Fifteen Minutes

Lately we are being bombarded with this insane notion of ‘fifteen minute cities’. Apparently it was thought up by some French guy who envisaged a world where everything you needed was a fifteen minute walk or less away. Work, school, any shops you required, all within a short walk.

It sounds really nice, and it was. We had that back in the 1960s and 70s. There was a butcher and greengrocer three streets away. Doctor and dentist about five streets away. I’d walk to school – about 15-20 minutes. I didn’t need a lift in a car. Even the fancy shops were less than half an hour’s walk into the ‘big town’ that had a high street. That’s how it used to be and I’d be quite happy if the Frenchman’s vision took us back to that.

However. That is not what we are getting. Our lunatics in charge have taken the ’15 minute city’ idea and swirled it in a pot with Orwell and Stalin. They have interpreted it as a place where you will be fined and punished for moving outside your defined zone.

They are not installing amenities within 15 minutes of your home. They are installing blockades and cameras and fines if you dare move outside your alloted space.

This was not the idea. It was not meant to be enforced. It was meant to be convenient. The 15 minute city idea was intended to produce places where you didn’t need to go far to get stuff. Not to produce places where you weren’t allowed to go far. The original concept still allowed travel, it just meant that for the essentials, you didn’t have to.

There were no lockdowns, road blocks and fines in the original concept. No need. You want to go shopping? There are local shops selling all you need within walking distance. You want to go further? Fine. You can. You just don’t have to.

The original concept is what I grew up with. Sure, you could take a bus to the ‘big town’ but you can just walk there in 30 minutes anyway. I walked to school, to the shops, everything.

What happened?

Supermarkets. The first one I remember appearing was Carrefour. It looked like an aircraft hangar. Everything was in there. Now we have so many of them and they really can’t set one up within 15 minutes of everyone.

The supermarkets killed off all the little shops. They couldn’t compete on price. Those small shops that were the heart of the original ’15 minute’ communities were eradicated by the big guns. They are not coming back and there is no effort underway to even try to bring them back.

The ’15 minute’ cities are going to be ghettoes. If you are more than 15 minutes from one of the supermarkets you will have to pay for delivery and since you have no options, they can charge whatever they want.

If you get sick and you are more than 15 minutes from a doctor then, basically, write your will.

The implementation of 15 minute cities and ‘low traffic zones’ does not include the provision of essential services within 15 minutes of your home, as the original idea intended.

It will simply stop you travelling more than 15 minutes away from your designated pod.

Did you vote for this?

Hmm? Were you asked?

Carbon Cobblers

Quick book update – Underdog Anthology 20 is now out with the authors for final checks, some have already responded and it hasn’t been 24 hours yet. So, hopefully not much longer. The next one is a complex job with many photos, it’s already under way and I hope not to be too much longer about that one either.

Okay. the carbon dioxide bollocks. Anyone my age learned the carbon cycle at school but it seems they no longer teach that. At its barebones basic, animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2, plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen, using the carbon to make sugars and polysaccharides and proteins. Eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere and all the plants die, and shortly after that, so does everything else. Because we need oxygen and there won’t be any plants producing it. Everything dies.

Except a few species of anaerobic bacteria. They don’t need oxygen. Life on Earth goes back to its original state – factory reset, if you like – to start all over again. I have to wonder if this kind of Great Reset has happened before. A thriving planet sent back to the beginning by a species as stupid as us. Or at least, as stupid as those who think they rule us.

The Billy Gates Gruff and his pals think that it’s a great idea to blot out the sun to stop ‘global warming’ while simultaneously making us reliant on solar power. They cannot see any issue with that. They want to spend millions – perhaps billions – on machinery to take CO2 out of the air while cutting down all the trees that already do the same thing for free so they can install solar panels under a blotted-out sun.

This whole planet is going to be the galaxy’s Easter Island to alien explorers. Dead, treeless, and covered in meaningless monuments. They will wonder how any species could be so stupid as to destroy their environment in the name of saving it. They will marvel at the environmental destruction of lithium and neodymium mining, the horrors of cobalt mining, and the ruins of the ridiculous ‘carbon capture’ buildings and they will wonder why we didn’t just leave it to nature and accept that the climate has cycles we can do nothing to stop or change.

