Extremes

Digression first – I think I have a title for the Christmas anthology. ‘The Silence of the Night’.

Although maybe ‘The Silence of the Reindeer’…or is that too brutal, even for me? I have some fava beans and a nice Chianti here if anyone wants to come round and argue about it.

Anyway. It has 16 stories from ten authors, three of whom are new entrants to the Underdog Anthologies. Stories range from traditional, whimsical, romantic, dark, to… mine. Editing is complete (unless another one comes in, it’s not closed yet) and this weekend will be occupied with sending out author contracts and payments (it’s also quarterly payments time for the novel authors) and putting it all together.

So, a quick one before going quiet again.

I hear Ohio are now demanding that doctors transplant ectopic pregnancies into the woman’s womb, or they’ll be prosecuted for ‘abortion murder’. This takes the ‘no abortion’ extreme beyond the pale. Even the Grauniad think this is a stupid idea. It’s that bad.

Ectopic pregnancy is where the placenta tries to implant in a Fallopian tube instead of in the uterus. Untreated, it is fatal. Both mother and baby will die.

The only treatment is to operate to remove the wrongly implanted foetus and that has to be done very early on, well before any sane country’s abortion limit. Yes, the baby will die but that was inevitable anyway. The mother can survive.

So, the Ohio idiots-in-charge have decreed that doctors cannot simply remove that wrongly implanted pregnancy, they must transplant it into the mother’s uterus. This is a medical procedure that, in layman’s terms, does not exist. It has never been done. It has never been attempted. Nobody has the slightest idea how to do it and it’s unlikely to work anyway.

You would have to extricate the placenta from the Fallopian tube and then reconnect it to the wall of the uterus in the exact same pattern of blood vessels. I really don’t think modern science can do this and I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the first doctor to try it. The experiment, for that is what it would be, is likely to fail and kill both the mother and the baby.

So, you are a doctor in Ohio and you have a patient with an ectopic pregnancy. Your choices are –

1. Do nothing, let the patient die, be sued for malpractice.
2. Attempt a never-before-tried experimental transplant and most likely kill the patient and be sued for malpractice.
3. Perform the correct surgery, remove the wrongly-implanted foetus, save the mother’s life and… go to jail as an ‘abortion murderer’.

If I was a medical doctor in Ohio you know what I’d do? I’d relocate, fast! Before any patient shows up that is going to wipe me out one way or another. It’s probably best to avoid Ohio because if you get sick there, they soon won’t have any doctors at all. It’s not a safe place to be saving lives.

All of this is, of course, in retaliation for those states who have decreed abortion is legal right up to the moment of birth. Incidentally, Jerry Cordite’s Labour party want that here too. Pull out a fully formed infant and kill it. Premature births survive, a full term baby has no problem surviving, but if a mother in labour decides ‘nah, I don’t like it’, then baby dies.

In America now, you can cross a state line and move between a world where doctors are prosecuted for removing a wongly-implanted and inevitably fatal cell mass to a world where full term healthy babies are legally slaughtered. How the hell did it come to this?

What happened to a sensible medium course? That’s gone now, in so many areas. Humanity has polarised into extremes in every aspect of life. The centre ground is barren, the armies face each other on the peaks of extremity.

‘If you are not with us you are against us’ has always been a silly saying. Take the matter of gay marriage. I do not ‘support’ gay marriage, I do not ‘oppose’ it. Since I have no religion and I’m not gay, I don’t care about it at all. It’s none of my business. That, however, is not allowed. I must choose whether I celebrate it or condemn it. I refuse to choose. I don’t give a damn.

The Church of Climatology declare that if you do not accept the coming Fiery Armageddon of One Degree Temperature Rise then you are a ‘climate denier’. Personally I’d rather they were more honest about it and use the term ‘climate heretic’. At least they can’t burn us at the stake, not once we explain how much CO2 that would release.

A climate denier. Someone who denies the existence of climate? Well, they mean someone who denies that the climate changes. You know, someone utterly blinkered in their view of the world. They will never see the irony.

Of course the climate changes. The land masses move around. The atmosphere changes. There was a time when the atmosphere had a lot more oxygen than it has now. Sounds great? Well, you should see the size insects and spiders grew to when their oxygen intake was far less limited. Trust me, you don’t want those days back 😉 There was also a time when there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere. You won’t remember that time. Humans hadn’t yet appeared. Damn those dinosaur SUV’s eh?

The climate is changing as we speak. The sun has now entered a grand solar minimum and the coming years are going to be different. The thing is, they aren’t going to be warmer. Those solar panels are going to be covered in snow and the windmills will freeze up. It’s too late to build more traditional power stations, this isn’t ‘ten years away’, it’s now. If your house doesn’t have a chimney well you’d better get a generator to run some heating. Ideally something wood-fired because fossil fuels will still be taxed to the hilt to prevent the warming that isn’t happening. You could use some of Jerry’s billion imaginary trees.

Saying that puts me at an extreme. It’s no longer a reasonable ‘look at the actual science instead of obsessing over 0.04% of the atmosphere, most of which comes from mud flats and tundra anyway’. I’m a ‘climate denier’ for trying to warn of impending climate change. Well sod it. Let the buggers freeze. At least I can say I tried.

In America, you are either 100% for Trump or 100% against him. In the UK you are either 100% for Bozza or 100% for Jerry. There is no middle ground. The Lib Dims used to be a sort-of middle ground but Jo Swindles has taken them to the extreme too. Which extreme? Well they are on a little peak of their own that nobody is really looking at.

