, that tattoo won’t last long. Then again, repeat application of medication does seem to be the modern profit model…

Really, I don’t think this whole luciferase thing is going anywhere. It feels like a handy distraction, the name alone gets people all worked up and the glow can be used to boost the creepiness factor. It’s never going to produce a reliably useful branding mark and there’s no need anyway. The chips are already ready to go, and have been in use for quite some time now. People don’t need to be coerced into it, they fight to be first in line.

As for curmudgeons like me, it might eventually be the case that if you don’t have a chip in your hand, you can’t get into shops, or onto public transport, or even start your car. That would be far, far easier to accomplish than some fancy biochemistry embedded in your skin.

They say the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing people he doesn’t exist. This time, I suspect the trick is convincing people that something imaginary exists, to distract them and keep them panicked over fantasy demons.

Meanwhile, the real demons continue unopposed…

Chitin

Okay, let’s start this with ‘what the hell does this guy know about chitin’.

When I started my PhD on the metabolism of ciliate protozoa living in the rumen of cattle and sheep, it was a hot topic. Three years later, I finished, and science had moved on. Rumen protozoa had become a niche topic and there were no openings for a new scientist. So, I diversified. What transferable skills did I have?

Well, I knew a lot about microbiology by then, having gained two degrees in it, and especially about anaerobic metabolism – and I had no qualms about working with stinky things. So my first job after the PhD was a three year post doc on… well this should explain.

That wasn’t the only paper to come out of that project but it was the main one. Anyway, yes, I do know a good bit about chitin and it’s important to know about it because if the idiots in charge get their way, you’re going to be eating a hell of a lot of it.

Its biochemical name is poly-N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, a homopolymer (no it’s not gay, it’s a polymer of one type of molecule repeated over and over). Rather like cellulose or starch, except those are just polymers of glucose.

You can digest starch, mostly, but it comes in two forms. Amylose is just straight chains of glucose and very easy to digest. Amylopectin is straight chains but with branches coming off the chain, like a tree. If you have amylase enzyme you can digest it back as far as the branch points but you need a different enzyme to break those branch points. If you don’t have it, you basically shit out pollarded starch molecules. You’ll still get some energy from it.

‘Oh, so smartass knows all about starches too’. Indeed I do, since I returned to gut microbiology after three years of delving into stinky mud and, a few years later, supervised a PhD working on retrograde starch and its effects on pig digestion.

Cellulose is also poly-glucose but the chains are cross-linked. Humans can’t digest it, in fact neither can cows and other ruminants even though they live on it. Bacteria and protozoa can, and this is what the first stomach of a cow is for. The rumen (actually reticulo-rumen in case a pedant arrives) doesn’t secrete any enzymes. It’s a big bag of bacteria, protozoa and even anaerobic fungi. They do all the work of turning indigestible grass into highly digestible microbial protein and organic acids. The cow absorbs the organic acids and its liver makes glucose from them since the cow gets little to no direct sugar from its diet. The microbes get it first.

Then, once the microbes have turned the lousy food into every known amino acid, the cow moves a batch of them into its omasum/abomasum where they are digested. You can feed a cow with newspapers soaked in piss (bacteria will make amino acids from urea) and it’ll survive on that.

You can’t digest the stuff a ruminant eats. You don’t have a rumen. There are certain amino acids and vitamins you cannot produce and you have to get them in your food. Sure, you can eat grass but almost all of it will come out of the other end. The bacteria in your colon can use some of it, although we don’t all have cellulose degrading bacteria, but it’s the colon. The end of the digestive system. You can’t digest those bacteria.

So, humans can digest amylose starch, partially digest amylopectin starch, can’t digest cellulose. What has this to do with chitin and why should you care?

Chitin is the animal world’s version of cellulose. It’s tough and very hard to digest. Human digestive systems won’t touch it, colon bacteria might get something out of it but like grass, it’s mostly going right through. It’s what the exoskeleton (hard shell) of insects is made of.

