Insularnet

Today it is possible to be globally connected within a narrow bubble-like mindset. A recent departure from Google’s workplace has this take on it. (h/t @RooBeeDoo1 on Twitter).

In the days before widespread internet, we all knew one or two who believed the moon landings were faked, that the new Ice Age was imminent (caused by rising CO2, incidentally), who believed Russia was behind everything bad that happened and that the Earth is flat.

I never met anyone who believed the Earth is flat but all the others, yes. They were harmless. They were entitled to their opinions of course, nobody would force them to change their minds and mostly, the ideas they had were at least entertaining. A diversion from football in the pub chatter.

Now, those ideas are dangerous. All those individual tinfoil hatters have formed, across the Internet, into large groups. Mostly composed of idiots manipulated by a few smart ones with an agenda, they have formed an army of Pub Nutters and they have assumed quasi-religious status.

I recently tried to talk to a few Climatologists on Twitter. They had reached the point where they claimed anyone who does not believe in climate change is an idiot. I interjected at that point, suggesting that the opposite of ‘believer’ is ‘heretic’.

The Cult of the Green God did not approve of the terminology. I said I wasn’t in this fight, they said the only way I could not be in this fight was if I had another planet to go to. More than once in recent years I have wished for just that.

So, the summary is, if I don’t join the ranks of Believers in Climate Change, the Green God will visit Armageddon on us all.

And still they object to this being called a religion.

I gave up when someone pointed me to the ‘facts’ presented by the IPCC. The argument had gone full circle and it was time to step off. It had reached the point in religious arguments where someone says ‘It’s in the Bible/Quran/Torah therefore it is unquestionable.’ You must believe because It Is Written. Not a religion? Really?

The IPCC depends for its funding on the existence of man-made climate change. If they were faced with proof that we have nothing to do with it, that it’s just the same old climate change the planet has always had, the IPCC would all be out of a job. The same is true of many Climatologists now – they have moved from benignly watching it get warmer and cooler to being utterly dependent on man-made chemical death for funding. Admit we aren’t actually responsible and they go back to tapping the barometer and noting the readings. So, would they say ‘Okay, we’ll all pack up’ or would they set their drones to silence the dissent? Give it a little thought, if you need to.

I was presented with arguments including a conflation with being a gravity denier. Gravity is self-evidently real and needs no proof. As someone who was once stuck beneath a heavy rhubarb and who has fallen off a great many things, I am assured of the reality of gravity. The reality of one thing does not prove the reality of another thing. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

Climate heretics are compared to ‘flat-earthers’. Refusal to believe one thing does not automatically indicate belief in another thing. I do not believe in God. That does not mean I worship Satan. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

I don’t believe in Satan either. I have seen and experienced things I cannot prove but I have not seen evidence of any God or Satan in charge of those things. I’ll keep my own counsel on those things until I have solid evidence for them, I get enough derisory comments from those art students who think they know about science as it is. That’s actual science by the way – I don’t want you to ‘believe’, I want to show you data that supports what I say. I do not yet have that data so I keep quiet about it.

As for flat earthers, show me pictures of the edge of the world, explain the lunar eclipse and time zones and seasons and we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll stick with the oblate spheroid with a tilted axis theory. It works for me.

I do not, and will not, simply ‘believe’ anything. There are things I don’t care about enough to investigate myself and many things I’d like to delve deeper into but don’t have time. Just telling me ‘it’s true, believe it or you’ll be damned’ gets you classified as a religion and we’re done. You have not won the argument. I have simply withdrawn from the fray and will leave you to your beliefs. You win the argument when you convince me you’re right and ‘Believe!’ will never do that.

Another thing that makes me give up on you as a waste of arguing breath is ‘the science is settled’ and ‘there is no meaningful debate to be had’. Those statements do not belong to science. They belong to religion. Once you have writings that nobody is allowed to question, you are a religion. Science has no unquestionable data. None. Not even gravity.

Oh we know gravity is there but we still don’t have a definite mechanism for it. Gravitons? Electromagnetics? Angels on our shoulders holding us down? Even something as self-evident as gravity leaves Science with plenty to argue about. Science is never settled.