There have been many things I used to sneer at as conspiracy theories. Common Purpose. Well that’s real. You can see their little drones doing their teacher’s semaphore-signal exaggerated ‘body language’ in their speeches. It probably works if you don’t know about it. Now their graduates are fucking things up all over the planet. And it has become clear that that is exactly what they were meant to do. Take some dopes, teach them some tricks, set them loose and they will wreck everything while they honestly believe they are doing the right thing. Useful idiots, an age-old game.

The Georgia Guidestones, a modern day mini-Stonehenge with the New Commandments etched into them. Most likely the work of a rich lunatic but taken as Gospel by the idiots-in-charge. Massive population reduction is the delight of the cuddly Attenborough who you all love even though he wants you and your family dead. Reduce the global population to an easily controlled worker colony – it’s not a conspiracy theory when it’s in the open.

Old man Soros, with the face as benign as a smiling sloth. How could one old man be behind all this crap, I used to wonder. Now, I wonder how he’s still alive, he’s had a face like a retired army marching boot for many years. Then there is the conspiracy theory on adrenochrome, and now I have to wonder… all those very old white men, all those late term abortions… is it connected? Well anyway, it’s good story fodder.

This is the thing with writing. You research things. You make links that are credible, doesn’t matter if they are true, they just have to be believable within the context of the story. Those photos of ‘chemtrails’ might just be photos of busy airspace covered with vapour trails, but if I write something about chemtrails it’ll be credible because of those photos. We don’t see many of those trails here but then we are north of Aberdeen airport. Not much comes this way apart from helicopters heading for the oil rigs. They don’t leave trails.

I’ve written things that have later been true. ‘Telephone Pest’ happened six months after I wrote it. ‘The Sweet Man’ took about a year. I have stalled so many times on ‘Panoptica’ because the things I imagined turned up in the Daily Mail days later. I have wondered if maybe I should stop.

I’ve researched things for my writing, used ‘conspiracy theories’ to make them credible, and then watched it happen. A recent one. ‘All the Strangers’, had a kid with embedded electronics he never had to remove because it was wirelessly charged while he slept. I took the idea from the primitive wireless phone chargers that had started to appear at the time and combined it with the Borg and the alcoves they recharge in.

Now there are wireless chargers built into cars, and credit cards you just have to wave next to a reader. People have embedded chips to open doors at work. They will not balk at embedded credit card chips so they just have to wave their hand at a machine to pay for their shopping. They will fight to be first.

In this one, I will not be in the desolate middle ground. I will be right at the top of the ‘NO’ peak. As I am with things like Alexa, and TV with a camera in it. I do not want listening and watching devices in my home and I am sure as hell not paying to have them there.

So many other things. The human race is polarising. Us and them. With us or against us. The middle ground is a wasteland now. Make a choice. Choose one life or the other. You cannot choose your own.

If this continues it can only lead to one outcome.

They used to say, if you’re in the middle of the road you’ll get run over. Nowadays it might be the only safe place to be.

Because nobody else is there.

The Wood and the Trees

Well, the silliness has ramped up. Bozza has ducked out of being interviewed by Andrew Neil, which I think was a bad idea. Okay, Mr. Neil has a reputation as a hard interviewer and he did wipe the floor with Nicky the Fish and Jerry Cordite. No doubt he’d do the same to Bozza. It would be embarrassing.

However, running away is never a good look for someone who wants to be the leader of a country.

On the other hand, his and Smoky Nige’s decision to snub the Church of Climatology’s debate was the right one. It was just a circle jerk of ‘I’m greener than you’ daft sods, hosted by the propaganda channel for Extinction Rebellion. The ice blocks were the winners in that debate.

Jo Swindles said she doesn’t think her five-year-old has ever seen a hedgehog. Hedgehogs are nocturnal and hibernate in winter. Not too many five year olds get to stay up late enough in summer to even see the sunset. So he probably hasn’t seen any bats or owls either, since he’d be asleep when they were active.

Jerry Cordite plans to plant something like 150 trees a minute for 20 years. Estimates vary.

Well, he clearly hasn’t considered the total land area of this country since he plans to use as much land as Wales, with no regard to towns or cities. Nor indeed, farms. Incidentally, he also promises to build 100,000 new council houses every year. Presumably they will be tree houses.

There are large areas of the UK where almost nobody lives. Drive through the very north of England at night and you’ll experience total blackness. Not so much as a porch light. For miles. Large chunks of central Wales are the same. Drive through them in daylight and you’ll see why those areas are unoccupied. It’s because they are horrible places to live.

Mountains, steep sides, nothing but grass and gorse. Not even trees. Picturesque to look at but mostly inaccessible and really not much fun in winter.

Why no trees? Can’t Jerry plant all his trees there?

Nope. For the same reason nobody cultivates crops on those lands. They are basically rock with a thin layer of topsoil. Tree roots can’t get deep enough to hold up the tree. The soil supports grass and not much else. They are grazing lands for sure-footed sheep and really not much use for anything else.

This is one of the reasons turning the country vegan is a bad idea. You can’t just kill all the sheep and cattle and grow crops instead. An awful lot of UK land only grows grass – and even if the soil could support crops, good luck ploughing and harvesting a 45-degree slope!