Carbon dioxide is 0.04% of the atmosphere. With all our burning of coal, oil, gas, wood, why is it not far more? Well our contribution is infinitesimal compared to all the animals, birds, insects, sea life and bacterial activity pumping it out. The only way to prevent carbon dioxide emissions is to eradicate all life on the planet. So why aren’t we seeing so much more of it?

The Church of Climatology want you to believe that CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries. The truth is, every emitted CO2 molecule has minutes at best before it’s taken into a tree, shrub, flower or blade of grass. What is actually amazing is that we can detect any at all.

So you can’t get on a plane carrying 200 people for one trip while they can get on a plane carrying one person for a much longer trip. You must fear rising sea levels while they live in beachfront homes. You must give up your one car while they ride in armoured cavalcades.

The most amazing part is that they have useful idiots who believe it all. They will slash the tyres of SUVs so they have to be replaced with new tyres while the old ones go into landfill and that’s ‘green’. They will block roads so traffic sits idling or goes the long way round, wasting more fuel because that’s ‘green’. They claim gas fracking is deadly for the environment while they ignore the toxic lakes and acid pools of their masters’ rare earth mines. And yet they still believe they are saving the environment even while they are helping to utterly destroy it.

The useful idiots do all this while making full use of petroleum products. They live in homes where they wake up warm because nobody has to get up to light the fire (how many remember that – and frost on the inside of the windows?). They film their antics on plastic machinery that cannot exist without oil. They sail their righteous voyages in ships powered by diesel engines.

They usher in a new 16th century world that they think will not apply to them. Oh they are going to be so very surprised and unprepared.

Well, if they win, they’ll all be dead within a week. They have no idea how to grow or hunt, the evisceration of a rabbit, pheasant or deer will make them throw up or pass out, they have no idea which wild berries are safe to eat and using any tool that doesn’t need to be plugged in or recharged is absolutely alien to them. As is any possibility of making fire, which they are terrified of anyway.

How did that happen? Less than half a century ago (well it was yesterday here) people had no issue with lighting a fire in their living rooms. Now they think a tiny wood stove will kill them all, when a roaring coal fire was pretty much all that kept them alive in winter.

The descent into stupid was fast, and it’s continuing. Perhaps it can be reversed.

If we stop putting morons in charge, and stop doing the moronic things they say.

More official lunacy

Book stuff first. My mother is visiting in early April so I’m going to be occupied with getting book stuff sorted quickly. I have an alternative-history novel to get ready and the Spring anthology too. Expect to see contracts and payments going out long before the deadline for that (March 31st) so I can be ready to load it up in the first week of April. I’m not going to move the deadline forward, that would be unfair, but I won’t have as much leeway on that as I usually do.

Right. That’s done. On with the actual post.

The idiots in charge have decided to spend like drunken sailors again, this time on an ‘emergency alert system‘ that will set off every mobile phone with a ten minute siren and disable any other use of that phone until the user presses ‘ok’ or ‘I give up’ or ‘scare me harder daddy’ or whatever they choose to put on that button.

We’ve never needed this before. It’s the UK. The rainy island off the edge off Europe. We don’t really need to worry about forest wildfires because our forests rarely get dry enough to burn, and the Green Men have cut most of them down for windmills anyway. We sometimes get little earthquakes that would barely be noticed in most other countries. We have no volcanoes. Not even dormant ones. We do not have rampaging predators nor do we have stampedes of wildebeest. The worst we get in that respect is deer with no road sense.

Let’s face it. Bugger all happens here most of the time. There are occasional storms that cause damage but we don’t need the phone to tell us when that’s happening. In fact in the last big one all the phones were dead, landline and mobile, so an alert would be as useless as it was superfluous.

It is a ridiculously pointless idea unless… the government is planning something big to scare us with. It wouldn’t be the first time. The ‘test’ is on 23rd April and it looks like turning off ’emergency alerts’ on your phone won’t stop it. Well I’m pretty bad at remembering to charge mine…

They are advertising it, sure, but not everyone will get the message. When phones turn into air raid sirens there will be people who don’t know it’s coming. Some will have dodgy hearts or high blood pressure and some will be driving. There will be crashes and heart attacks and people trying to find out what’s happening using a phone that no longer works unless they tap the button they don’t know they need to tap. It is going to be a disaster.