If a subject area is completely explained and nobody can refute it, then it’s done and we move on to the next. This is not true of… anything yet. Science once had the atom as the smallest indivisible particle of matter. Well that soon changed, and the particles we know about now are still being investigated. They might turn out to be made of smaller bits. Nothing and nobody is science has yet managed to escape debate. Not even Einstein.

You say your science is unquestionable, you are claiming to be smarter than Einstein. I don’t claim to be that smart and I have the hair. Yeah, I should get to a barber before I start looking like Gandalf… but I digress.

We have an army of Green God Cultists predicting Armageddon unless we protect the environment by mining neodymium for magnets to put into vast steel windmills with miles of copper wire inside to protect the environment from industrialisation… yeah, sounds rather like starting three major religions based on the invisible voice that told Abraham to cut the end of his knob off then kill his son. Sorry, religion, but that is how it looks from the outside.

Actually that’s unfair. Most religions don’t advocate doing this to the planet in order to save it. That’s just for the windmill magnets, we won’t go into all that steel and copper wire production, nor the diesel used by the transport and maintenance trucks, and let’s not mention the hundreds of tons of concrete under each and every oversized lawn ornament pretending to save the environment out there…

Climatology is a religion but it’s a religion with a purpose.The dopes who believe in it won’t see that and they’ll laugh it off and call me heretic – or rather the modern variant, ‘denier’. They’ll call me a flat earther and a gravity denier and an idiot while they march to their doom. I have no problem with any of that. You march on, folks. I’ll wait here with beer and a bacon sandwich and watch you march away.

The insularnet is working exceptionally well. The thing we thought brings us all together is the thing that most effectively separates us into insular groups.The Climatologists have no truck with Population Control and no interest in Immigration Insanity and will distance themselves from the Anti-Sex League who will not mingle with Health Police nor with Political Correctness…

…but they, and more, are all facets of one thing. Facets kept separate, specific, isolated on the global net and easily controlled. If they saw the whole thing they’d refuse to take part. Well, a few jackboot-lovers would still take part but mostly, no. You know, the Righteous have learned a lot from their repeated slapdowns over the centuries. This time they intend full control by a series of backdoors. They hope to open them all at once, before any one group realises what is happening.

I’m not going to say any more at this stage. I want you all to break your own bubbles and see who’s been blowing them. Hint: It’s not lizard people. It’s humans. Not very nice humans but they don’t have scales and rarely eat insects.

I have sometimes wondered if Rolf Harris was brought down not because of some insidious political agenda but because of one line he kept repeating. A line that had to be removed from broadcast, a line that might get people to think things they should not be thinking. A line based on an incomplete picture made of a few brush strokes with the rest yet to fit in.

Can you see what it is yet?

 

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The Pen is mightier than the Sword

…but it seems Le Pen is not as mighty as a Macaroon.

France has a pro-EU, Brussels puppet as its leader. Well, it’s what they voted for. I don’t know how much real power the French President has – don’t his pronouncements have to go through Parliament? I’ve no idea, perhaps one of the France-occupying readers can tell us. Not our problem, since the UK is now on a no-going-back route out of the EU. We’ve even been deleted from their propaganda leaflets.

At least there aren’t likely to be riots, at least not by the French. It seems clear in modern politics that one side always accepts losing a vote while the other side scream about voting being non-democratic because they didn’t get what they wanted. Then they have protests to overturn the vote in the name of democracy. These are usually violent.

It’s always the same sides too.

It’s rather like the Church of Climatology’s thought process. It gets a little warmer, that’s global warming. It gets unusually cold, ‘weather is not climate’. In the same way, Socialism only recognises democracy if they win the vote.

This kind of doublethink is endemic now.

I bought New Scientist this week. First time for ages. There is a feature article about air pollution. Apparently, at least in the West, it’s not so bad. China, India, Bangladesh… well they are effectively going through their industrial revolution phase and that’s always messy. The cities in those countries get smog like London used to get. Pretty pointless pushing to ban smoking there – but they do anyway.

The article carries a chart showing causes of death. Predictably, smoking is near the top. What’s interesting is that nowadays, nobody just dies any more. Everyone dies of something that could have been prevented if only the NHS could force them to live pure lives. It seems based on the premise that if we remove all risks from life, nobody will ever die again. Except… of boredom.

