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…

Reliance

I know, it sounds like the next Mark Ellott novel, following ‘Ransom’, ‘Rebellion’ and the almost-ready ‘Resolution’ and who knows? Maybe it will be.

Well, the replacement router arrived today and it’s much improved over the one I had before. Four years of technology can do that, I suppose. It linked much more easily to the wifi booster and it has a stronger wifi signal than the old one. So four days without internet was worth it.

Just in time – I had almost used up my data allowance on the mobile by using it as a mobile hotspot. I have been considering reducing the data package since I normally rarely use it, but I think I’ll leave it there. It was very handy in this emergency!

It’s amazing how much you can get done when your internet access is severely restricted. I have both Mark Ellott’s and Marsha Webb’s novels formatted and returned to the authors for last checks and I have a short story collection from another author that I can now start sorting out. I’m really going to have to limit my forays into the mad world of the internet in future.

These days in the Internet wilderness also showed me just how reliant I am on it now. Oh I remember when the only phone available was the phone box at the end of the street. I remember when I bought a mobile phone for the first time – I was in my early thirties and scoffed at them until a pheasant flew into my windscreen on a country road and shattered it. Suddenly they seemed like a potentially useful thing to have.

I was, of course, travelling at a perfectly sensible and sedate pace along that dead straight and empty road. It was entirely the pheasant’s fault.

I remember when it became law to fit front seat belts to cars so my father did. It was not yet legally required to use them, so he didn’t. I remember when I was sent, with my younger brother, to the corner shop to by my father’s cigarettes. I remember very well the day they couldn’t sell them to us any more. He wasn’t happy.

We used to buy things with money. Now we just wave a plastic card at a machine and soon we’ll have the card chips in our hands.

Now, of course, the Phone is God. You can use it to pay for things, watch films, browse the internet and if you can figure out how, you can even still make phone calls with it. That feature, once the only reason for a phone’s existence, is now buried in the mass of icons on the screen and in the 48 gigabytes of memory it contains. Ah, I recall fitting a 16 kilobyte memory pack to a ZX-81 and thinking it was amazing.

So many of us are absolutely reliant on the internet. Leg Iron Books could not function without it – the days of high street printers are pretty much gone and the thought of having to cut and paste with real scissors and paste is horrifying. And yet that’s how I wrote my PhD thesis. My mother typed it, on an actual typewriter, I cut and pasted pages together for the retype.

Money, as pretty much everyone knows, no longer exists. Well, you can still (so far) get cash but most of the money circulating in the world is just numbers on a screen with no physical reality at all. If everyone decides to withdraw their money form a bank they will soon find the bank doesn’t really have all that much actual cash. It’s mostly just binary digits.

And to think, these same banks poo-pooh the likes of Bitcoin. Their methods have been the same for years!

On it trundles, the world based on unreality, and it works, sort of. At least for now.

All it will take though is one solar flare, one coronal mass ejection, and it’s all gone. Wiped. Cleaner than a Hillary Clinton email inbox. All evaporated like the dew on a summer morning.

Heck, I was put on restricted access this week by a lightning bolt. To be fair, it was four hours of lightning bolts and a pretty intense blast at the end. It was enough to fry a router and a landline phone. I couldn’t do too much through the mobile phone. I could check and send emails but sending/receiving large documents or image files was a ‘no’.

If that had hit the bank computers I could have been wiped out along with a lot of other people. How could I prove how much money was in those accounts? It didn’t really exist in the first place!

I have been paying a lot of attention to the sun recently. It has three cycles that go from high activity to low and it is now entering what is called a ‘grand solar minimum’ where all three cycles go low at the same time. It’s nothing to get all worried about, it’s happened before. Humanity survived.

It does mean it’s going to get colder. That’s why the Climatologists have rolled out the Unassailable Weapon in the shape of a highly suggestible autistic child. Argue with what she’s been told to tell you and you are attacking an autistic child. I feel sorry for her. Autism does not equal stupid. One day she will realise how she was used and she is going to go through hell. You think the Church of Climatology cares? Once they are done with her they will discard her with not a single look back.

But yeah, it’s getting colder and it will get worse. So the push is on to get as much funding as possible for the pretend science of man made global warming before the lie becomes obvious. Millions will die but hey, the Climatologists will make a load of money so that’s okay with them. It also helps their depopulation agenda which naturally does not include them.

I, and many others, have tried to tell the Church of Climatology what’s really coming but that just makes me a ‘Climate Denier’ which is their new word for ‘Heretic’. I stopped bothering, let the buggers freeze. Anyway it’s too late now, it’s already started and there is not a damn thing humanity can do about it. Light up the fireplace, get the popcorn and watch them shiver while they complain about the heat.