But then, has any UK government since Cromwell done anything but cause disaster? And Cromwell turned out to be a dick too.

I’m not an anarchist, but I really am beginning to understand their point of view.

Bank crashes

Many distractions are happening. Some kickballing crisp salesman has apparently vanished from TV for something he did or said, I neither know nor care any more than that but it’s the talk of the internet. Then Mad Wanksock is getting all the blame for the Covid lockdown debacle. I have no sympathy for the weasel faced git, he deserves all he gets – but he is far from the only one to blame and the rest of them shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their parts in that mess.

In the background, but sliding into the limelight, a bank called Silicon Valley Bank went bust. Turns out this was a bank with a particular penchant for high risk investments. You’d think they’d have a risk assessment department keeping a close eye on things in that case, right?

Well they had no head of risk assessment for nine months, and when they appointed one, they chose a woke idiot who spent all her time arranging LGBT parades and Lesbian Awareness events. Not checking on the risks they took with investments. Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but as a straight man I have no reason to be aware of lesbians, nor they of me. We are of no interest to each other. And I’m afraid that whenever I hear ‘LGBT’ my mind defaults to G scale narrow gauge railways – LGB trains. I see no reason to have a parade about that.

So a bank that took big risks in investments while having no, followed by effectively no, oversight on the scale of the risks they took, went bust. That’s really not a surprise and shouldn’t alarm anyone who didn’t have their money in there. Incidentally, it turns out the Harry formerly known as Prince and his sidekick, Me-again, had a lot of their money in that bank.

However, it is being touted as ‘the first domino in a banking collapse’ There is no reason why it should be, but then there was no reason to panic buy toilet paper at the start of all this yet people did it anyway. There wasn’t a ‘real’ shortage of toilet paper. There were rumours of one, which caused the easily petrified to buy it all and thus cause the very shortage they were trying to avoid.

The same happened with rumours of petrol shortages, other shortages and lately fresh fruit and vegetable shortages. Although if anyone is daft enough to stockpile fresh fruits and vegetables, well your house is going to stink worse than the allotment compost heap in a week or so. Which, I suppose, will make it easy to identify the utterly gullible.

All it takes to create a shortage is to put out a rumour there’s going to be one. The impossibly stupid will do the rest for you, and they are legion. They’ll buy up and stockpile the thing you wanted a shortage of and cause that shortage themselves.

So… if you want to crash the banks, all you need do is install a useless head of risk management in a very high risk bank and let it inevitably crash. Even better if you have King Jug-ears’ grandson as a major account holder. That guarantees massive press coverage. Then all the gullible toilet roll hoarders will panic and cause a run on the banks – all of them – so they can take their money and stuff it into mattresses. That will then cause the massive bank crash you wanted. Even the most well run banks can’t pay out all the money in all their accounts. Most of it doesn’t actually exist. So, banking crash incoming.

It’s hard not to see the toilet roll, pasta, petrol and all the other shortages as practice runs for this event. Each of them was inconsequential and temporary on their own, but as a lead-in to crashing the financial system, a very good way to train the drones into doing what the WEF want them to do. Also, to find out how many gullible idiots are willing to help this crash along.

Seems there are a whole army of them. So, get ready for the financial crash – unless enough people wake up to the scam. I am not hopeful of that.

Looks like the plan for digital currency is working well so far. Well, best get planting… there won’t be too many veggies on this year’s food bills, and I’ll have to dust off the fishing and hunting gear too.

If you live in a city, you have my sympathy. If you can, get the hell out soon.

Dangerous Labels

This is my favourite. The safety mob once insisted I put it on the door of my lab, after they found out what I was doing in there. I didn’t think it was all that dangerous, it was only things like Salmonella, Campylobacter and so on, and I never got sick from working alone, often well into the night. But hey, they said I needed a sign so I got a sign. If anyone ever asks what ‘my sign’ is, this is it.

But it’s not the label I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the casual use of quite serious allegations to the point where nobody takes them seriously any more. Racist. Nazi. Bigot. Fascist… and lately Far Right.