While the article shows a rapid fall in air pollution in the UK, the editorial laments the UK government’s failure to tackle air pollution. It’s headed with a picture of a smoggy street which is quite clearly not in the UK. The cars are on the wrong side of the road and the no-parking lines are red, not yellow.  They didn’t even bother to spend five minutes with Photoshop to make it half-convincing. What really hurts is that PhD level scientists will read that crap and not question it.

The editorial calls for some kind of legally-enforced action from the government while the article claims all major atmospheric pollutants are in decline in the UK’s air.

I don’t mean the smoke from half a gram of burning leaves. I mean properly toxic stuff. The UK’s air is getting cleaner. Remember that when the new anti-motorist regulations come into force so that the Green Men can breathe pure air in the cities. I’m glad I don’t live in one.

We now have the latest big push from antismoking to classify vaping as smoking. It’s clearly not smoking. For one thing there’s no smoke. No tobacco either. It’s getting to where rechargeable batteries and USB connectors are likely to be classified as tobacco products – and politicians all over the world can’t seem to understand why they are now openly ridiculed. If there is one thing more likely to see you more universally despised than being a smoker, it’s becoming a politician.

The antismokers say they want us to stop smoking but only using their approved methods. You know, the ones they get paid to push. Not some independent method that’s been shown to work for an awful lot of people, oh no, can’t have that.

“Nicotine is ‘addictive and deadly’. To help you escape its clutches we’ll sell you patches and gum loaded with… nicotine.”

What they really want is to get you ‘addicted’ to their own nicotine delivery method, so they can cash in.

Warnings on cigarettes, warnings about the alleged addictiveness of nicotine on vaping gear… seen any warnings on the patches and gum? Of course not. Seen any public shouting about people under 18 getting hold of patches and gum? Neither have I.

Approved nicotine is magically safe to prescribe. Non-approved nicotine is deadly and will kill you along with everyone in a 100-metre radius. Every time a smoker lights up in public we are like slow motion suicide bombers. That is what modern medicine, and our Governments, actually believe.

Really. They genuinely believe it. In the old days, schools used to teach chemistry and anyone from those days will have no trouble finding the chemical structure of nicotine. It’s a simple molecule. The nicotine in patches is the same as the nicotine in tobacco. The same as the nicotine in vape steam.

I’m still amazed no doctor has been charged with attempted murder for prescribing nicotine patches after telling us it’s deadly and addictive. Why hasn’t that happened? It’s wide open, that goal.

You know, some vapers don’t even have nicotine in their steam. Some have found that it’s the action of smoking they like. The taste, blowing smoke rings, all that stuff. The nicotine isn’t really necessary. I’ve tried it in my own Electrofags. Nicotine isn’t the biggest part of smoking, it’s the taste and the action that matters. That’s why Electrofag has worked for so many people. Not for me, not yet. The strange flavours are a lot of fun but I haven’t found a tobacco flavour that tastes just right. Maybe one day.

It must be difficult to keep a war on smokers and a war on motorists going at the same time. A war on all forms of transport, in fact, other than electric Noddy cars and trains made by Hornby. They have to ramp up the same pretend risks for both wars without anyone questioning how you can die twice. They seem to be managing this quite well because the general public have failed to notice.

There have been several Dalek and other alien invasions of Earth. Remember those? Nobody does, and in subsequent episodes the Doctor puts it down to the human ability to blot out anything that doesn’t fit their worldview.

He’s right. Humanity is easily controlled. Has been easily controlled for a very long time. It’s a herd. The oft-used sheep analogy is not misplaced. Those of us who won’t run with the herd are treated as anomalies and freaks – and perhaps we are. We like it that way.

Some of us will always refuse to obey. Some of us will snarl back at the sheepdogs. Some of us will remember and write it down for the future’s annoying buggers to know they are not alone.

The pen is, still, mightier than the sword.

Just watch out for macaroons…

Dominoes

No, it’s not about pizza.

Today I was blocked again on Twitter. It’s what the indoctrinated and the one-track-minded would love to do in real life: just silence any alternative viewpoint. Except… it doesn’t silence anyone. It just stops the blocker’s involvement in the conversation.

So I guess the one who blocked me won’t see this. Should I start to care, I’ll be sure to post an update. I’ve given up on these people. They cannot bear to consider any other view and I long ago tired of talking to walls.

