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.

Endgame

The Amazing Occasional Cortex is the best thing to happen to American politics. Her entertainment value trumps even Trump. I hear the senior Democrats plan to get rid of her ASAP because she’s too dim even for a career in politics. And she’s giving away the game.

She’s also quite pretty when she’s not doing the bulging eyes and catfish mouth thing. Dimmer than a five watt light bulb, even so.

I once bought a five watt (tungsten filament) light bulb when I was a student. I put it in the central light in the room I occupied. I swear the place got darker when I turned it on. The gloom level it gave was most delightful.

Occasional Cortex has rediscovered something science was bilking money for back in the 1990s. An impossible project with just enough hints of vague promise to keep the funds flowing. I wasn’t working on it but I was there.

I’ll try to keep to layman’s terms and not don the lecturer cap here. At that time I had just switched from working with ruminants to working with pigs. It was the time I developed the artificial pig gut so I could experiment without messy animals getting in the way. I still have its final incarnation, it’s in pieces in the garage. I doubt I’ll ever run it again though.

Anyway. A ruminant (cows, sheep, goats etc) has four stomachs. The last of these is a proper stomach like we non-ruminants have. Number 3 is for the lecture hall, I won’t bore you with it here. The first two are usually pretty much combined into one big fermenting bag. It doesn’t digest anything from the animal’s point of view but it digests things animals can’t digest. Namely, grass and other plant materials that would pass straight through us undigested.

They do this because the rumen, that big bag, is loaded with a massive population of bacteria and protozoa. My PhD was on the rumen protozoa, mainly Dasytricha and Isotricha, incidentally. Also, while I was doing my PhD, someone else discovered that the rumen was home to the only anaerobic filamentous fungi known at that time.

Back to the point. The thing about that rumen is that it is almost, (but not quite) totally lacking in oxygen. It is the perfect place for methane-producing bacteria to thrive and they do. Big time. You think you fart a bit of methane? Pfft. If dragons were ever real, they were cows with spark plugs in their noses.

So, in the 1990s, there was much funding available for reducing methane production by cattle. It can’t be done, of course. Mess with that microflora and you’ll show a result but when you stop meddling, it just goes back to its natural balance. Keep meddling and the cow gets sick.

The thing about ruminants is that they don’t have a single essential amino acid requirement in their diet. The bacteria and protozoa in the rumen make them all from grass and the cow digests the bacteria and protozoa later. You can, it is true, feed a cow urine-soaked newspaper and it will survive. Carbon source, nitrogen source, its rumen microbes will produce all it needs. However, it needs that microbial population in balance. If it goes out of kilter the animal can get lactic acidosis or bloat, both of which can be terminal.

I did have some fun back in those days. I had found methane-oxidising bacteria in pig guts. Yes, I was pressured in a most unfriendly way into handing those results to the cow meddlers and I put up just enough resistance to let them think I cared. Pig guts (like human guts) have way more oxygen than a rumen, relatively, but it’s still not much. Those methane oxidisers, which require oxygen, were growing incredibly slowly and having no discernible effect on the pig’s methane production. They had no chance in the rumen but it was fun to watch them try.

Later I ‘leaked’ ammonia oxidising bacteria to the same group. They are real, but again, they aren’t doing much in a low oxygen environment.

The only way to reduce the global production of methane by cows is to… kill all the cows. This is obvious and has been from the beginning. It will make no difference unless you kill all the wildebeest and deer and rhinos and antelopes and moose and reindeer and every other herbivorous animal on the planet. Oh, and you have to drain all swamps and estuarine sediment areas too. But reducing methane was never the point.

It’s incredibly silly anyway. Cows can live on grass, we cannot. Huge areas of land won’t grow anything but grass. Turn them into croplands and without many, many tons of artificial fertlisers they will grow… only grass. You grow meat animals or nothing at all on those lands.

The point was, as Occasional Cortex makes clear to even the dimmest of voters now, to stop you lot eating meat. It was to make you drain away your energies on tofu and beans. That’s going to reduce methane production? Really?

Man made climate change is a load of cobblers. We all know it, even those who promote it know it. If Al Gore really believed it he wouldn’t live in a mansion that lights up like a planetary Christmas tree. None of them really believe it. It’s just part of the plan.