There’s always a silver lining. Low sun activity means a much reduced chance of a solar flare or coronal mass ejection coming our way. It’s never zero, of course, but the odds are in our favour as long as we can keep ice off the wires.

A mass ejection or flare would have to be pointed right at us to have an effect. Well, actually pointed a little bit ahead of us since we’re a moving target. A flare on the opposite side of the sun won’t bother us at all. This means the chance of being hit by one are always reasonably low anyway.

The chance is never zero. Never. Probabilities go up and down but they never hit zero. One day it could happen – in fact it’s safe to say that one day it has to happen. When? Tomorrow? Next month? A decade from now? A century?

There is no way to know. And there isn’t likely to be much, if any, warning. Go to bed rich, wake up a caveman. Go to bed connected to the world, wake up alone and isolated.

As people rely more and more on online comunication, the latter is going to be the hardest to bear, I think.

We really should have a backup plan in case of such an event.

But nobody has.

Where is your Green God now?

Well, May is here, and with it the promise of… snow?

It wouldn’t be the first time. Scotland has had snow in May before and will again. It’s no coincidence that ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out’ is a common phrase in Scotland. It means, to put it into Mrs. Queen’s English, don’t be in a hurry to put your winter clothes in storage before the end of May.

In the last few years we have had a surprise frost in the middle of August. Usually just one night, maybe two, but it does happen. It makes a bit of a mess.

I’ve been called a ‘climate change denier’ because I agree with David Bellamy. ‘Man made climate change’ and all this ‘carbon’ stuff, well it’s all bollocks, innit?

Changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by adding a few parts per million has only one effect. Plants grow faster. Every greenhouse operator, every biologist who hasn’t been suckered in to the scam, knows this. Carbon dioxide really doesn’t do anything else. It is not a ‘greenhouse gas’ beyond its use in actual greenhouses to make plants grow faster. Yes, greenhouse farmers really do this. You can achieve a temporary boost in your own small greenhouse by dropping a couple of fizzy headache pills in water and closing the vents and doors. It won’t be much of an increase and won’t last long but we are talking parts per million here so it’ll have an effect.

This makes me a ‘climate change denier’ even though I fully understand that the climate changes all the time. Sometimes dramatically, as it’s about to. It has nothing to do with human activity, nothing to do with carbon dioxide, it’s not getting warmer and we can’t do a damn thing to stop it. Adapt or die.

Of course, most people are adapting in the wrong direction so they’ll all be dead soon. China and India are building more coal fired power stations because they see what’s really coming. I think I’d choose moving to India over China. It’s further south, less totalitarian and I really like curries.

When I say rapid change is ‘coming’, I really mean ‘it’s here’. While Corbyn jumps on the global warming bandwagon, the last wheel is about to come off.

The North Wind doth blow, and we shall have snow. Another old saying. Here it comes.

I doubt there’ll be very much snow in most places but considering that snow was declared ‘a rare event that future children will never see’ by the year 2000, and considering that we are now in May and should be entering summer, if you are still being suckered in by ‘man-made global warming’ then good luck to you. Prepare to die.

We are about to see a big push for windmills and solar power and a shutdown of every reliable power source. Houses built with no chimneys have no alternative heating arrangements. Gas boilers are being banned, oil prices will be way out of reach for most of us and electricity will be available occasionally. If you don’t have a chimney, you’d better have a really high metabolism.

You see, this is a ‘climate emergency’ so you all have to die to keep the ideology pure. You have to love socialism, right? Well you have to or they shoot you in the back of the head but this time they have hit upon a much more efficient way to kill millions. They’ll let the cold finish them off. Icicles are cheaper than bullets.

Didn’t anyone question the likes of David Attenborough’s huge support for ‘climate action’? We must do all these silly things and shut down everything to save ourselves, coming from the man who has declared he wants somehting like 90% of the human population removed from the planet. He will achieve the latter because of those who believe the former.

Africa is being cleared. People are being sent north to die in the coming cold, a cold they will never have experienced before. Some of us northern people are used to it, some of us remember waking to ice on the inside of the windows and a house that had no need of a refrigerator. Some of us remember how to store lake and river ice through the summer with no machinery at all. Technically that’s even before my time but I do know how it’s done.

Until someone got out of bed and lit the fire in the living room there was no warm place to be. That was inside the house. You had to rotate yourself because the part facing the fire was warm while the part facing away from the fire was cold. Think I’m joking, young people? You’ll find out. If you live where you can have a fire. If not, well, basically, you’re fucked.