His argument was that cattle produce methane, methane causes global warming, so if people eat less beef there’ll be less cattle and thereby save the planet.

I pointed out that if he wants less cattle then he must also restrict all milk products. I mentioned falling dominoes. Twitter’s limitations did not allow me to elaborate the difference between beef and dairy herds and I doubt he’d be interested anyway. Nor would he be interested in hearing about all the other ruminant species out there. I’m blocked now but well, I’m not involved in education any more. The wilfully ignorant are not my problem. He’ll see it one day, when his personal domino falls, but I’m not here to save him. I’m here to save me, and anyone else who will listen.

My background is in intestinal microbiology. My PhD was on the metabolism in the gut of ruminant animals. So yes, I know what I’m talking about here.

I saw the bandwagon of methane reduction when it started. I worked in labs that jumped on that bandwagon. Some actually believed it would make a difference but most saw a good way to keep the department funded. Sadly, that part of science is necessary: experiments don’t pay for themselves. So, many labs run high-profile projects for funding and do the interesting stuff behind the scenes. You only get to hear about the interesting stuff when it finally does something impressive.

The interesting stuff won’t get any funding as speculation, it has to prove itself first. It does that on the back of bandwagon grants.

Methane is trivial as a greenhouse gas. It was long ago shown that water vapour is the major greenhouse effector but you can’t take exhalations and you can’t tax the sun on the ocean. Therefore, carbon dioxide and methane, extraordinarily tiny components of the air, have to be continuously blamed. There’s no money in steam.

If there was that much methane in the air then every time I lit a cigarette, the flare would be visible in Edinburgh. Methane isn’t inert, there are soil bacteria that use if for growth so it does get used up. It isn’t the final end product, it’s part of a cycle. I worked on methane oxidising bacteria as one of those Interesting Things at the back of another project. Didn’t get too far but I did get a paper out of it.

You cannot isolate one single reaction and claim you have the answer to the global ecosystem. It’s a very complex ecosystem. Change one part of it and all the rest will change to adapt to it. Like rabbits or cane toads in Australia – meddle with an ecosystem and all hell can break loose. One change is like toppling that first domino. It’s hard to stop the chain reaction once it starts.

The Green God’s religion does not recognise dominoes. To them, every scientific result is to be taken in isolation and then applied to the entire planet as Gospel. Unquestionable. ‘The science is settled’. Yeah, well, if it’s unquestionable then it’s not science. It’s a cult. They can’t grasp that.

The also can’t grasp that cows are not the only source of methane – in fact they aren’t even the major source. Mud flats, peat bogs, any swamp anywhere is pumping out methane all the time (I spent three years working on bacteria in estuarine mud flats too). And we won’t even start on what happens when a subsea methane clathrate collapses. The ice worms that live in them are cute though.

Cows don’t produce methane. No mammal does, not directly. Bacteria in their guts produce methane and those bacteria are not specific to the gut. They live in swampy ground and anywhere it’s wet and there’s no or very little oxygen. Including deep water. Cows are a small part of the whole ecosystem and yet they are to be wiped out to save the planet? Total extinction will have no measurable effect on methane production at all.

That’s not why they are being wiped out. They are to be removed so we don’t eat meat. There’s a reason for that.

I remember when butter was suddenly deemed a Terrible Thing. Spread butter on your toast and a heart attack was only hours away. It’s been shown to be bollocks now but it persisted for decades. It coincided with the rise of margarine, then the pretend-butter spreads I refer to as plasticine. Butter, it turns out, is healthier than the synthetics but it took a long time to get the truth past the censors.

Doesn’t matter if the cows are to be eradicated. All we’ll have left are the synthetics. Synthetic milk already exists. It’s horrible but it exists.

Sugar is suddenly evil. Well not really suddenly, it’s been sneered at for a long time. That started with the introduction of artificial sweeteners and has become harsher and more desperate recently as people are rejecting the synthetics in favour of actual sugar.

Today’s new product is insect protein. A whole industry is trying to get off the ground. Faced with the choice, would you pick the burger made from beef or the one made from cockroaches? Yeah, it’s not a hard choice.