I’d open a scrapyard at the bottom of it and wait for the battered tractors to come rolling in…

Those billion trees aren’t going to be planted on the wide open spaces. They’ll take farmland because that’s the only place they’ll grow. No more crops.

This trees idea is as daft as Boris reinstating the entire rail network for the price of a medium sized garden railway. I’m exaggerating? There is a G scale Coronation class engine on eBay, live steam, for £6,700. That will need coaching stock and track and that’s just one train. Yes, some people spend millions on their model railways. I would too, if I ever had millions.

I haven’t heard a single realistic promise yet. Come December 12th, it’s not going to be a case of which party to vote for.

We’re going to have to decide which fantasy we want to see fail.

Running to Teacher

I didn’t watch the so-called ‘leader’s debate’ because it was pointless. It always is. They just spout nonsense at each other and then both sides claim it as a win. That’s because both sides’ leaders are saying what each side wants to hear. Well I’m sick of listening to any of them.

I’d watch it if it was decided in a fist fight. ‘In the red corner, Jezza the Jam-maker. In the blue corner, Bozza the Clown. Seconds out, round one.’ I think that would really pull in the ratings.

The Left Out Kids went whining to teacher. Jo Swindles and Nicky the Fish weren’t invited so off they went to the High Court with ‘Please sir, they won’t let us play’. Fortunately, this time the court saw sense and told them to stop being silly and get on with their homework. ITV stands for ‘independent television’. It’s not State owned like the BBC, it’s a private company and they are allowed to decide who they invite into the Shouty Room Show.

Strange though. These same courts have castigated private businesses, bakers and bed-and-breakfast alike, for attempting to decide who they want as customers. Seems not all private businesses are equal in the eyes of the law.

It’s not the first time politics has been decided by the courts. The Left Out Kids took Bozza to court because he closed Parliament a few days early. They made him open it again, they all marched back in and… did bugger all. It was a complete waste of money and of the court’s time. But hey, at least they got to claim more expenses.

London courts are busy places, what with all the stabbings and shootings since guns and knives were banned. The mini-Mayor in charge has a plan though, he plans to pretend it’s not happening unless white people say bad words. Then, oh then he turns into the MicroHulk and sets his dogs on them.

Our politicians have a plan too,. They plan to ban guns and knives harder. Because that worked so well the first time. Bozza wants to let the police search people for banned things, including (I kid you not) those people the police know have a history of carrying weaponry around with them. You know, the ones they haven’t bothered arresting so far.

I hear the ex-Squeaker, Tyrion Bercow, is to appear on a TV show. Since many people watch TV on their phones now, I suppose they have to pick people who will fit on the screen. I won’t watch it. I haven’t watched TV for a long time. I used to like Dr. Who, and to be honest I wasn’t too bothered with the (admittedly rather forced) change to a woman Doctor. They picked a good actress. I thought she might do a good job. However, the political correctness and the silly lecture at the end of each show stopped me before the end of the series.

It was the giant spider one that finished it for me. This ‘kind’ doctor locked all the spiders in a room and left them there. With no food. They would eat each other until the last one grew so big it would be unable to breathe. Then she wanted to let the ‘mother’ spider asphyxiate rather than let the arse of a hotel owner shoot it. That was not the actions of someone who has thousands of years of life experience.

Still, I do not run to the courts and cry that they won’t let me play. I just stopped watching the show. As I did way back when Sylveste McCoy wore the Riddler outfit and shut down the show for decades.

There are businesses out there that don’t want my custom because I like to smoke. I’m not going to do sad-face in the Daily Mail and go to court over it. There are plenty of other businesses who do want my custom. Besides, why would I patronise an antismoker business? Let them have their smug superiority. Someone else will have my money.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. I cannot recall any past election where the minor parties demanded equal time. Are we going to see the one Green MP, Cascading Mucus, demand equal time too? How about Platitudes Cymru or the DUP and the Ever Changing Name Party We Just Made Up going for it too?

To go to court over it though. To try to use the law to force a private business to do as they are told. That would be shocking if it hadn’t already been used so many times before.

The gay men who deliberately tried to book into a devoutly Christian B&B so they could get in the Daily Mail and then sue. The gay men who travelled past so very many bakeries to demand a gay wedding cake from a devoutly Christian baker. Funny, they never try this with any other religion. They were successful in their targeting.

The girlie-man who identified as a woman and wanted a waxing parlour to de-hair his girl-balls. At least he/she/it didn’t win that one.

All I see in the world now is utter, utter desperation. Anti-Tories are trying to set up Jerry Cordite as serious competition. I mean, really? I don’t trust Bozza the Clown but at least he doesn’t have the economic grasp and general appearance of Worzel Gummidge without his thinking head on. He walks like a Morlock and talks like a Spitting Image puppet but of the two main options I still think he’s the least bad.

As for Jo Swindles, or Nicky the Fish, or all the rest of them, I’d still rather have Bozza. All I can say about him is he’s the least bad option. We don’t have a good option.

Desperation. The EU is falling apart. Guy Thermostat has been bad mouthing Viktor Orban, and also the ruling Polish party, openly on Twitter. This is not a cohesive organisation. We’re better to jump this ship before it sinks.

France is fucked. The yellow vests have been protesting every weekend for over a year and it’s getting bigger, not smaller. Nobody in power seems to care. The MSM have only just noticed it.