I have no idea what far right is even supposed to mean. The others have defined meanings, now diluted away to almost no meaning by their constant use in trying to shut down arguments the shouty ones have already lost.

Lately we have seen the protests in Liverpool and all over Ireland (if you haven’t seen them on the news, I’m not surprised, has the news even noticed the Gilet Jaunes yet?) labelled ‘far right’.

These protests are about the massive influx of illegal immigrants and their subsequent attempts to seduce and rape underage girls. Yes, they really are doing that and yes, they are illegal. They arrive here without any regard for border checks, with no documentation and expect to live the high life for free. These are the people Keir Starmer thinks are the future of the economy? Really? When his WEF-controlled band of idiots, along with the mob on the other side of the House, have wiped out the taxpaying workers, what does he think his imported mob will do next? Knuckle down and say ‘Yes Massah’? Oh those days are long past and they are not coming back. If the WEF use them to wipe out white people until only the white people in the WEF are left, well, I think the next stage is really not that hard to guess.

So the people of Ireland are protesting, the people of Liverpool took it a little further as you’d expect, and soon it will kick off in Glasgow if it hasn’t already. The news will never tell us if it does. I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want… I want the government to load up a hotel in Milwall. Then we’ll have a real excuse to get the popcorn out.

Does anyone really believe the people of Liverpool could ever be fairly described as ‘far right’? Heck, Liverpool considers Starmer as ‘far right’. Stalin would be considered ‘middle of the road’ in that town. Yet all those people who are really objecting to the sexual abuse of their daughters are labelled ‘far right’ by the propaganda arm of the WEF. That’s the thing we used to call ‘the news’ back when we were all enamoured of the idiot lantern.

The Irish government are, similarly, labelling those who object to the harassment of their daughters as ‘far right’. It’s the New Racist. They wore that one out so they’ve come up with a new one, one that is so much better because nobody actually knows what it means. You can say “I’m not racist” but how can you say “I’m not far right” when being far right means you care about the safety of your family?

In fact, why would you? Why would you say “I’m not far right” when being far right means you care about the safety of your family? Why would you deny that?

The danger of all these labels is that one day, and very likely soon, a real ‘far right fascist’ party will rise and people will vote for them. A real, nasty, authoritarian Hitler clone will come along and the shouty ones will cry “You can’t vote for them. They are far right!”

The people will shrug and say “So? You’ve told me that’s what I am too.”

Hitler was voted in. Mussolini was voted in. Many other evil bastards were voted into power. How?

The people were desensitised to the threat by being accused of being that threat by the shouty ones. So when the real threat appeared, they didn’t see it. It was just another one who was accused of the same things they’d been accused of all along. It wasn’t true for them, why would they think it was true of the actually evil ones?

And then it’s too late.

Earthquakes and other nasties

Book stuff first. The Underdog Anthologies have reached number 20! I thought it was a dose of wild optimism to call the first one ‘first volume’ but the next will be 20. I never expected it to get so far if I’m honest, and yet it seems to have become something of a monster. Doesn’t make a return on investment yet but it’s fun anyway.

I have also found a local shop, only two towns away, that has a sort of free library. They don’t sell second hand books, the locals drop off books on a set of shelves and take what they like. Bring them back or bring new ones. There are some anthologies there now, and I will be dropping off other authors’ books in the future. This will work best with authors who have multiple books since those with just one book… well I’d just be giving away a free book. Dropping off one book might get a few people to look up the author and actually buy the others. It’s a limited market but worth a try. Anyway…

Many earthquakes have devastated Turkey and Syria in recent days. Some of them were huge. Whole buildings collapsed, many people are dead or missing. It was a massive blow for any country and aid is pouring in. To Turkey.

I have seen many pleas for donations from the likes of Oxfam and even Wee Nippy herself. Now, aside from my natural reticence to trust Wee Nippy with more than sixpence, I will not be donating. At all.

Why? Am I so cruel and insensitive? Have I become infected with the North Scots refusal to part with cash? Well, apart from those, there is another consideration.

All aid from the west goes to Turkey. The USA, EU and UK among others will send no aid to Syria because, well, sanctions.

That’s right. Politics comes before helping people from a disaster. Governmental tiffs are far more important than helping ordinary people who have nothing to do with that tiff and most likely know nothing about it at all.