The sun is entering a Maunder minimum and real science has known this was coming all along. They were scared to say anything because denying the ‘man made’ part is a career ender. Even those who tried to warn everyone always qualified it with ‘but man made global warming will continue afterwards’.

No it won’t. Most of you will be dead afterwards. Why do you think they are so keen to move people out of the future nature reserve called Africa and send them North? A Maunder minimum will kill them even faster than it will kill us. People adapted to tropical climates are not going to last long when the glaciers start to roll again.

It’s happening faster than real science expected. Sunspot activity is dropping sooner than expected. You don’t have 20 years before it hits, it’s already started. That polar vortex is just a taste. Hence the panic to move the Plan forward faster now.

So if you have been preparing for a meatless warm future, well good luck to you. I have many years of fishing skills and know how to set a rabbit snare, and how to prepare a rabbit and cure the skin for later use. Oh I haven’t done that for decades but it’s really not hard once you know. I’ve been getting ready for cold, no electricity, no mains water or sewage, and a meat based diet based on what’s likely to be left around here.

The Plan has been no secret for a very long time. This particular ‘conspiracy theory’ has been, quite literally, set in stone and put on on public display. Still, many deny it.

Many poo-poo it even now. However, most of those who scoff are avid fans of Bernie Stalinders and the Occasional Cortex and all the free stuff they promise that will be paid for by someone else. They are listening, not to the voices of reason, but to the voices of madness and disaster.

One of those voices is now telling them the links in the Plan.

I think the Democrats will get rid of her sooner rather than later. But I hope she stays for a long while.

She’s the best laugh I’ve had since the Benny Hill show.

The End Times

The world still hasn’t ended yet. I hope it ends before the expiry date on my popcorn.

As I’ve often said, I have no religion of any kind, not even atheism. I have absolutely no interest in persuading anyone to my view of the afterlife, this life, past lives… or anything else.

I have, however, always been interested in religion. Not in whether it’s true or not, nor in whether I should consider joining up. No, my interest is in where it comes from, and why so many people fervently believe something that cannot be proven because there is no mechanism for testing it.

How would science go about testing God? Omnipotent, omnipresent – so you can’t have a ‘definite no-God’ control area. Where is your null hypothesis? That everything arose by pure chance? Well, is that a null hypothesis or an opposing theory? And how do you go about testing whether anything in biology, geology, elsewhere did not arise by chance when the alternative is not visible, tangible or measurable? There is nothing to test.

Try testing prayer. Let’s say you get an effect. Does that prove God, or does it prove Jung’s ‘collective consciousness’ at work? Did the healing come from a God or directly from the people praying?

If someone performed a verifiable miracle – did God do it, or did that person exhibit some unusual paranormal ability? There is no way to prove that God exists. You either believe or you don’t. I don’t.

I know, people say I should believe as an insurance against being wrong. If I said I believed I’d be lying. I’d be faking it, as so many already do, to avoid being ostracised or worse by the religious community they live in. If there is a God, he’s likely to be much more pissed at me for faking it than for being honest about not believing. And God would know I was faking it. Faking it would mean lying to myself, to everyone else, and, ultimately, to any God who might be watching. As insurance policies go, it’s a dud.

All religions, including the new Church of Climatology, have a doomsday scenario. The end of the world. Do as we say, live as we tell you, or you will be damned on Judgement Day. Yes, Climatology is a religion. It fits all the criteria.

Climatology has seized on the Christian Armageddon version, in which the world is utterly destroyed forever and all humans are dead. The Christian one is preferable in that at least some survive and get taken up to Heaven. The Climatologist’s Green God just kills everyone.

The big question is – when? When does this all happen? The Jehovah’s Witnesses once set a date of about 1919 (my memory could be a couple of years off) and the world didn’t end. Although the First World War brought it to an end for millions of people so maybe they weren’t entirely off the scoreboard with that one.

There have been quite a few dates that have been set for Armageddon and all have passed uneventfully. God won’t give a date, as Death himself once explained.

So it’s all guesswork. Anyway, not all religions have such finality to the end days although pretty much all of them calculate those end days as being very close. For some, and there is a consistency between several of their legends, the end is not an ‘end’, but a change. A big change, a not particularly comfortable change, a change few will survive, but not the utter destruction of the planet.