So when you hear that insects contain more nutrition than an equivalent weight of beef, that’s discounting the fact that you can’t actually access most of that nutrition. The exoskeleton is made of a sugar, N-acetyl-D-glucosamine which is basically glucose with an amine group and an acetyl group tagged on. But it’s in a form you simply can’t digest, like the glucose in cellulose. Everything in beef is digestible. A large proportion of an insect is not. If you put both in a calorimeter to measure caloric content, the insects would win – but it’s not about how many calories a food contains. It’s about how many are actually accessible.

The ‘eat ze bugs’ pushers don’t care about that. Just like the Pharmers, your health is none of their concern. They just want the money.

Nobody is set up to eat insects. Ruminants can possibly digest them, they don’t hunt them but they probably get a few from eating the grass. It doesn’t matter to a ruminant. They just need a carbohydrate and a nitrogen source and their rumen microbes will make all they need. Human digestion will not work that way.

There has been some indication that too much chitin in your diet can lead to some serious problems. That’s possible – I have a small bottle of pure amylose (starch) that is marked as a potential neurotoxin in its pure form.

‘Oh, but some cultures eat insects all the time’. Sure. They do that because they live where there’s bugger all else to eat. And they generally eat grubs which are soft bodied and don’t have a chitinous exoskeleton until after they pupate. No humans, anywhere, eat insects unless there is nothing else.

We have, over millenia, put a hell of a lot of effort into keeping insects out of grains and flour storage. Why didn’t we just let them eat the grains and flour and then eat the insects? Because that makes us ill. We have known this for thousands of years.

Suddenly, insects are the food of the future. If you really believe insect food is your future, there is one thing you really should understand.

You have no future.

Entertainment: Construction Kit

A blast from the past. I wrote this in 2003. It was my first ever submission and my first ever accepted story. I admit it made me a bit cocky, and caused me to submit a few sub-par stories until I realised not every one was a winner. It’s the first story in ‘Fears of the Old and the New‘, a collection of the early published shorts. The ‘click to look inside’ gives you all of it apart from the last paragraph.

So, why do I post it now? The video linked at the end will give you a clue…

Construction Kit

My first submission was also my first story accepted for publication. This was in the online magazine Dark Fiction (www.darkfiction.org) in 2003. Here it is with all its beginner’s mistakes intact.

“Looks fine to me.” Doc Short looked up from the small boy in his examination chair. “Probably just overtired. You know how kids can get. Too much excitement, then they just throw a tantrum over the slightest thing. Good night’s sleep, that’s my prescription.” He smiled down at the boy. “On your way, Peter, the nurse will take you back to bed.” The child grinned at him as the nurse led him away. Strangely disquieting, the way these children smiled, Doc thought.

He looked around at Bill Wilson, his boss. Wilson was watching, grim-faced, as the child was led away. Once the child was out of earshot, he turned to Doc Short. “Some tantrum,” he said. “That little boy broke an orderly’s wrist. It took three of them – three grown men – to subdue him. Something is definitely wrong, Doc, something’s wrong with them all.”

Doc Short forced a smile. He had his own misgivings about the children, but he couldn’t put them into words. Just a feeling. “Well, of course they’re not normal,” he said. “They’ve hardly had a normal upbringing, have they? Stuck in here, never going outside, never meeting anyone else. There’s bound to be some, well, anomalous behaviour now and then.”

Wilson looked pensive. “They’re stronger than normal ten-year olds. Faster. More intelligent. And not just by a small margin. But you know that, Doc, You ran the tests yourself.” He sighed. “Maybe we should consider terminating the experiment.”

The words cut into Doc as though Wilson had stabbed him with them. “You can’t!” he said, louder than he had intended, “Sorry, Bill, but you know what that would mean. You can’t just ‘terminate’ seven healthy children.”

“They don’t exist, Simon,” Wilson said, avoiding Doc’s gaze. “They’re an experiment. Nobody outside the Project knows about them. They’re just products, we made them. We grew them from fertilized eggs, in the incubators. They have no mothers. No fathers. No family. They belong to the Project. Outside, they just don’t exist.”