I will not support that.

This does not mean that I poo-poo what happened in Turkey. Far from it. The tectonic plates there shifted several metres with devastating effects. No, I will not donate because their neighbour, Syria, is being ignored by my country for political reasons which now apparently override humanitarian reasons. People have died. People are trapped under fallen buildings. Will we help? Nooo, because… sanctions. It is disgusting.We should be helping the people of both countries. None of them are in charge, they are just people like you and me, just trying to survive ths mad world. And yet, because of politicians, the Syrians are not considered worthy of help by the bastards in charge here.

We are ruled by self important scum. If that wasn’t made clear by the events of the last three years, surely this will bring it to everyone’s attention.

But it probably won’t change a thing.

Antiscience

Granddaughter’s fifth birthday approaches. I have decided to get her a microscope. Well, I have been forbidden to buy her a crossbow, sword or power tools so it’s the next best thing. She’s very keen on child level ‘science lab’ stuff and I feel we’re going to need some real scientists in the future. The real ones we have left are being gradually pushed out in favour of the new breed of antiscientist. I won’t buy her a chemistry set, the modern ones are crap. I’ll make one for her myself.

Grandson will turn three later in the year. I know he’d love some dynamite but I bet that’ll be on the ‘no’ list too. I’ll have to think of something else. Maybe a motorbike. Ooo, I see they make child sized backhoe diggers…

Back to antiscience. I have noticed a marked rise in the lunacy of humanity of late. Oh sure, we’ve always had those madmen and eccentrics but they seem to be rapidly increasing in number and noise. There has been a Flat Earth Society for as long as I can remember but we’d just ignore them and let them get on with it. The contortions of logic required to explain why the southern hemisphere sees completely different stars to the northern hemisphere, for example, are most entertaining.

Yet now, there are those who claim that Antarctica is an ‘ice wall’ surrounding the flat earth (with no explanation of how someone can traverse Antarctica and still be on the same planet). They claim Mars is just another world beyond the ice wall, and not actually orbiting the Sun as our telescopes and even naked eye observations have made clear for really quite some time. It has expanded well beyond the old ‘turtles all the way down’ line and its proponents are really quite vociferous.

The ancient Greeks worked out that the world was a globe and made a remarkably accurate estimate of its diameter. Yet the flat earth idea isn’t just still around, it’s getting stronger. Is there something in it?

No.

Anyway. Back to microscopes. I can’t give my granddaughter my ex-lab one, it’s a bit overcomplex for a five year old and it takes a lot of practice to use the 1000x oil immersion lens without driving it right through the slide. I have seen many ‘toy’ ones claiming 1200x magnification. It’s impossible to get to that level in air, you need an oil immersion lens to get the right refractive index so that your focus point is actually in front of the lens (and still not by very much!) rather than behind it. I certainly don’t believe a microscope priced at £14 can do it. You’d need a couple more zeros behind that number at least.

Besides, her parents are not going to let her cultivate bacteria to examine with it. All the stuff to do that is in my garage… give her a few years of growth first ;D

So, she’s likely to start with leaves, insects… probably around 200x would be fine as a starting point. 500x and she’d have a really good view of protozoa, single celled algae like Spirogyra and Chlamydomonas, diatoms, and yeasts. We can come back to the bacteria.

Of course, no light microscope can see a virus – although I think I recall reading about one that was just big enough to see – but most will need an electron microscope. A little out of my budget to buy, and likely to be out of her parents’ budget to run.

There has been a progression in antiscience here too. It started out with people denying that Covid-19 was real. Now that is a definite possibility. It entirely replaced the flu count in a single winter. Could it be simply rebranded flu? There is a very plausible argument that it was. However, it’s not exactly like flu. Its attachment protein – the ‘spike’ – is unlike any seen in any other coronavirus and it really does look as if it was constructed in a lab. So far, I’m going with it being a real virus but a manmade one, not a natural one. More on that another time.