Germany is collapsing under the weight of migrants. Even Chancer Merkin has admitted it. What will she do about it? Nothing at all.

Spain is imprisoning political opponents. Italy is about to explode in rage. The EU is all but over.

And they all blame Russia. Russia doesn’t have to lift a finger to destroy Europe. The EU is doing a fine job of it all on its own. Putin just needs a good popcorn supply.

And then there’s the Church of Climatology. Prince Harry, the ultimate product of centuries of inbreeding. has stated that every family needs a Greta Thunberg. A school-dodging, expensive entitled teenager with delusions of having her childhood destroyed. Sure, we should all have one. All while pushing that Green agenda that has children half her age digging for the required minerals in the Congo and in China, and producing lakes of toxic waste in the process. But hey, she has been forced to sail on fancy expensive boats made of petroleum products so she’s the one suffering here.

In America, the Democrats claim the people can’t be trusted not to vote for Donnie Trumpton so they have to remove him. Sounds very like Jerry Cordite’s attempt to take over the UK government without an election. Desperation.

I have a feeling things are going to get very nasty soon. All over Europe and the USA and in a lot of other places too. It’s going to be… interesting.

Once the real winter hits, the Grand Solar Minimum which isn’t in the future but is already here, then the fan will have an awful lot of shit to shift. Winter isn’t coming. It’s here and it’s not factored into anyone’s plans.

This time there is no teacher to run to.

Dichotomies

In ‘1984’, Orwell defined ‘doublethink’ as the ability to hold two totally contradictory ideas at the same time and to assign equal validity to both.

When I first read that, many years ago, I thought it absurd. How can that be done? Surely, like Schrodinger’s imaginary cat, the mere internal observation of two contradictory ideas would cause the brain to collapse one of them and choose the other.

Maybe it used to be that way. It seems to me that in the past, people held one belief at a time. They either discarded opposing views, or, if sensible, considered them and then decided whether to keep their view or change it. Maybe there were doublethinkers back then, maybe before the Internet we just didn’t see so many of them.

Now they seem to be everywhere. The Corbyn Party is a hotbed of it (I don’t call them the Labour party any more, they haven’t been that since Blair took over and they’ve gone way off beam since then). The Corbyn party want an election and don’t want an election, they want to leave the EU and stay in it, they want a Brexit with a deal and they don’t want a deal, but they want ‘no deal’ off the table.

That’s like leaving the atmosphere and refusing to accept the vacuum of space. You can’t take ‘no deal’ off the table. It’s never been on the table. It’s what happens when a deal cannot be agreed. It’s not one of the options, it’s the default.

Then we have the youth claiming that Brexit has stolen their future while simultaneously believing the world is going to end in ten years and they have no future. Climate change is going to lead to a massive extinction event. We’re all going to die. Because of man-made carbon dioxide.

When I was a teenager, we were about to get a new Ice Age in ten years… because of man-made carbon dioxide. This magical gas, comprising a total of 0.04% of the atmosphere (and the human contribution is a tiny fraction of that), can cause ice ages and scorched earth simultaneously – and people believe it. They believe both things at once.

They also simultaneously believe politics will ruin their future while they have no future at all. A terrified generation – is it any wonder they are so full of nihilism and care so little for life? They think we’re all going to die anyway. Who did that to them, and why?

The one thing they will never accept is that the change in climate isn’t ten years away, as has been touted for about a century now. Climate change is happening now and it has nothing to do with carbon (they like to call it ‘carbon’, the stuff of pencil leads and diamonds, because they have never been taught that it’s not a gas). It has everything to do with solar cycles.

Those running the scam must have been aware of this. For those who were listening, genuine climate scientists have been warning about this for a long time. Nobody wanted to hear it. To be fair, those genuine climate scientists were shouted down and sometimes fired for telling the truth, but it’s still true.

Why this insistence on nonsense? You can’t tax the sun. All you can tax is human CO2 emissions so they have to be blamed for everything. This time, no tax will stop it. Nothing will.

So many people have moved north and south from Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Encouraged by those running the game. Oh it’s no secret, no conspiracy theory, that the aim is to massively reduce the human population to an easily controllable level. ‘They’ have been very open and clear on this point. They also intend to make Africa a nature reserve and concentrate what’s left of the population in small cities. There will be no travel for the worker drones, they can use the internet to see the world.

Climate change is very likely to kill a hell of a lot of people in the coming years. Especially those who have just moved from a warm climate into the frozen hell to come. They won’t know how to deal with it. They’ll be in flats and houses with no chimneys and they won’t be able to afford heating. It’s going to be horrifying.

All this information has been around for a very long time. Nobody wanted to hear it and now it’s too late. It’s not ‘coming in ten years’. It’s started. This year. Still they don’t want to hear.

We have spent decades preparing for the wrong apocalypse. And still nobody wants to hear it. Too late now, the clearout of humanity is under way.

Now we have another population reduction method. Transgendering children is a remarkably effective way of sterilising the next generation. Even if they transition back, they’ll have non-working plastic bits instead of the bits they were born with. Sure, there are real transgender people but these are rare. They are also, as with autism, on a spectrum.

There are men who like to dress in women’s clothes. Once called transvestites. and regarded as a normal English eccentricity, these men are not gay. They are straight. They just feel more comfortable in a dress and they like makeup. At the other end are those, men and women, who genuinely feel they are in the wrong body and seriously want it altered. It’s become fashionable to ruin your child’s life by pretending they are the wrong gender, long before they can decide for themselves. There are going to be a lot of lonely parents in the future.

