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’.

 

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?

 

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.