So it has to be made a hard choice. Push up the price of meat with ‘greenhouse tax’ and ‘fat tax’ and boost the guilt trips and soon the roachburger is all you can afford. The drones fall for it every time.

I have seen Twitter drones insist that Electrofag is designed by the tobacco companies to keep us smoking. I don’t engage in conversation with that level of stupid, it’s so concentrated it might be contagious. There’s no point.

Electrofag is the biggest threat the tobacco companies have ever faced.  I have several and I like them – although I still like the real ones too. Many have switched away from the real ones to Electrofag, and many new ‘smokers’ became new vapers instead. Isn’t that what those who hate tobacco companies wanted? A big dent in their profits?

It’s not what those who live on other people’s earnings want. Tobacco taxes account for an enormous amount of revenue and Electrofag is denting that too. This should give anti-tobacco governments a problem. Their drones will want to cheer on the demise of tobacco but those at the top can’t allow it to happen. What happens to their funding, their very reason for existence, if we all switch to vaping?

Fortunately the drone mind is easy to manipulate. Just tell them it’s another kind of tobacco, tobacco companies sell it, and all vapers turn into smokers. Those are all total lies, none of them ever happened, but the drones need no evidence. They will believe what they are told and block anyone who tries to tell them anything different.

Twitter is perfect for drone control. They’ll block any reasonable voice and end up talking amongst themselves, just reinforcing the indoctrination they’ve been exposed to until the Cult of the Green God is ready to launch its own jihad on we filthy heretics.

It’s not new. Many cults have used the same techniques to produce blindly-believing followers. This one pretends to use science. Its pronouncements come from academics.

I’ve met an awful lot of academics. Some are at genius level, most are merely clever but some make you wonder how they got in there. I can think of two PhD’s I’ve met who made me wonder if the qualification was really worth anything at all.

Yes, there are idiot academics. They make up for their uselessness by fast-talking and sounding convincing. The cunning ones build a following and the really devious get the press on side. It’s hard to sack someone when the press has built them up to hero status.

Personally I avoid any contact with the press. I talked to one once, was totally misrepresented and had phone calls from genuine scientists wondering what the hell I was up to. Now, I have no comment for any reporter anywhere. Read the journal papers, wait for the data to be published. I’m not talking until that’s done. At the moment I work as a consultant for commercial companies so can’t say much of anything anyway.

I’ve never blocked anyone on Twitter and never been blocked for abusive language. I’ve been blocked twice for agreeing with people, once for sympathising, and a few times for trying to tell them the truth. They don’t want the truth, they want their beliefs.

Let them have their beliefs. I work in science. Everything I do can be questioned and sometimes, those questions reveal to me something I’ve missed. I do not silence dissent. I encourage it. It’s a source of new information. I have no time to play with those who believe ‘the science is settled’.

That’s a religion. I do not have time for religion.

The Pan Generation

It was a fast transition to the children who never grow up.

In the 80’s we had winters where it snowed so much I couldn’t find my car. It was just one of the white mounds in the street. Yet traffic kept moving, transport was barely affected. We never heard about ‘the wrong kind of leaves on the line’ or anything like that. Everyone just carried on.

Incidentally, I once asked a railway guard about the leaves thing. Turns out some leaves are more oily than others and can make the wheels slip. That part has never changed. The only new part is that it’s now an excuse. In the ‘old days’ (30-odd years ago) they just got on with it.

I saw the news the other day. It’s rare to see the news, it means turning on the TV and I don’t do that very often. There was Snowpocalypse! There was enough snow to fill a bag of flour and deep enough to almost reach your toenails. My shabby Fiesta would have laughed at that much snow as would every other car on the road that isn’t a Matchbox toy.

We were regaled with images of the M74 into Glasgow that morning with stationary traffic in one direction. We were told this was because of snow.

I have had to pass the M74 a few times this year and it’s going through massive roadworks. It’s a standstill every morning. A light dusting of snow will not affect it at all, heck, a real proper blizzard wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. It’s slow going and satnav won’t help because it’s all changing.

You have to be scared of snow. It’s not supposed to happen. Globule Warming says there has been no snow for twenty years so you can’t be expected to cope with the world turning slightly white. Noo! You’re all going to die! The rain has frozen and it’s Snowpocalypse!