Well I live in Scotland. Not so long ago, all the men here wore kilts and going back further, they’d paint their faces with blue woad to go into battle. I wore a kilt to my son’s wedding. It’s a comfortable thing to wear and the sporran is just the right size for a decent hip flask. Men in skirts hold no terrors for me. But then I’m not a woman. They aren’t creeping into my bathrooms and demanding I wax their balls. I will if they want. I’d use bitumen.

Now we have men dressed as women wanting access to women’s toilets and changing rooms, and taking the prizes in women’s sports – and this is done in the name of ‘women’s rights’. Rapists identify as women so they get put into a prison full of women and what are you going to do when they rape other inmates? Put them in prison? They’re already in there and they are surrounded by captive victims. Why would they ever want to leave?

I’d support them going into a women’s prison. Yes, really. The sentence would include a stay in a secure hospital first, where they get surgically transformed into a woman before they serve their sentence. I have a feeling after one or two of these, rapists won’t self-identify as women any more.

I have strayed from the point here and there, but if you’ve read my babblings for any time at all you’ll know that’s normal.

Now I think about it, there were indeed doublethinkers in the past. There were women who demanded access to men’s clubs but still wanted their women-only clubs. There was once a publisher who wanted to publish only ‘man’ stuff – cars, violence, trousers, that sort of thing – but was shut down by a gaggle of harpies. Women-only publishers thrive.

Blackpool has, I hear, gay hotels where non-gays are not welcome. Bakers who don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding are taken to court. These bakers, and it’s also happened to at least one bed-and-breakfast place, are targeted. There are other bakers who have no religious issues with baking a cake with two men or two women on top. No straight people have ever bothered to target a gay-only hotel or club.

The whole ‘only white people can be racist’ narrative goes back a long way. Usually attached to thiose who want to kill all white people. They’ll never see it, there’s no point trying to explain.

I live in the middle of nowhere. It’s the only sensible response to all this. I am off grid for water and sewage, I have alternative heating and cooking arrangements, if food supplies ever have a problem I can hit rabbits, pheasant, partridge and sometimes even deer from the living room window. I just need a reliable, non-fossil-fuel electricity supply (solar panels won’t cut it in winter here and I don’t want a bloody windmill) and this place will be right off the grid.

This place survived the last mini ice age and it’s still standing. I think it might be the best place to stay for now. There are horrors coming and there are so, so many people who will enable them. Not because they want them.

Because they don’t have the ability to see the consequences.

Killing yourself to live

Okay, the Freddo competition still hasn’t happened because I’m dealing with two novels and a short story collection while preparing for visitors and getting ready for a short trip to Denmark and battling a garden that looks like Chthulu’s extended family rising in the rain.

Nobody noticed the last one so this time it’s up front. Where did I steal the title from? Band, album, year. And what did the song actually reference? Up for grabs – a print copy of ‘you’ll be fine’ plus a bit of Leg Iron Books crappy merchandise – which is not on general sale so far. First answer in the comments gets it. The book is a funny one, not a scary one.

Right. To the real point. The Green God and the Church of Climatology.

I have argued with them on Twitter but no longer. There’s no point and it’s too late anyway. They call me ‘climate denier’, the new word for ‘heretic’. They believe what the High Priests of Alleged Science tell them, they believe in The Models (the digital version of a remarkably inaccurate religious book) and they talk of nothing but the End of Days unless we all live as they direct. No discussion is allowed, the ‘science’ is settled and is now Gospel.

And they scoff in smug self-righteousness when I call it a religion. Then they want me burned at the stake for heresy.

Well, the real truth is that there has been no global warming for twenty years and we are now in a sharp cooling period because the Grand Solar Minimum is already underway. The Apocalypse has indeed started and the Church of Climatology has made it far worse than it needed to be. We could have adapted, as we have in the past, but that option is now deleted for most people.

Let’s put my positions on the line.

Climate : The climate changes. All the time. It does this in cycles, a complex set of cycles with big cycles of hot and cold overlying a shorter warm/cool cycle. Anyone my age knows this because we have experienced it.

In the first few years of the 2000’s I could grow six foot tall tobacco plants outdoors. I live well north of Aberdeen. It was legal back then, it’s not legal any more but it doesn’t matter because I’d struggle to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse this year. In those years I’d have to use an electric fan indoors because even opening a window was no use – there was no air movement for weeks and the air outside was hotter than inside anyway.

In the early 1980s I went out to drive to work and couldn’t find my car. All I saw was a row of white mounds along both sides of the street. Deep snow in between them, deep snow on the pavement. I walked in to work and it turned out not many others had bothered.

About eight years ago we had two successive winters that started in October and continued into May the following year. It wiped out my fish pond and gave me cracked ribs because it would get just above freezing in the day and then freeze again at night. So every outside surface was frictionless. You just could not walk on it. Especially after a few whiskies.

Last winter was pretty mild by comparison. The one before wasn’t. The next one might or might not be. It is not warming. Human activity is not affecting climate. We are just not that important.

Pollution : This is always a bad thing. Plastic islands at sea (tell me which song that line came from and I’ll send you a copy of the next book I publish) are always, always a very bad thing. It should not be happening. We nag our teenagers to clean their rooms while we bung plastic into the ‘recycle’ bins which are really nothing more than a magic portal to the middle of the Pacific.