I have no sympathy for the young. They have been blocking roads and lying on the floor in Waitrose (they wouldn’t be seen even genuinely dead in Poundstretcher of course) to make the world cooler and it’s been cooling for the last two decades. This is about to accelerate.

Why? Why am I so confident that winter is coming to stay awhile?

Astrophysics is not like climate science. The cycles of the sun are entirely predictable and have been prediced way in advance of this moment. The problem was that those predicting those solar cycles – if they wanted to keep their careers – had to add the caveats that ‘warming will be slowed’ or something like that to their papers. Read the papers without the caveats and what they tell you is that we have just entered the start of a Grand Solar Minimum.

Sunspot activity is dropping very fast. The sun is going quiet. There will be less solar wind keeping cosmic rays off us. Cosmic rays will cause a lot of low cloud. A lot of low cloud will shield us from the already dimming sun. It’s going to get very cold indeed. This is just the beginning.

Middle America is seeing cold and wet weather. Crops are suffering and will be limited this year. I’m hearing that South Africa is getting something similar. Farms in the UK have been busy with planting through a warm April and are about to be hit with definite frosts and possibly snow. Sheep are lambing into the cold.

The climate is changing. Fast. And not for the better. We are going to be taxed as if we are causing warming to the point where we cannot afford to survive the coming cold. Reliable energy sources will be shut down to prevent warming that isn’t going to happen.

Adapt or die. It seems most have chosen to die. But then that was the idea from the outset. Agenda 21 is not a conspiracy theory. It’s serious.

However, as with all these things, the ones the so-called ‘elite’ will kill off are the ones they wanted to keep. The gullible drones. They will be left with those like me, who accept nothing, believe nothing, and who make arrangements for their own survival with no regard to the wishes of those who think themselves superior.

It’s such a monumental ballsup I could almost believe Theresa May is the festermind behind it all.

That’s if I could be convinced she actually has a mind.

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.

Madness

I’ve been busy with some intensive book preparation lately. I know there are two books on the way in and the next anthology starts mid February so I took a bit of time to finish one of my own. It actually was pretty much finished, I just hadn’t realised it. All it needs now is final editing and a cover.

Well, I said at new year that 2019 was going to make 2018 look sane and so far I have not been disappointed. The insane asylum that is Public Health wants to put us all on rations to combat an obesity epidemic that does not exist. Sugar ‘allowance’ was quietly halved a year earlier so that now we can be accused of consuming twice the ‘allowance’.

They did the same with booze ‘allowance’. It dropped from 20-something units per week to 14 and they act as if that was the rule all along. 14 units? That’s breakfast!

Notice also the sly change from ‘recommendation’ to ‘allowance’. ‘We recommend you have this much’ has become ‘we will allow you to have this much’ as if we are children.

There is also the use of ‘limits’ on all kinds of things. Well I have my own limits, thanks. I know my limit for whisky, if I plan to do anything more than groan into my coffee the following day. I know my limit for bacon, it’s when I can get no more in.

Incidentally, they’re all having a go at bacon, aren’t they? ‘Science’ is now telling us that we’ll get The Lumps from even seeing it. PETA are having a big anti-bacon drive. Again. Oh they are against all meat consumption but particularly bacon. I wonder who they are appeasing?

Have they not seen the lunacy and violence caused by bacon depriivation all over the world? If they want a placid and easily controlled population, taking the bacon away is going to have the opposite effect. The evidence is clear for all to see and in this New Science of correlation = causation it cannot be denied.

Sometimes, as with asthma and smoking, a negative correlation proves causation. It’s a very flexible thing, this New Science. It always proves exactly what it’s paid to prove.

We are now in Dry January and also Veganuary. A month with no booze and no meat. If I follow that I will have worked out how to destroy the planet by mid-January and will have done it before February dawns. Fortunately for the world I am ignoring both of the silly things.

The Dry January will have a lot of adherents among those who don’t drink much but went way off the rails at New Year. They will have a days-long hangover and a month off will sound like a good idea to them. Also, most people are broke in January having spent December’s pay, at least, in advance over Christmas. So cutting out the expense of booze will appeal to them.

I did not get pie-eyed at New Year because I had to drive on January 1st. Scottish drink-drive laws are now at a level that make the Prohibitionists gasp in awe and the police have always been on high alert for any erratic driving around this time of year. I wasn’t going to take the chance. So I did not have the massive hangover of the booze noobs and I budgeted Christmas so I didn’t end up broke.