In reality it’s the mildest winter we’ve had for ages. Just a few years back, winter started in October and Scotland was frozen until May. That was a real bastard of a winter. This one is a doddle. If this is Gabble Wanking, let’s have more. We won’t though. The shitty winters will come back. They always do.

Oh but now, just a few days after the Ice Age Cometh, we are told Scotland will be hotter than Barcelona. It’s winter in Spain too so we’re going to have a degree C more than another country that’s in the middle of winter for a day… Well I have a rug with a bullfighter on it and that could show up on Twitter with a plate of paella and ‘nyaah!’ if I can be bothered.

I’m not religious but Dear God, can’t you smack some intelligence into the things you made? You say you made them in your image and they make you look like a fucking retard. Aren’t you cringing in embarrassment right now?

I mean look at this one – Tam Fry wants to pay toddlers to eat as directed.

Really? Toddlers have the ability to think ahead and understand bank accounts and compound interest? Toddlers?

Look at any responses to any story about pensions and they are full of ‘why should I pay to keep old fogeys alive?’

Because, dickhead, when you’re an old fogey the kids you hate now will be paying your pension. That’s how the screwed up system works. Want to change it? Go ahead, it means no state pension for you but hey, go for it. I’m buggered anyway, I’ll have to live to 72 to get a penny and most of you will be in the same post office queue as me by then.

So with 20+ year olds having no concept of the future, Tam Fry expects toddlers to understand economics and saving and the banking system. Actually no, that’s not what he expects.

He expects you to believe that they will.

Because in his mind, like the minds of all the sociopathic Righteous who tell governments what to do now, we are just children. We are the lower orders and we need to be instructed in how our betters expect us to live. Many people actually fall for this.

We now drink our coffee from baby trainer cups. We drink approved soft drinks and water from baby bottles. We wear romper suits renamed as onesies. We eat and dress as directed, we stay off the booze in January and we don’t smoke.

Oh, and you all ostracise me because I break every single one of those rules and steadfastly refuse to die or even get any disease at all. Sorry, I’m not sorry.

Scared of snow and terrified of global warming.

Don’t take the car, travel by bus, fear the diesel fumes. Bus diesel is not the same as car diesel, like patch nicotine is not the same as smoke nicotine, even though it is. Yeah, believe the shite, you fucking morons.

Decry smoking but fear the steam that might replace it. Calm down, boil a kettle, don’t breathe the steam, and have a cup of tea but no sugar in case it gives you cancer and no milk in case it makes you fat. No tea either. because of something about to be made up…

Live for the children but looking at them or thinking of them is illegal.

Doublethink is not a fantasy. It’s already here.

In God’s image? Really?

God must be Peter Pan.

Or he’s just having a laugh.

Dreaming of unification

It’s been a long time since I corrupted a song here. I should have been asleep long ago but this one just demanded my attention. What the hell, I don’t have to be up early, work is afternoon shift tomorrow.

There was only one line I didn’t change because it fit so well and I really couldn’t better it. You can find the original here.

So, with apologies in advance to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, here is my version of ‘Californication’, now retitled ‘Dreaming of unification’.

As always, it’s open to better lines or links.

_________________________

Science is redundant in the climate conflagration
And Tom Jones songs in rugby now cause domestic violations
And if you dream any kind of dream it’s mental aberration

It’s the end of the EU and soon the end of civilisation
The sun might burn in the east at least it’ll fire up the next big nation
While in the west democracy becomes unification

Pay the Righteous very well to do all of your thinking
They’ll take your smokes and leave you broke and save you from your drinking

Believe in unicorns
All sex is porn

Dreaming of unification
Dream of Borg assimilation…

Marry a girl or a badger or a bird it’s the same in this society
We no longer make distinctions because we’re high on total equality
And start up a farm with a corporate arm, organic food fakery

Death may be the final frontier but you can find it in a hospital basement
And Corbyn can you see the end of our EU debasement?
And Assange won’t you go away, you’re just an embarrassment

Righteous dark pronouncements to control the population
Government accepts them, rubber stamps their smug elation

Look! A unicorn!
Distracts them all

Dreaming of unification
Dream of Righteous smug elation
Dreaming of standardisation
Dream of Borg assimilation

Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation
It’s what the Righteous just can’t grasp, they think it’s a final solution
But everything they break just makes a newer innovation

Pay the Righteous very well to tell you what you’re thinking
Twisted in the mind, they want to find a way to stop you thinking

Ignore the unicorns
Wake up, see the dawn

Dream of Borg assimilation
Dream of Righteous smug elation
Dreaming of unification

Dream a life without coercion…

Intelligent people?