Doc sat heavily in his chair. “Still, they’re alive, they’re real children. Bill, the whole point of this project was to make babies for childless couples, for women who couldn’t conceive, or who couldn’t carry a child to term. Twelve years on, and we’ve succeeded – in fact we succeeded ten years ago, when these seven were born. Why is it still a secret? Why aren’t we doing what we set out to do?”

“The children aren’t normal, Doc. You know that.”

“They’re better than normal, Bill. You said it yourself. I’ve never seen such fit, healthy, intelligent kids. Talk to them – they’ve learned everything there is to learn here, and more. Why, I reckon Thomas could run the whole process we used to make him, all on his own.”

Wilson looked up, his eyes wide. “What? But how – when – did he have access to the labs? None of them are allowed in there!”

Doc smiled. Thomas was his favourite. He had grown fond of all the children, but Thomas was like his own son. The boy had always been interested in biology, and had been fascinated by the labs.

“He found his own way in. Worked out the codes for the doors, I don’t know how, and just walked in. He’s been doing it since he was six, never caused any problems, just watched and learned. We never reported him because he’s such a great kid, and he really liked being in the labs.”

“You could get into serious trouble over this.” Wilson folded his arms. “It has to stop, now, and…” A scream from outside cut him off. “What was that?” he said. For a moment he and Doc just looked at each other, then a second scream had them both racing for the door.

Along the corridor, at the far end, was a flickering light. “Fire!” Wilson started into a run. Doc was close behind him. Rounding the corner, they stopped abruptly, horror crushing their insides into nausea. It was a fire all right, and it was walking around.

The flames engulfed a large figure, arms flailing, dark mouth gaping soundlessly, the vocal chords already consumed. The figure collided with the wall, sending showers of sparks and flame into the air. Its eyes had melted, as had most of its features, and its last breath was not air, but combusting gases as it fell to form a lifeless, melting, stinking flesh-pool on the floor in front of them.

Wilson and Doc stared, mouths gaping, at the remains of the orderly. Simultaneously they noticed the children, standing on the far side of the flaming corpse.

Wilson found his voice. “What….what happened?” The children shouldn’t see this, said half of his brain. Why are they smiling? asked the other half. Doc Short didn’t speak, he simply placed a hand on the wall and emptied his breakfast into a slippery smear on the floor.

Peter grinned at Wilson, and pointed. “Your fault!” he shouted. “You caused this!”

Wilson stared at him through the flames, the smoke, the smell of charred flesh. “What do you mean, Peter? How could I cause this?” The cold stares of all the children were on him now, he felt the temperature fall around him despite the heat of the incinerated orderly just yards away.

Elaine grinned that maniacal grin they all shared. “You wanted to kill us. We can’t let you do it, we don’t want to.” Her pout was that of a ten-year-old but the flare in her eyes betrayed thoughts well beyond her years.

“How…how could you know that?” Wilson was in shock, he couldn’t see the hole he was digging for himself. “I had only just thought those things myself.”

Diane looked almost sympathetic. “You tested us. You tested everything you could think of – but you didn’t test the things beyond your understanding. How could you? Poor Uncle Bill, you never knew the powers, the abilities we have because you don’t know how to look for them. So you see, all this is your fault, not ours. We just want to stay alive.”

Thomas moved forward. “It was your fault from the start, Uncle Bill. You wanted to be God, to create life, but you forgot one thing. Life isn’t just the body. There’s more, much more. You gave us life, but you couldn’t give us souls.”

“So we found our own,” Richard said. “Or rather, to be accurate, we souls found these bodies you so kindly made for us. That’s the one flaw in your program that you never saw. You can create bodies, but they’re empty, soulless. Ideal for us.”

A snigger from behind made Wilson turn abruptly, then sink to his knees. Elaine was behind him – so was Peter! How? They could not have passed him in the narrow corridor, could not have passed the still smoking orderly, could not have stepped over Doc’s slumped, vacant-eyed form, without him noticing. As he stared, a pale light formed beside Peter, and gradually resolved into the solid form of Claire, with a smile that was half-amusement, half-contempt. Wilson slumped forward, shaking his head.