Yes, I know, most plastic enters the sea from rivers in China and Africa but that’s because we send our recycling there to be processed. It’s not their own waste they are dumping. It’s ours. Anyway it’s changing, China at least has had enough of getting blamed for this.

Overall though, apart from plastics, pollution has been declining. Vehicle engines are a lot cleaner than they used to be, there is a lot to do still with cargo ships who pump out more pollution than all the cars, trucks and buses in the world. They should be fitted with sails as well as engines – free propulsion, with no emissions, when the wind is in the right direction – but why should they? Greenpeace ships don’t do this. They all run on diesel.

Factories don’t produce smog in London any more although some places still have that problem.

Green driving? Sure, it works great in town and that’s where it’s needed. A high concentration of vehicles produces concentrated traffic fumes. Replacing most of them with electric or hydrogen fuel is going to make a big difference.

However, for long journeys it’s not viable. Imagine waiting for a delivery when the large truck bringing it has to stop-over for 12 hours or more to recharge. Imagine driving across country when that ten minute stop to refuel becomes a few hours of recharging your little car. If you can find somewhere with a charging point. And… where do you think that electricity comes from?

Still, if you live in a city and don’t want to drive long distance, all you need is an electric car to get to the shops and back. I’d be okay with that as long as it doesn’t ramp up fuel prices for people in the countryside, like me, who live half an hour’s drive fom the nearest shops and whose electricity supply can be shut off by a lightning strike.

I drive a 4×4 because anything that isn’t 4×4 isn’t going to get to this house in winter. I do not drive it for any kind of showing-off, I drive it because it is necessary. Sure it has emissions but there are combine harvesters and tractors here. Even their emissions don’t produce enough to taint the air. My little 4×4 is making no difference. It is not like the cities those who moan about ‘clean air’ live in. It’s the place where ‘clean air’ is normal.

There is a lot we can do about all forms of pollution and really, a lot of it has been or is being done already.The biggest problem pollution control faces is that it is now linked to climate change when they are actually totally different things. Yes, we should get the plastic out of the oceans but no, it does not affect climate.

And so we come to those killing themselves to live.

Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. “I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I’d have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I’d call my mom telling her life was pointless,” she said. She believed at the time that the human race “should be wiped out.”

But… if she believes climate change will do that, what’s the problem?

“I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I’d be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn’t] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage,” Rohrer said.

This is what the Church of Climatology has done. No hope, no redemption, only despair. Unlike every other religion there is no way out for the followers of this one. They have no Heaven or Hell, only oblivion and no hope of changing it unless… everyone follows their religion.

You think Islam is a bit strict? Islam is a summer hayride compared to the Green God’s religion. At least in Islam you still have a chance of Heaven by killing unbelievers. In the Church of Climatology, unless every single person on the planet believes, everyone will die with no Heaven, no redemption, nothing but rotting corpses on sun-baked sidewalks. Even if everyone does believe… it’s the same.

Gritty Thunderbird, the latest wheeled-out child advocate, is now dictating climate policy to the idiots in charge. Yes, I know, I’m ‘attacking a child’ and that is the reason they use children. Any dissent is ‘attacking a child’, in this case an Asperger’s child with well orchestrated hair braids. She looks so innocent and naieve and unfortunately, she is.

She is being used and abused by the Church of Climatology in the most disgusting way possible and yet criticising the message she has been fed is ‘attacking her’.

I do not attack her. She is a child and she is being used. The message she relays is lies. She does not know this. She has been convinced of it by much darker forces. One day she will realise and on that day she is going to feel things nobody should ever be made to feel. I sympathise, but sending lies through a child is not going to silence me.

Barmy Prince Charlie has been out with this crap too. ‘We have 18 months to save the world’. Oh dear. We’ve had a few years to Armageddon since the 1950s and nothing at all has changed. Well to be fair, in the 1970s, rising CO2 was going to cause an ice age, now rising CO2 is going to cause warming. Why?

Because that’s the only thing they can tax.

You know what rising CO2 really does? It makes plants grow faster. It’s currently 0.04% of the atmosphere and all plants on the planet use it in photosynthesis. Reduce it to zero and all the plants – every one of them from giant redwood to dandelion – dies. And then so does everything else.

Increase it and the planet gets greener.

So, Steering a large asteroid into the plent is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, or so I am told.

Erasing 0.04% of the atmosphere can be done if someone has enough money to buy the right chemicals and place large batches of them in the right places.

Bill Gates once said he wanted to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to zero. He has the money to do it.

And I have the know-how.

Hey, Bill…

The psycho and the baby

I am keeping up with the work for Anthology 8. It’s going to be a big one and submissions don’t close until the 25th. I am keeping up with edits, with Roobee’s help, and contracts. It’ll be fine. I have, naturally, chosen this time to redecorate the bathroom, inspired by a Government who have chosen the time of the biggest job they have ever had to ban the advertising of cheese, jam, and tiny chocolate frogs.

I haven’t forgotten the Freddo competition. I thought I had a lull in anthology submissions but even more stories arrived last weekend. Also a new toy – a ten quid Chinese video camera small enough to fit on OO scale trains. I am resisting playing with it until after the book and competition. It’ll happen.

So, Tessie Maybe gave a speech earlier in which she blamed everyone but herself for the Brexit Balls-up, and left some subliminal threats to her MPs concerning an upcoming vote on the same deal that has been given a most emphatic ‘fuck no’ by the House of Conmen twice already.