Antiscience claims there are no such things as viruses at all. They are simply bits of waste disposal from cells. So why are there so many types, and why do they infect and kill other cells? Have you ever seen an image of a bacteriophage? These viruses infect bacteria and they have developed a remarkable system for punching through bacterial cell walls. Human viruses only have to get through a fatty membrane but at the scale they live at, the bacteriophage has to get through the equivalent of reinforced concrete. This is not some bag of waste, it’s a complex microstructure.

There really are viruses. People get sick from them all the time. So do animals. And plants. Even bacteria.

Speaking of bacteria, the antiscience now claims that even bacteria are not the cause of disease. We are creeping back to the science before Van Leeuwenhoek developed his first microscopes, when diseases were transmitted by ‘the aether’ and bad smells could make you sick.

If someone has anthrax, you will, 100% of the time, isolate Bacillus anthracis from the infected person. If you isolate and grow Bacillus anthracis (it’s really not that hard) and get it to sporulate (a little harder) and get those spores into a dry powder (very hard to do without infecting yourself) and then shoot that powder at someone… they will get anthrax.

If you have an eye infection you might find a doctor using a UV light on your eye. Why? Because Pseudomonas species are a common cause of eye infections and the nasty ones fluoresce green under UV. So you can be diagnosed in moments and the correct antibiotics prescribed.

Vibrio cholerae is the cause of cholera. Clostridium difficile causes devastating gut infections. You can isolate these from 100% of cases and if you’re especially villainous, you can use them to induce the same disease in healthy people. Some bacteria definitely do cause disease. There’s no getting away from it. Otherwise, why would you worry about Salmonella or Campylobacter in chicken? You want to eat raw chicken? Go ahead, I won’t be joining you.

I have isolated and grown many of these bacteria. I have seen them under the microscope. Heck, I once grew enough Cl. difficile to wipe out most of Aberdeen if I only had a Scwab villian suit and an underground lair. I suppose that’s why I also had massive public indemnity insurance… fortunately I’m retired and not paying for that any more.

If you think viruses are not real… how can you blame Bill Gates for polio outbreaks that were caused by a not-quite-dead polio virus in immunisations in Africa and India? How can you blame Dr. Fauci for gain of function research in viruses that were only in the imagination? Gain of what function, if they didn’t exist in the first place? And what were all those scientists paid to do, play computer games? You can’t have both at once. If viruses aren’t real then all the supposed crimes cannot possibly be real either.

The natural world is real and it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. It’s nasty out there, far nastier than most mollycoddled modern humans can even contemplate. There are parasites that take control of their hosts and drive them to kill themselves so the parasite can complete its life cycle. And not just in insects. There are things that burrow into you and live inside you so you feed it and shed its eggs without ever knowing it’s there. Nature is not some motherly being taking care of its creations. Nature is Thunderdome – you get in, you might not leave.

Humans used to know that, until we separated ourselves and pretended we were the ones tasked with taking care of Nature. Nature gives not a single shit about us, we are just another thing it came up with and like Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus, if we don’t work out, Nature will move on to the next thing.

The best way for a species to survive is to do what the Coelocanth did. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Stay quiet, stay out of sight and Nature will ignore you. Start trying to take over and boom – you’re gone.

We are not the owners of this planet. No, not even you, Klaus. We are a species that happens to live on it for the moment. Monkeys with fancy toys. Nature has no need of us and absolutely no need of our protection, nor of our ridiculous notion that we have some kind of control over it all. When we are extinct, Earth will move on.

Maybe this is what the cats are waiting for.

No Qatar

I have absolutely zero interest in any format of the various kick-ball games out there. Not even in stick-ball, which is very popular here in Scotland and not even in my native land’s ‘run with an almost ball shaped thing and slam it down at the end of the field’ game. They all seem entirely pointless to me.

I have, however, been somewhat entertained by football’s decision to host the world cup in Qatar. It is a highly religious country – and I don’t care about religion either – so there has been much ribbing of virtue signallers like Gary with Ears like Walker’s Crisps and so on, who are all happy to take money to go to a place that does everything they virtue signal against.

The stadiums are built with slave labour, many of whom have died during construction, but apparently that’s all the fault of us honkies. There are no human rights there, there is only Sharia law and if you aren’t Muslim, or even if you are a Muslim woman, you’re less important than a goat. But all that is fine when there’s money on the table for the virtue signallers who claim to be against these things.