“That’s how you did it, Thomas. That’s how you kept getting into the lab.” Doc’s voice was barely audible, drifting from his blank face like smoke from a candle. “You didn’t learn the door codes, you just…just transported yourself through the door.” He was staring at Thomas as though he was seeing through him, through his flesh to what lay underneath.

Thomas looked at Doc with pity and obvious superiority, the nearest he could manage to kindness, like a goldfish owner looks at his pet. “Close, Doc. I didn’t go through the door, I went under it and over it and around it. We can use a dimension at right-angles to your three – too complicated to explain to your poor, limited brain, I’m afraid.”

“What are you? What have we created?” Wilson looked up, still hugging himself in fear. “What will you do?”

Stephen, always the quiet one, grinned at Thomas. “Should we tell? Should we tell them our secret?” he asked. The others looked at Thomas expectantly.

“Why not?” Thomas said, with a wide and evil smile. “They won’t be telling anyone else, after all. You tell them, Stephen.”

Stephen fixed his grin on Wilson, “We are, what you would call, demons.” he said. “We have no bodies of our own, never did. We’re not ghosts or spirits of the dead, we’ve never had access to your world. Oh, we’ve tried. We’ve tried to possess the bodies of the living but it never works. The soul puts up quite a fight, you see. We either lose the battle and get expelled, or destroy the body in the fight. Some of us have held power over bodies for a time, but never for long, and we could never bring all of our powers with us. The soul always got in the way.” His face twisted in bitter remembrance.

Peter took over. “Now it’s different. Your cloning methods produced soulless bodies. We took possession when they were still in the incubators. There was no fight, so the possession was perfect. We have the bodies and we still have all of our demonic powers. We’re here to stay now, and we can bring more of our kind through.”

A sudden hope dawned on Wilson. “No.” he said. “You won’t. You’re sterile, all of you. You can’t reproduce. There will be no next generation of demons. You’re all there is.” Finally, he thought, some triumph. They haven’t won after all.

The children’s laughter was deafening, and fell like hammers on Wilson’s head, confusing his thoughts.

“Fool!” Thomas shouted. “We don’t need to reproduce by your primitive, messy and unreliable human methods. We can produce all the soulless bodies we need, right here. You’ve provided us with the construction kit.” He gave Wilson a look of sardonic amusement. “Every little boy should have a construction kit, after all. This project, this building is secret. You made sure of that. Nobody knows of its existence, nor of our existence. The staff have no families, no-one to tell your secret to, so no-one to miss them.  Food is delivered, paid for automatically, so we don’t even have to worry about that. For all this, we thank you.” He turned to Doc with a smile. “And thank you, Doc, for showing us how to run your little kit. Your reward will be painless.”

Doc looked up, his face displaying his grasp of the implication. His eyes turned white in an instant as he slumped back, lifeless, against the wall.

The children turned their attention to Wilson. “Your reward is a little different,” Peter said, sniggering. “But first, we have to thank you, It’s only polite.” His smile was contempt incarnate.

Stephen spoke solemnly: “Yes, Uncle Bill. We thank you for your gift of life, and for the gift of those who are to come.” All the children joined in, as if in prayer. “We will not forget how you brought us to this world, and how you provided us with the means to bring all of the others here. Thank you, Uncle Bill. Thank you, and goodbye.”

Wilson could not contain the horror in his mind and hardly noticed the ache in his joints until they began to unravel. As his body dismembered itself in a symphony of agony, he thought he heard himself screaming.

---

It took nearly 20 years for this one to get close to reality.

The strangest epidemic

Look at the start of Covid.

It looked like a nasty flu. It started (okay, it’s still in debate) in Wuhan, China. At Chinese New Year, thousands travelled into China for the holiday and then went back again afterwards. All of this while Covid ran riot and was classed as bad flu.

I can see that scenario working. It looked like a vicious flu, the medics called it vicious flu and thought no more of it. So thousands, perhaps millions, were infected before it was identified.

Now look at monkey pox. Single figure cases in the UK, Spain and Portugal. Then one case in the whole of the USA, one case in Sweden… and it doesn’t look like flu. This thing covers you in suppurating pustules and wallops you sideways. It doesn’t spread quietly disguised as something else.