Squeaker Grumpy (he once declared he was not Happy so I’m guessing which one he is) has said that No-mates May cannot keep putting the same thing up for votes, especially when it keeps getting ‘fuck no’ results every time. The EU has overruled him, or tried to. We’ll have to wait and see.

In her speech she has, most likely, alienated the last of her supporters and brought the country together in a way no Prime Monster has ever managed before. Absolutely everyone wants her to resign now.

There was a Meeting of the Big Cheeses (am I still allowed to use that phrase under the New Food Rules? Cheese is full of fat and often slippery, so it seems accurate) aka the leaders of the parties in government.

Chukkus Yermoney was there as leader of the Rebel Loonies. Jerry Cordite took one look at him, declared he wasn’t a real party leader and stomped out in a huff.

Well, Jerry did have a point in that the Rebel Loonies were elected due to their party manifestos. They have ditched those manifestos and the party they were elected under so they don’t even have a mandate to be MPs any more. They also aren’t a ‘party’, just a gang. The gang of kids in the schoolyard whose only common factor is that none of the other kids want to play with them.

But throwing a tantrum and storming out of a meeting that could decide the UK’s future in just over a week?

This man is supposed to be the leader of one of the two biggest parties in the UK. He has had many meetings with HAMAS and the IRA and the reason he gave was that ‘sometimes, you have to talk with people you fundamentally disagree with in order to solve problems’ or words to that effect.

Chukkus Yermoney is a British Moocher of Parliament still and someone Jerry Cordite agreed with on most things until recently. He might be an idiot but he’s not HAMAS nor is he the IRA. He’s never killed anyone. As far as I’m aware, he’s never even so much as poked anyone in an aggressive manner. And yet Jerry can’t be in the same room as him, when he has palled up with mass murderers in the past.

Did Tessie, Empress of the Eternal Failure, deliberately invite Chukkus just to wind up Jerry? Well, I’m no psychologist but her manipulative ways, constant reiteration of lies and devious aggression do look like a narcissistic personality bordering on the sociopath. We knew she was a control freak when she was in the Home Office (remember her slavering over internet control and the DNA database of everyone?). She’s nasty enough to have done it for that reason.

If Jerry Cordite was an actual adult, he would have shrugged and taken his seat, then used every opportunity to dig at Chukkus whenever he opened his non-mandated mouth. That’s what I would have done.

Instead, he did what every toddler would do. Screamed ‘NONONO! I DON’T LIKE IT’ and stomped out of the room.

So. At the next election, you have a choice. You can vote for one of the two big parties and end up being ruled by either a psychotic habitual-liar deranged bint or a reality-denying habitual-liar man-child. Or you could vote for someone based on the person, not the party.

Just remember that manifestos mean nothing. Labour proved that under Blair anyway, but any residual doubt has now been removed by both Tories and Labour. You can safely put any manifesto straight into recycling. It was a waste of ink and paper.

And to think, I thought the Brown Gorgon was bad. I’d rather have him back now. That says a lot about the current options.

As for the Lib Dems, I hear that Vinnie the Wire is stepping down. A pity they don’t have Lemsip ‘oblong-eyes’ O’Pick, that jaunty Irish labourer with the persistent cough, in their MPs any more. I didn’t agree with him on much but I have to admit I quite liked the guy. I have no idea who they will pick as Vinnie’s replacement because I can’t name a single one of their current MPs. It’s like trying to name separate parts of a blancmange.

Greens will kill us all. It’s in their DNA. They want massive population reduction and they will achieve it by moving most of Africa and the Middle East north so they can become corpsicles when the grand solar minimum really gets going. It’s already started, but probably won’t become clear to the dopes of the Green God of Climatology for a few more years. Too late guys, you should have prepared. Maybe you shouldn’t have shut down all those power stations. Oh dear. What a shame. Never mind. Africa is slated to be a nature reserve. All humans will be deleted. They didn’t tell you that when they sold you the boat tickets, did they? Oh and did you notice that most Green policies, despite them being a minor party, are also EU policies?

Who do you vote for? You can refuse to vote, that’s a valid and perfectly understandable response in the current climate, but you know the drones will vote for all of the above and if you abstain, one of them will win.

I’m not telling you who to vote into Wastemonster. I’d rather see it burned to the ground to be honest. That isn’t going to happen so we have to make the best of what we can do.

What can we do? Not much really. I’d like to see a Parliament made up of independents and the lunatic fringe candidates. It won’t last long but it will give the actual politicians one massive kick up the arse. And they really do need that right now. With steel toecaps and hobnails and a good run-up.

Will they get it? I doubt it. Most constituencies are made up of morons who will vote for a mollusc with the right colour rosette and often have. It will take a seismic shift to make them vote differently.

Tessie and Jerry might have just made it happen. We shall see.

(Is it bad that I wish the current Tory Prime Monster was called Tom?)

Extermoonate!

Around 1990, I worked alongside some scientists who studied methane emissions from ruminants, particularly (but not exclusively) cows. I wasn’t directly involved, I was working on probiotics for pigs, but we are talking the same scientific group.

Their aim was to reduce methane emissions from cows, in the name of global warming, because otherwise we’d all be dead by 2000. Must have worked then, eh?