The survivors will not have pink hair and arms like pipe cleaners. It’s that sort of change.

I have for some time been interested in the ‘yuga’ cycles of ancient India. Now, I know it is fashinonable to think of India as being under British subjugation as if it didn’t exist before Queen Victoria’s time, but there has been a quiet civilisation there for a very long time. They do not seem to have been an expansionist civilisation, they aren’t recorded as being like the Greeks and Romans and many others who were so bored with their own countries they felt the need to invade someone else’s. India has been invaded many times throughout history but they showed no interest in invading anyone else.

There is an interesting, if long, article by someone who has studied the matter in detail. The full yuga is 12000 years and there are four sections to it. Well really it’s 24000 years because there is a decline then a rising of humanity through the cycles. We are currently in Kali Yuga, the very bottom of the cycle, a time of barbarity and chaos. It’s nearly over.

Each of the yuga sections is 2700 years with a 300 year transition period (which is what Tessie Maybe will sign us up to over Brexit if the daft tart has her way). Here is the timeline he has calculated:

So we are leaving Kali Yuga and moving into the transition period into a new and better period, if this is correct. However, the transition period is always nasty.

Basically, natural disasters and the collapse of civilisations. Well, we are about to enter a Grand Solar Minimum which will make a mockery of all those ‘climate change’ energy bollocks, and civilisation falling apart? Look around, it’s happening.

Do I believe this? I believe nothing. I look at data and try to make sense of it. I do, however, believe that a lot of human knowledge of the past has been lost. How and why thjat happened I don’t know.

I have watched a lot of YouTube videos about pyramids. Not just the ones in Egypt. Most of those videos say ‘humans could not have done this, it must be aliens’ because we would struggle to build with that level of precision now.

But what if we could in the past? It is true that the Egyptians with their meticulous record-keeping left no clue as to how they built the pyramids. Maybe they didn’t build them. Maybe they found and adopted them. There was a plausible theory that the Sphinx originally had a lion’s head that was re-carved to a pharoah’s head and the proportions bear this out.

The Greek civilisational collapse mentioned in the graphic above was so bad they had to re-learn how to write. It wasn’t just the Greeks, it was global. Nobody would remember who built the pyramids and many other complex structures and nobody would remember how they were built.

I have to consider this as possible. It’s certainly, in my view, preferable to ancient aliens who came here, built huge stuff and then just pissed off home. It seems more plausible that humanity in the past developed skills that were subsequently lost through a global catastrophe that set us back to the stone age. I mean, if a big solar flare hit the planet tomorrow, what would happen to the infrastructure we have built now? How would future archaeologists interpret a fossilised iPhone?

Do I need religion for this? No, I just need an accurate historical record and if the human race is blasted back to living in caves and going ‘ook-ook’ every 3000 years, any historical record beyond that is going to be suspect.

But you know, when you look at the world around us now, and you match it to these old text cycles, it’s hard not to think ‘here we go again’.

If there is a God, it seems he does have a reset button for the planet after all.

Whiter Christmas

That last post got me thinking. And a line or two popped into my head. I haven’t corrupted a popular song for a long time now and well, it’s Christmas. The 20th book of my first year as a publisher is done and I risked life, limb and whisky to slide my car down the drive and post the author copies. of the anthology. Basically, I have done all the publishing for this year and it’s time for a real break.

I like to picture Bing singing this but he might have had reservations. Still, let’s face it, the original song was pretty crap really. Two verses repeated and that was it. Status Quo had more chords than that.

I’d love to see someone croon this in a capitalist-produced Antifa T-shirt. Capitalists love you, Antifa. You buy any old shit we produce. Keep daddy’s money coming, dupes. We’ll smile as we take it.

So anyway. Twitter are going to have a Kruschev-style purge of undesirables on Monday and I’ve just checked in a mirror and confirmed my undesirability. I’m white and male and straight with no gender questioning whatsoever. I am not a feminist because I believe you have to be female as a first qualification for that. I care nothing for religion and that includes Islam, the religion of making people eight inches shorter and of experiments such as determining whether being gay makes you immune to gravity and the genetic combination of rocks and rape victims.