You are expected to trust your health, the entire complex metabolism of your body, to people who cannot tell smoke from steam. (h/t @Mardconsult on Twitter)

NHS boards will be required to ensure that their grounds are smoke-free by April.

It’s not… oh, what’s the point? These ‘health experts’ already believe that someone smoking in the open air (next to the body-part incinerator while all sorts of motor vehicles pass by) is the most dangerous thing on the planet. If they can’t grasp the absurdity of that position they can never grasp the difference between smoke and steam. Really, the medical profession needs to set some standards here. How about refusing to employ administrators with an ambient IQ?

The medics wondered why it took me three days to call in with two cracked ribs, an inability to change from standing to sitting and frank haematuria. It’s because they are a  propaganda organisation now and I only gave in because it was taking longer than usual to heal. I thought it might be a bit more serious than my usual damage.

Health is the lowest priority for the health profession. Ridiculous and petty control tops the agenda. Do you really want your health in the hands of someone who thinks steam and smoke are the same thing? Someone who thinks that smoke – and especially steam – are deadly in tiny amounts outdoors?

I wouldn’t let them clean my windows, never mind fix my body. They didn’t in the end. It grew back all by itself. There really was no point going – turns out morphine has no effect on me and I had ineffective Ibuprofen at home anyway. Well, at least I had a go on some of the rides while I was there. I’d been paying in long enough.

Thgen we have Climatology. Still banging on and on about climate change that isn’t currently happening even though humans are supposed to be making it worse. Now they have a new blame game. It’s the Russians! (h/t @RooBeeDoo1 on Twitter).

So all those Ecodim bulbs and horrible LED lights and shivering instead of turning on the heating due to green taxes and government doing the hippie hippie hate… that was all a waste of time? The Russians are making it rain and snow and that causes droughts… hey, don’t expect sense. None of it ever made any, except in the mind of those who don’t really have one.

Work has been outfitted entirely with LED lighting. It’s awful. Unlike filament or fluorescent or even halogen, the light from LEDs is directional, not diffuse. Put paperwork on a shelf in the shade and I can’t see it properly. There’s way too much contrast between the lit and unlit areas. It’s made sure I’ll never even consider getting LED lights for home use.

Every tinfoil-hatter knows that HAARP control the weather and they are just blaming the Russians to start a war. The UK is either a testing ground or totally immune. Our weather has been completely random for centuries.You could put four seasons into a day here and nobody would even notice – we’d just moan about it and get on with things.

No matter the crisis now, whether it’s the perennially-imminent destruction of the wheat or chocolate crops (no more chocolate biscuits? England would explode!) or earthquakes or typhoons or the world getting one degree warmer or cooler or some country actually inventing an Orgone accumulator and making it rain… the prognosis is always a world war.

I think they are looking for an excuse to start a world war, you know. Using the most ridiculous arguments their semi-wits can come up with because they tried all the potentially real ones and nobody believed it.

We are not being treated by intelligent people and we are not being ruled by intelligent people. Both are now the preserve of the gibbering control freak and the cackling warmonger.

Sometimes I just want to sit back, light a smoke, pour a whisky and watch it all happen. That would be an entertaining show.

Trouble is, it’s happening to you and me too. Like it or not, we’re in the show.

British Weather.

We British talk about the weather a lot because this country has so much of it. More than any other country on the planet. You can be sunbathing in the morning and building snowmen in the afternoon here. You can crank up the heating before bedtime to ward off sub-zero temperatures and wake up bathed in sweat in the middle of the night. All it takes is a change in wind direction.

Yesterday I left for work at 6 pm and it was -5C outside. Today I left for work at 6 pm and it was -2C. There was frost on the ground at 6 pm but it had all melted by 9 pm.

I recall winters where the snow was so deep I gave up trying to clear it and just cut a path through it. I remember opening the door to leave for work, finding snow halfway up it, closing the door, calling in ‘no’ and going back to bed.