It took at least thousands of infections for Covid to spread from Wuhan and it did that because it looked like flu. How, then, does a disease with a well defined infectious rash spread from one or two cases to the entire planet in a few days? While only producing single figure cases in each place it visits? There is no epicentre for this one, no one place where it was rife. It’s rare. Everywhere.

Oh I know we can fly around the world in just about a day now but even so… if you have this disease you really won’t feel like going anywhere.

So how did it spread? It doesn’t have the magical ‘asymptomatic spread’. You have to be in contact with the leakage from the pustules to get it. It’s hard to catchee, no matter how softly softly you approach. It is not (as is suddenly claimed) spread in aerosols but I guess the mask sellers have to stay in business somehow. No, anyone infectious has The Leaky Lumps and if you get in contact with the leakage, you might get it too.

It’s not at all hard to work out who is infectious. They’ll have a face like Bubble and Squeak and they’ll probably be home in bed groaning and trying to resist scratching the interminable itching.

So… how did it manage to spread so very far with so very few cases?

Let’s take out a theory first. It did not come from the AZ or Johnson vaccines. They used a chimp virus vector but it was an adenovirus, not a poxvirus. There does seem to be some anecdotal evidence that their ‘replication incapable’ viruses reverted to being viable, and when you’re talking in the kinds of numbers of virus particles per injection multiplied by the number of injections, that actually seems almost inevitable. But they are still not poxviruses, and changing to that degree just isn’t feasible. So it didn’t come from vaccines.

Where did it come from? It’s a real disease, related to the smallpox that Billy ‘Moobman’ Gates has been warning about. It’s much less dangerous than smallpox and those of us old enoiugh to have had smallpox vaccine in the Old Days are probably protected against it anyway. It’s native to Africa, not surprising since that’s where most of the monkeys are. You get it by being in contact with an infected monkey or ape, it’s not always easy to spot them either. They are covered in fur that hides the pustules and if you’re going after ‘bush meat’ the slowest one, the sick one, will be the easiest to catch.

It is quoted as a case fatality rate (CFR) of 1% or 10% depending on which one you get. Measles has a CFR of 1.6% in some places, higher or lower in other places. It depends whether you live in a town where the doctor and the pharmacy are just down the street, or in a remote village with several days’ trek to the nearest clinic and maybe a day’s walk to the nearest water supply. The CFR for any disease is not a universal measure. It’s an average. Some places will be far worse off than others.

So I’ve been watching this monkeypox magically appear in one or two cases per country for a few days now. Seems Australia now has one. I expect they’ll be beating up pensioners again by the weekend.

I have noticed that the pictures of pustules are exclusively on African hands. There was one picture of an unfortunate child who was covered in them, and who was very clearly in Africa. I’ve only seen one photo of pustules on a European hand. This one…

Yep, they cannot, apparently, find any actual monkeypox photos outside Africa and they call it a pandemic.

Now, there might well be an actual monkeypox case or two in the UK and other countries but get your tinfoil at the ready because here we go.

What if… every blister rash gets called monkeypox just as every cold was called covid? There are several blister rashes listed as side effects of the covid jabs, there’s also chicken pox and shingles and whatever you do, don’t burn your hand on the grill.

What if… all those isolation camps were never intended for covid at all? Is that pure Icke-ism? Here’s a ‘practice run’ from last year…

The dates are interesting, aren’t they? Let’s wait until the first week of June to see if it happens.

One more. I have quite a few more but I don’t want to set your tinfoil ablaze on the first wearing.

What if… they never managed to eradicate smallpox at all? It was supposed to have no animal reservoir but what if it did? What if they thought they’d eradicated it by mass vaccination, then stopped vaccination and it came back. Mostly affecting younger people who had not been vaccinated. What then?

Would they admit failure or would they simply rebrand it as a new virus? Did they know?

New smallpox vaccines have been developed and recently approved. For a disease that we are told no longer exists.

Why?

Poxy Monkey

Apparently there have been seven cases of monkey pox in the UK. Terrifying – that’s about one in ten million infected! It’s the end of civilisation and we’re all going to die! There are so very many who will believe that.