I have seen US and UK football idiots complain that there will be no booze available. I am waiting for the reactions when they find out there’s no pork chops or bacon rolls available either. They have actually used the phrase ‘but it’s our culture’ and these cretins have never grasped that it only applies in countries that are dim enough to let people claim that shit.

Qatar does not. It is a Muslim country. If you go to their country, their laws apply. No booze. No bacon. No wandering around drunk with your moobs on display, resting on your hairy belly and flapping in the breeze. Mere seconds spent on the internet would tell you what to expect if you go there. It’s not rocket surgery.

The thing is, it’s what the West expects now. Our countries have bent over to take it without lube for every immigrant’s ‘culture’ and people truly expect a reciprocal arrangement. There isn’t one. There will never be one. We’re just suckers.

Nigeria has banned the use of white actors in TV adverts. You will have no trouble imagining what the blue hair brigade would have to say if we did the opposite here in the UK. We wouldn’t anyway, there are now a lot of non-honky Brits and have been for several generations but just imagine the reaction.

I have never been to Qatar and probably never will visit. Two of my favourite things are whisky and bacon and those are both banned there. I have no problem with that. It’s their country, they can run it how they like. But it’s not my kind of place and they won’t like me so the simple solution is to just not go there.

It might, however, teach a lot of our own idiots a lesson. All this ‘It’s my culture, innit’ crap does not apply universally. You can claim it’s part of your culture to drink beer and eat pork sausages when watching football but when you go to a country that doesn’t want those things going on, no fucker cares about your ‘culture’.

Get it into their heads, and maybe they’ll see the claims of ‘it’s my culture to rape children/slaughter animals in my backyard’ etc differently when they get home. Just maybe, a few of them will see what’s really going on.

It won’t affect the blue haired screamers, of course, since their pipe cleaner limbs don’t allow them to get involved with anything harder than charging their phones and their minds have atrophied to the point where a dessicated mushroom scores higher than them on an IQ test… but it might get through to those the blue hairs have spent decades indoctrinating.

One last thing – so many Western football clubs are going with gay iconography on their planes and football strips.

They really should have looked into what seriously Islamic countries will do to them.

There is going to be an incident in Qatar this year. The provocation will be intense and it is likely to get a harsh response. There will be much hand wringing from the well paid virtue signallers, but nothing will be done.

It’s their culture, innit?

UPDATE: Apparently it’s worse than this. The booze ban only applies to the paying plebs. The VIPs, many of whom have their jollies paid for by the very taxpaying plebs who cannot now have a beer, will still be downing champagne and wine in their Virtue Boxes.

So it seems ‘It’s my culture innit’ does work for a very few. Just not for those paying for it. I suppose we should be used to that by now.

What’s behind the veil?

Well, Less Trust has gone. 44 days as Prime Monster. During which time her picks for Home Secretary and Chancellor were also forced out and replaced from the legions of the dead-eyed and the useless. So we are facing yet another Prime Monster.

Who will we get this time? There are rumours that the Fat Scarecrow plans to make a comeback, but it really doesn’t matter. None of them are in charge of anything, they all do as they are told by the men behind the veil. All of them are old, rich white men, by the way. Their lunatic fringes and protestors seem fine with that. Eat the Rich? Don’t be silly. You’ll be lucky to get to eat a rat, as long as you push the ‘net zero’ insanity. You’ll be living on a diet a labrador won’t touch.

Oh and you won’t have any pets either, especially those who are either edible or who require a meat diet. Companionship of any kind is a Bad Thing in the eyes of the New Lunatic Party currently running the show.

Lunatics? Well, how else would you describe those who cut down entire forests to burn for energy and ‘reduce CO2’ when the absolute best means of absorbing CO2 is… forests. Take a look at an oak, a Scots pine, a giant redwood. Every atom of carbon in there was once in the atmosphere. How much CO2 has a giant redwood sequestered by now? How about all those acres upon acres of crops? The carbon in a plant came from the air. It came from CO2. Take the CO2 away and all the plants die.

Since it’s the plants that produce oxygen (they use the carbon part of CO2 and ditch the oxygen back into the air), and since plants are the base level of every food chain, it’s not hard to work out what happens when they all die. The world is back to anaerobic bacteria to start all over again. Absolutely nothing else survives. No amount of money will save you.