I recall winters where flowers were in bloom. A particularly stupid carnation was once in full bloom on Christmas day. That plant was so dim even the other plants used to call it names. There have been years when the snow was several feet deep and years where there was hardly any snow at all.

The same is true of summers. This last summer was reasonable but had a cold snap in August that pretty much wrecked anything growing outside the greenhouse. Especially my tobacco. The ones before have been mostly wet and dreary but there were summers in Aberdeen that were stifling hot in the past. And others that were grey, wet and pretty much like winter with slightly warmer rain. I remember Aberdeen summers where opening a window was no help – the air outside wasn’t moving. The electric fans I bought are still in the attic in case it ever happens again.

I have seen one side of a street soaked with rain and the other side of the street in sunshine. More than once.

That’s British weather. No matter what the Met Office predict with all their fancy computers, British weather just thumbs its nose and does what the hell it pleases. They might as well predict the weather by looking into goat entrails. It would be cheaper and just as effective.

You just can’t predict the unpredictable.

It must be the Church of Climatology (those who work on the study of British weather are doomed to insanity, as has been repeatedly shown) that pushed the Daily Doomsayer into its continual ‘It’s going to snow a bit!’ stories in winter and its ‘It’s going to be a bit warm!’ stories in summer. They are almost always wrong. Not because the computers at the Met Office are faulty. Because those computers work on logic, and British weather does not.

If there is a pagan British god of the weather, he hasn’t been sober since Doggerland sank into the sea.

Now the Daily Rainonyourparade predicts it will be a warm New Year. There have been warm ones before. Even here, north of Aberdeen. There have been others that, if you venture outside, you dare not blink in case your eyes crack but this winter has been a fairly gentle one so far.

They keep on about ‘Britain will be warmer than usual’ but then casually mention the wide range of temperatures we’ll get. Britain is a long narrow island that stretches north to south. Depending on how the North Atlantic Oscillation lies over the country it could all be warmer than average, all be colder than average, or neatly bisected into two contrasting cold and warm bits.

They also gloss over the past and talk about -9C as if it’s unusual for a late British December. It isn’t. It’s actually quite pleasant compared with past winters where windchill surpassed -20C and every manhood in the land looked like a button mushroom. Meanwhile every woman in the land sported a pair of Scammel wheelnuts that could punch neat holes in a Parka. They could have your eye out if she turned around a bit too quick.

So it’s freezing one day and not freezing the next. The only ones surprised by this are the Mail hand-wringing churnalists (how do they type while hand-wringing? I suppose it would explain all the typos but they must look like a room full of epileptic walruses taking a simultaneous fit) and the gullible drones in the comments.

In 1981 (or maybe 82, those were blurry years) I had a Mark 2 Cortina. I’d bought it in 1979 for £75 and rebuilt it with aluminium mesh and Plastic Padding. One day I went out to the car and instead of a row of cars in the street, there was a row of identical white mounds infilled with enough white stuff to be above the wheels. I couldn’t tell which was mine and it needed its starter motor fixed anyway so I just left it alone until it all melted. Somewhere I might still have the photos.

That was in Cardiff, not in Aberdeen. The following year was an easy one for both me and the car. That might have been the year I sold it and bought an ex-Water Board Commer van. You could still see Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water) on the side of it and since the front wheels were behind the driver’s seat you had to learn to pass corners before turning. But I digress.

We talk about the weather in Britain because it is the most rapidly-changing thing about the place. Being a weather forecaster in this country must be the most maddening career available. Predicting it is a waste of time. Sure, you can track the big storms and the main high/low isobars but you just know that most of the weather is going to ignore nature’s indicators and do just as it pleases.

But please, Daily Mail, stop pandering to the warped minds of the Climatologists. They need serious help. Just look at their primary prayer – ‘when it’s warmer than average it’s global warming but when it’s cooler than average then weather is not climate’. Does anyone above ambient IQ think that’s science?

UK weather will change. Within a day, most days. This place has the most unstable climate on the planet and that’s why the snowstorms elsewhere are ignored and our climate has to be compared to random cities every time to make the narrative fit. Istanbul is a new one.

There is nothing we can do about British weather.

So we talk about it. It makes no difference, it just gives us something to say to people we don’t really like all that much.