I am not owlkin or badgerkin or shitehawkkin, I am simply almost-human. I do not like the EU but I am not anti-foreigner (stranger in a strange land myself, as it goes).

Therefore I am universally despised and I am fine with that. I’ll let you know if I ever start to care. You want me to be evil and demonic. Yeah, I can do that. You’ll be surprised, and soon, at just how evil and demonic we White Walkers can be when we’re pushed too far.

When Twitter have their purge, I have two other accounts there that won’t last long. I am also Underdog on gab.ai. Maybe they are considering not purging me.

Twitter has issued a challenge. Can I push them into banning me? Let’s see if racist Christmas can finish the job.

White Christmas

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
From times when IQ’s weren’t so low
Dim minds take it all in and idiots listen
Cause you can’t see racists in the snow

I’m dreaming of a wide Christmas
With every Christmas pie I bite
May your waistline stretch really tight
And may buttons fly into the night

I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas
With rain and cloud instead of snow
All the global warming can’t stop ice from forming
It’s all fake science, yes we know

I’m dreaming of a white Privilege
When immigration rates were low
When the lives of homeless and poor.
Were the stuff of Privilege that’s only white.
 

Merry Saturnalia to one and all.

The pointing finger points

The book is done. Print and eBook versions formatted, links in the eBooks, covers, all of it. I just need to write a short description for the sales page. I’ll leave it overnight in case someone finds another correction but if everything is okay it’ll get loaded up tomorrow.

So I have time to blog properly for a change. Let’s see if I can remember how.

I have seen, on Twitter, references to the ‘six rivers’ that produce 90% of the world’s floating sea trash (figures may vary). This is held up to prove that we in the West aren’t the ones polluting the sea, it’s all coming from China and Africa.

Well I don’t know about Africa, but there’s a good reason for a lot of that waste to come from China. It’s because we Westerners send it there. Then we blame China for producing it and the Chinese have had enough.

As of January 1st, China has new rules for the ‘recyclables’ they will accept and they don’t want all the added crap. The plastic bags, the bits of mouldy food residue etc. That stuff that ends up dumped in China instead of over here and then washes into their rivers, then into the sea.

In addition to all the waste China produces itself, and has to deal with, they’ve been dealing with a big chunk of ours too. Then we blame them for being polluters. Oh, and we send the stuff over on those massive container ships, six of which can equal the polluting output of the total of all the cars on Earth. That’s really green.

There’s also the matter of rare earths – we use a lot of those over here but we produce little to none. We use a hell of a lot in those massive wind powered ornaments we set up everywhere to wave hello to the Green God. We plan to use much more in those electric cars we’re all going to drive to reduce pollution and save the planet. Yet we don’t mine those rare elements ourselves. Most of the supply comes from China.

Those ‘rare earths’ aren’t really rare. It’s more that they are thinly spread and don’t occur in convenient seams or deposits where you can mine the ore and get them out fairly easily. So you have to process tonnes of rock to get much of anything as an end product.

That processing produces vast amounts of waste, and that waste is very toxic indeed. So, to fuel our lust to claim we are reducing our pollutant output and saving the planet, we have created a market that causes Hell on Earth. That’s really green.

Now that China isn’t taking our waste any more, not unless we clean it first, the recycling game is suddenly far less profitable than it was. If China has enough of turning its country into a pit of sulphur, where will we get all our vital electronic components from?

Or if China gets pissed off at us and decides to stop emptying our bins, stop supplying us with stuff we dare not mine ourselves and dump its vast dollar reserves back into the market…

They can wipe us out without firing a shot.

We won’t have any petrol cars left by then. All our information is already on computers we can’t fix without new parts. Our power stations will be gone, replaced by lawn ornaments and fields of solar panels that depend on materials whose extraction produces far more pollution than the power stations ever did. Our Green God is pleased because that pollution only happens in a country that does not worship him. Well okay, it leaks into the sea but we can point the finger at China for that. That’s really green.

China does not need to invade. They just need to wait. Once we are utterly dependent on their rare earth supply with no backup technology left, once we are wading knee deep through plastic bags and McDonald’s wrappers, China will take over the world with nothing more than one little word.

‘No’.