As for Veganuary, hahahaha! Most of those smug idiots trying it won’t last a week. They’ll pretend they did while sneaking a ham sandwich when nobody is looking. Veganism is a lifestyle choice with the accent on choice. It will never work when it’s forced on people, they’ll just eat each other. Starting with the herbivores.

Incidentally, while writing this, I heard about another one. ‘Januhairy‘. So now I have to cut every hair on my body and some of them are hard to reach. Thanks for that, idiots.

I really can’t wait for Fuckituary.

It’s the early hours of the 5th of January and already 2018 looks sane. This is just the beginning. This year’s lunacy is going to have even the Dreadful Arnott saying ‘hang on a minute…’ Defying it all is going to be a full time job.

Meanwhile in America they have elected a House of Representatives whose only policy is ‘get Trump’. Health, services, running a country, screw all that. They are going to target one man and impeach him whether he’s done anything or not.

The rest of America, well you have to get along as best you can. Your government is busy destroying itself.You voted for it.

The Amazing Occasional Cortex is going to be a lot of fun. She wants to ‘tax the rich to 70%’ even though many of them are Democrats. I expect George Soros will find a way to quietly get rid of her.

The UK tried that in the 1970s. France tried it more recently. The result is always the same. When you hammer taxes on to people who can easily afford to move away, they move away.

You don’t just lose the tax. You lose what rich people spend in shops. You lose the jobs that make the things rich people buy and you lose the businesses they run and the jobs that those businesses were providing. So you don’t just lose the rich bastard you hated. You now have a lot more people on welfare to take care of with a massively reduced tax income.

I’m all clear on tax. I don’t have to pay any more until January 2020. I don’t pay much anyway because I don’t earn much. But if I pay tax at 20% and provide no more than a trickle to the Treasury, and someone on a million a year pays 20% tax, then they are putting in £200,000 a year to the Treasury. How is that not ‘paying their fair share’?

In fact they put in a hell of a lot more because the bulk of that is taxed at the higher rate. I have paid higher rate tax twice and I don’t like it. So I deliberately don’t earn enough to do it again. Work hard, boost your business, end up working for half pay because the government has taken the other half. Why bother?

This is why Leg Iron Books now has a 70/30 split on profits in favour of authors and also why that split will get bigger for the authors if business really takes off. I do not want to pay higher rate tax. I really don’t need that much money. There’s no point, money isn’t even a real thing now. It’s just numbers on a screen. There is nothing backing it up.

And, when the socialists have taxed all the rich people out of the country, they’ll come for the rest of us. Don’t have a big savings pot. They’ll steal it. Eventually they run out of other people’s money and… it wasn’t real socialism.

Yes it was. That is what socialism does. Every time.

Five days into 2019 and the insanity meter has broken its needle already. There is so much more to come.

I am so glad I live way out of town. It’s going to get nasty in there.

Retirement is official

Well, the lab is empty. It was the last bits today. All the big stuff was out so the car is full of plastic bags stuffed with random bits for the final clearing-up. I am no longer paying rent on a lab I rarely used for the last few years and I won’t be doing any more 60-sample marathons. Ever.

See, with microbial samples you can’t do half one day and half the next. The half you do the next day will have changed. If you freeze them, you kill some species faster than others. If you don’t freeze them, the population will change overnight, even in the fridge. So if you get 60 samples you have to do them all that day.

This often meant working past midnight. In a remote lab, alone. Stuff that. I’ve done it many times and I don’t want to do it anymore.

I’ll still take on consultancy work if any appears but no more late-shift lab work.

With the demise of the lab, I can make my retirement from science official and concentate all my efforts on Leg Iron Books. No more distractions that lead to blunders.

Science is wrecked anyway. When I started it was all about getting new knowledge. Now it’s all about getting new money, and to hell with principles or diligent research. I can’t do that because I’ve never cared about money. I was always a blue-sky researcher and often, those wild experimentations came up with good results.

Nobody seems to care about results any more. The conclusions are pre-written by the funder and if you don’t reach those conclusions you get no more funding. I won’t play that game.

So I am now a publisher full time. Oh, and a seller of second hand lab equipment for a while 😉 I will hang on to some things that will be useful in brewing, of course, but there’s a lot I don’t need to keep.

I appear to have a large stainless steel condenser in my collection. I think I’ll hang on to that…

So, I enter 2019 at the start of a new career that really started in 2016, but which is no longer split by a second career. I am now Leg Iron Books and I have to learn marketing, fast.

Now, at least, I have the time to do it.