And yet this is what the lunatics want. I don’t just mean their idiot drone children, it’s what the likes of Crazy Gates genuinely want. They say money can’t buy happiness. Well it obviously doesn’t buy intelligence either.

So who is behind the veil? Gates? Schwab? Soros? No, they are clearly on this side of it. Behind it are those whose plans keep failing and their patsys take the blame, but those behind simply regroup and try again. This time, perhaps, they have moved too far and too fast. This time there might be holes in the veil.

Anyway. We all need a distraction from the horror show of modern politics. So, here’s a look behind a different kind of veil.

Yes, the Halloween book is finally out. Smashwords and Kindle versions are up, the print one won’t be far behind. (Update: the print version is out now).

So… what did I put behind that veil? The cover is a photograph of some of my cutest ever creations behind a cloth, with a hole so this lovely lady could peek out –

The base is one inch square, to give an idea of scale.

Either side of her are her compatriots. A Grimghast Reaper…

… and a Chainghast. Same scale, the squares on the cutting board are one inch square.

He’s the other way around on the cover.

The back cover features this supermodel-figured heartthrob –

Or was that heart-ripper? It’s hard to tell.

And one of these guys, although he didn’t come out too well so he’s not as visible as he should be. Well, I can re-use him on a later book.

Their horses look a little underfed…

These are all from the game ‘World of Warcraft’ which holds no interest for me as a game, but I do like the little models. They might well feature heavily on future Halloween book covers, and my collection grows – slowly. I have found eBay sellers who will split a box of 10 or 20 of one type and sell one at a time. Sure, it’s more expensive per model, but I really only want one or two of each.

Well, it’s a book full of horror stories, although it’s hard to match the one we currently live in.

It’s very cheap though. And it takes your mind off the real world horrors.

Less Trust

The 18th anthology is assembled into one document and formatted. Since my eyes are not what they once were, I have passed it to Roo B Doo, our much younger and much more attractive co-editor, for a checkover before sending it to authors. Won’t be long now.

I did see that Jerry ‘Rhyming Slang’ Hunt has been given the job of wasting taxpayer’s money. They change so fast now I can’t even remember most of their names. There’s no point, they’re all bloody useless anyway.

The Silly Hunt, he of the mad eyes and a face like a Grinch that just caught Santa in a gin trap, has been fully supportive of the Chinese method of nailing people into their homes to stop them catching a cold. Now Less Trust (CStM’s invention) has put him in charge of the few pennies the UK has left after spending it all on boat people and a war we’re supposed to not be involved in. No sensible leader would put him in charge of a hot dog stand but we haven’t had a sensible leader since… well, probably since King Arthur, and even he threw his magic sword into a lake. Idiot.

Incidentally, I have one of those magnets for trawling lakes for metal things and if I find that sword there are going to be some changes around here. Although I’ll more likely drag out a Ford Corsair’s rusted bonnet…

Our government, like so many nowadays, is just a bad joke. Why does anyone listen to any of them? Well, because the justice systems are also bad jokes enforced by megalomaniacs with guns. Our media are likewise bought off by cretins with money. So are most of the internet companies.

Why do people care so much about money? I’ve never had much of it and it’s never been an issue. If you gave me a million pounds tomorrow I honestly would have no idea what to do with it. I certainly wouldn’t try to use it to control other people because I have no interest in what other people do. I’d most likely die of whisky related liver poisoning within a month, but only on the really good stuff that I can’t afford now. Damn, I’d consider that a good exit!

Yet, every day I hear about ‘more money solves everything’ but it really doesn’t. Give someone like me a lot of money and I’ll either bank it and forget about it or blow the lot on booze and baccy. I am not interested in some ‘legacy for future generations’. If they want that they can read my books but current sales suggests they don’t so screw them.

The government, like most others, is entirely focused on money. They don’t give a shit about jobs or family or happiness or fulfilment. Just money. To them, money is everything. To those billionaires, money is everything too. I say, let them have it. Take it all. Take it, and be welcome.

And then, when they have every digital (and actually nonexistent) penny, ask them what they will spend it on.

Because we’ll have nothing to sell.