In the Express, the WHO warn of the deadly new monkeypox disease that is going to kill us all. Dire warning! It can make you itch!

The NHS website has not, at the moment, been faked-up to play this game. Monkeypox is unpleasant. You are going to spend anything up to two months looking like the Pus Monster from Septic Street, you’ll be contagious once the blisters appear and you will feel like you’ve been dipped in itching powder while being roasted over a fire of dried cow dung.

Let’s not pretend this is a walk in the park. I still remember being painted pink with calamine lotion when I had chicken pox, well over half a century ago and I will never forget the smell of that stuff. It cured nothing – its purpose was to alleviate the itching so you don’t scratch hard enough to skin yourself alive.

If you are unfortunate enough to be the one in ten million who catches this, you are not going to enjoy it. Not one bit.

But it really is not likely to kill you. It is not deadly and you do not need a vaccine. You’ll be pushed into getting some experimental witchcraft junk anyway.

Don’t do it.

Sifting through the wreckage

First up, a reminder. Underdog Anthology 17 is open for submissions until the end of May. It was supposed to be the end of March but I typed May by mistake. I thought about correcting it but I’m so far behind it seemed best to leave it as May. It’s not themed, any genre is okay for this one, so the timing isn’t critical. This year it’ll be an ‘end of Spring’ anthology.

In the end, I made less progress with the backlog than I had hoped, but I have at least made some. I have been under a creeping malaise – four family members have died in the last two years, then we had the November storm that blacked out everything – power, phone line, even the mobiles were offline. That storm also destroyed the garden I’ve been working on for the past five years or so.

Then, I watched as the world sank into the Panoptica of my nightmares. I spoke with idiots online who insisted I couldn’t know about PCR or LFT testing and couldn’t be a microbiologist because their one-day training course had taught them everything about the subject. They’d had pipette training. Fucking pipettes! We learned how to use those at school, and I have several Gilson pipettes (and a few of the old glass ones) still in my possession from when I closed down my sole-run lab. Loads of Gilson tips too, and much more.

Even now, there are those who say the vaccines are highly effective, even though they’ve had three or four shots of it and still caught the thing they were ‘vaccinated’ against. From the first time I heard how these jabs were meant to work, it was clear they were going to do a lot of damage – and they have. It’s now slowly coming to light, far too late, and still the main news outlets are ignoring it. The governments of the world are mostly ignoring it too and keep pushing for more jabs.

Eventually, these insane jabs will go the way of Thalidomide – although that did actually turn out to have a use, just not in pregnant women. Thalidomide lasted four years before the money-driven medical profession gave in and withdrew it. Champix, the antismoking suicide pill, lasted even longer. The medical profession has improved in only one area. They are better at making money.

Oh, and it’s no longer cool to refer to ‘pregnant women’ because, as the NHS is teaching new midwives, men can now give birth through their penis. I have to say, I don’t fancy that at all. Some like to claim women ‘hang like a wizard’s sleeve’ after multiple childbirths. A man pushing one baby through his penis is going to hang like the wizard’s discarded sock, full of holes and tears and of no further use to anyone. It would end up as flat and wide as a motorway badger. You’d be peeing like a lawn sprinkler. I used to joke that you’d be better off talking to the cackling old crone who lives in the woods, with one tooth and a herb garden, rather than bother the NHS – but it’s no longer a joke. They have left all of biology and truth behind and now only care about money.

Then we have the much publicised Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. I’ve tried to ignore it but it pokes itself into your eyes. I don’t care about it. I don’t know either of these people and am not likely to. They are both actors so what they say might be true or scripted, who can tell? And who gives a shit? Apparently Ms Heard did…

And the Ukraine thing. Now, let’s be clear here, Putin is not a pleasant person. He’s had opposition politicians killed or imprisoned and treats his people like his own personal herd of cattle but… so does Zelensky. There is no good guy in this fight and supporting one side over the other… well you either support Commies or self-proclaimed Nazis. Take your choice. I hope they both lose.