Nope. Not at all. The meddling kept getting funded but the cows farted and belched unhindered. My suggestion of adding a spark plug at either end to burn off emissions and simultaneously create double-ended dragons or self-cooking steaks was scoffed at. No imagination, those scientists.

Besides, the methane and CO2 belched and farted out of cows is as nothing compared to what comes out of mud flats, wetland, bogs, marshes, swamps… and when a subsea methane clathrate collapses, the cows become utterly irrelevant for that whole year. Sometimes you even get to see swamp methane as will-o-the-wisps when a bit of naturally-produced phosphine sets it off. Worrying about cow farts was, and still is, pointless but if you throw money at scientists they will find a way to use it.

To be fair, these days they have to accept funding. Their jobs depend on it. The days of pure research are gone and I count myself lucky to have been part of them. Now, you have to have a commercially viable aim for a project. Research for pure interest, and the inventions that came as byproducts of that, are gone for good.

Well, after a few decades of failing to stop cows farting (plugging the holes just makes them inflate and float away) the only solution left is the one that was obvious all along. In the name of conservation, in the name of ending animal cruelty, the plan is… kill all the cows.

The Amazing Occasional Cortex’s ‘Green New Deal’ is neither green nor new. There have been decades of research into stopping cows farting and belching methane and nothing has worked. Even if it did, all those wild ruminants would fill the void very quickly. So we’d have to kill all of them too.

If we do, their niche will be filled by other species and since most animals produce methane to some extent, and all of them produce CO2, the only way to save life on the planet is to exterminate all life on the planet.

Including insects and microbes. They represent an enormous biomass and they all produce CO2. They all have to go if we are to truly reduce CO2 emissions because shutting a few power plants is going to make no difference at all overall.

Makes sense? Has any of the ‘progressive’ claptrap ever made any sense?

No, it makes no sense. In the 70s we were heading into a global ice age due to rising CO2, then we were heading into a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus because of rising CO2, now we have ‘climate change’ because of rising CO2 so they can claim a win either way.

And they have an army of acolytes hanging on every word. Believe! Listen to our High Preists with their white coats and hockey sticks! Live as we direct or the Green God will smite thee! The End is Nigh!

I have tried to point out to these people that this is the basis of every major religion on the planet and that they are members of the Church of Climatology. Do they listen? Of course not. Who would willingly deny their own religion?

Now, the Occasional Cortex says we have twelve years to kill all the cows and abandon all technology. All those advances, all those innovations, must be discarded. Yes, she tweets this from an iPhone while drinking Starbucks and checking the time on a posh watch. And to think, people say Americans don’t understand irony.

Is that what happened to those who built the ancient structures we don’t know how to build now? Did they fall for the same scam? Did they abandon their technology because of farting cows and destroy all records of their inventions to make the world a safer place to bang rocks together and collect berries?

There are so many ruins under the Amazon forest that it is becoming clear that it’s not an ancient forest at all. It’s a runaway weed patch. The ‘lungs of the planet’ are not a discrete organ all in one place. It includes that lawn outside your window, the weeds growing in hte cracks in the pavement, the algae around your windows after a wet season. All of it is absorbing CO2 because all of it needs CO2 to live.

We are all to become vegetarian to save the planet by eating its lungs. Isn’t that a fun image? Well it can’t work. Those grasslands the cattle graze on are not used for crops because those areas are only good enough to grow grass. You can’t plough a field when the bedrock is six inches down but grass will grow there and cows will turn that into something you can eat. Vegetarianism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

There will be climate change, there always has been and always will be, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Not a thing. You adapt to it or you die. Nature doesn’t give a damn either way. If the human race is eradicated, another species will take our place. Just like the cows.

If you want to worry about humanity getting wiped out, you’d do better to worry about what’s currently happening between India and Pakistan than worry about half a degree of temperature change or a millimetre rise in sea levels. But hey, if that’s what floats your boat…

This planet has gone through changes that have put cities under the sea and the sea bed at the tops of mountains and humans have never, and will never, have any control over any of it. If the planet decides to have an earthquake or a tsunami or a volcano, the best you can hope for is getting enough warning to get out of the way. You cannot control this.

That is the part that the control freaks really cannot stand. We have absolutely no control over nature. None at all. So they have to pretend we do. They pretend we are ‘causing an ice age’ or ‘causing global warming’ or ‘causing climate change’ because they cannot stand not being in control. I’m surprised they haven’t blamed dinosaur farts for deflecting an asteroid so it crashed into Earth and killed them all.

We really don’t have hat much effect on the planet. Sure, we had cities with smog and some places still do but that’s a local effect. Not a global one. Cleaning up our cities to get rid of the smog is a Good Thing but really, only for ourselves. The planet does not care.

If we managed to get this planet to a state where we cannot live on it any more, nature will not care. It will replace us with species that can live on it in its new state and carry on going around the sun as usual.

Taxation will not affect that one jot. What does the rock we stand on care about our money? What does any other species on the planet care about it? Hell, there are whole populations of humans who don’t care about it.

Going back to living in huts made of dung and working dawn to dusk on subsistence farming is not going to make the slightest difference to climate change. It will only affect our ability to cope with it.

We really are not Gods. We do not control the weather and we have absolutely no control whatsoever over the planet. We are hairless monkeys with fancy toys and smugness and that is it.

The planet doesn’t care if we wipe out our species with our own self-importance. The loss of a species is nothing to Nature.

It can simply make another one.