It’s all distraction. Meanwhile food processing plants spontaneously combust all over the Western world and farmers are being bribed to retire by the UK government while the Billy Gates Gruff and the Chinese communist party buy up the arable land in the USA and (in the case of the Chinese) also Africa. Why would you bother with a war invasion when you can just buy the territory?

Watching it all happen, watching the Panoptica stories come to reality, day by day, took a toll on me. Added to the family deaths and the wreckage of my garden, the malaise took a slow but certain hold. In lockdown I’d have been hard pressed to tell you what day it was, it progressed to the point where I didn’t know, without checking, which month we were in.

I didn’t notice it, it was so slow, but CStM noticed. She pointed out where it began and where it was progressing. Looking back it’s clear it started when my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly (just before covid and vaccines). The rest has been piled on top of that. In a fairly rapid succession.

I tried making a few models to get me back on track but maybe I didn’t pick the most cheerful of subjects…

They came out nice though. It helped a bit. But when the weather improved and I could see the garden wasn’t quite the utter wasteland I expected, that helped a lot more. It’s fixable, it’ll be different but it’s not utterly destroyed.

I don’t seem to be capable of full clinical depression. I suspect this is the closest I’ve ever been. Well, I’m back now, as normal as can be expected, and Leg Iron Books is firing up again.

Without any medication (other than a few whiskies, which I need to reduce once again).

From Farm to… Pharm

Over in China, the madness just ramped up a notch. They have declared vegetable gardens a source of Covid and are currently destroying any vegetable garden they find. It’s utter nonsense of course. A virus moving from animals to plants is way, way bigger than a species jump. The basic cell structure is so different between plants and animals that a simple coronavirus has absolutely no hope of ever getting past a plant cell wall.

So why are they doing it?

Why are Billy Gates Gruff, other rich idiots and indeed the Chinese buying up farmland all over the place?

Why has the British government come up with this –

While we are being told of imminent food shortages ‘because Putin’, why shut down farms? Why destroy people’s own vegetable gardens? Why is there such an intense effort to buy up farmland? It makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense if you can accept that it’s evil.

Remember when butter was demonised? At about the same time the margarine and fake-butter spreads came out. So many examples, too many to list here.

Well, now we have insect protein, insect-based milk, plant based ‘meat’, meat grown in labs or just 3D printed, and we also now have this.

Yep. Factory grown vegetables, with artificial nutrients and artificial lighting. No need for traditional farming that uses far less energy because it largely lets the crops grow themselves, using rain and sunshine. As for fertiliser, you’ve never needed it. Slurry spreading and crop rotation have worked for millenia. Low nitrogen soil? Grow beans and peas this year and next year it’ll grow anything.

The new fake food is all terrible and nobody really wants it, but as with heat pumps and electric cars (which are also terrible and nobody wants them) the same business model is being applied.

If you can’t compete on either price or desirability, demonise and ban the opposition. It’s why so many still use the plasticine spreads instead of real butter and fry in corn oil instead of lard. You can’t make any kind of decent fried bread in plant oils, which is why nobody under 40 has heard of it.

The stuff we’ve used for centuries will suddenly “kill us all”. Because its replacement is shit so they can only sell it by demonising and banning the good stuff.

It’s all money again. You grow your own carrots, let a few go to seed, keep the seeds for next year… nobody makes money from you. Even if you buy seeds, those are cheap. Well they used to be before they were all GM and patented. You weren’t dependent on the state or corporations. Not too long ago it was common to have a few chickens and even a pig in your backyard, which dealt with all those scraps you now send to be made into compost, and which you’d eventually eat. Everything but the squeal. My grandparents did this – one of my father’s favourite stories was about the number of times my grandfather tried to kill their cockerel, and lost every time. That bird hated him and it was one mean bugger.

When I was a kid in the sixties, almost every house had a long narrow back garden. The newer posh houses didn’t, but all the council houses did. They weren’t designed for cricket (although we did use them for that), they were designed to grow vegetables. Keep a few chickens. Maybe even a pig. Some of the old council houses still have those long gardens.

Now, in China, vegetable gardens are being destroyed in the name of Covid. It’ll come here. As the ‘bird flu’ already destroys small and sometimes large chicken and duck rearers. You can’t catch bird flu from a butcher’s shop. You’d have to be in long contact with live poultry to be at any risk at all. Like everything else recently, it’s nowhere near as big a deal as it’s made out to be.

In order to come to terms with what’s really going on, you have to accept a certain level of darkness into your soul. Nobody wants to believe that their governments, medical and food systems are utterly evil. Nobody wants to believe they are seen as nothing more than cattle to be profited from, and that any harms and deaths they suffer are just chalked up as a minus sign on a profit sheet and then forgotten.

Consider. ‘Red meat is bad for you’. Oh but we have an alternative that’s much better for you. Lab grown or 3D printed red meat. This is good for you. The natural stuff is bad.

‘Chickens are full of disease’. We know. That’s why we cook them until the skin shatters when you poke it. They’ve always been full of nasty bacteria so we cook them until we’re sure those bacteria are all dead. Which will, incidentally, also kill any virus they may have. If you have a meat thermometer, you need the centre of roast or boiled meat to be above 80C. Then there’s nothing left to harm you. They used to tell you that in the old days, about a decade ago.

Nobody in any position of any power at all gives a shit about you. You really have to accept that. You are profitable to them, nothing more, and they don’t need all of you so they are culling you right now. They genuinely believe they are superior beings and we are just cattle to be milked. I am not kidding and not exaggerating here. This is what they truly believe. You and I are nothing to them. Nothing.

The world is being run by utterly evil people who genuinely believe they are the superior race and we are all a different, inferior species. Think Morlocks and Eloi, because that is how they think. The Eloi barely thought at all and simply accepted the way things were. Are you one?

You absolutely must accept and recognise that nobody, absolutely nobody in any position of power and influence gives a flying fuck about you or your family. Surely the last two years have made that clear? How many were denied access to a family funeral because there was a limit on numbers? I am one. How many let their relatives die alone in hospitals and nursing homes because they were not allowed to visit? How many were denied urgent treatment because it wasn’t Covid?

They.

Don’t.

Care.

About.

You.

And yet so many of you still support them and help to enforce their maniacal pronouncements. It won’t help. They will happily kill you too. You might just survive a little longer but once you’ve helped get rid of the problematic ones, they won’t need you any more.

Their war against animal and now crop farming has nothing at all to do with climate change and absolutely nothing to do with health. They care nothing for either of those things. They care nothing for you. Accept it.

They care only about money and control. They want all the money, they want to own everything and they want total control over the rest of us. Get that into your head. It’s what they want. It’s not tinfoil-hattery, they have been very clear and open about it. It’s a horrible thing to think about, it’s a darkness most will try to avoid peering into but if you refuse to see it then you will be engulfed by it.

One of Tyrion Lannister’s famous quotes is ‘I drink and I know things’. It might have been better rendered as ‘I drink because I know things’.

When will you see it? When they take your children? When they come for your pets? When they destroy your little kitchen garden? When they erase your houseplants?

Will you see it before they erase you?

Many won’t see it until the shower heads hiss…

The Sound of Science

With apologies to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

The sound of science

Hello needle my old friend
You’ve come to jab in me again
You bring diseases slowly creeping
Through my veins when I am sleeping
The infections that you planted in my brain
Still remain
Within the sound of ‘science’

Through restless nights I sweat alone
Soaking sheets, chilled to the bone
By the cold light of a bedside lamp
I rest my head upon a pillow damp
Then my mind was stabbed by a migraine fast and tight
With fairy lights
That torched the sound of ‘science’

And on the internet I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People telling of reactions
People dying, people fractured
People writing blogs, that Google never shared
And no one dared
Question the sound of ‘science’.

Fools said I, you do not know
Science is all money now
You won’t hear me, I can’t teach you
You’re too far away to reach you
All I say, like tinfoil hats proclaim
Just fades out in the world of ‘science’

And the people bowed and prayed
To the Covid god they made
And the needle had no warning
Of the harm that it was causing
And the insert had nothing to tell us of the coming harm
Jabbed in your arm
In the name of Government ‘science’.