We have a title!

After at least ten minutes of gruelling brainstorming, I have a title for the fifth Underdog Anthology.

Six in Five in Four. Sounds suitably mysterious and in keeping with the strangeness of the other titles.

Six authors in the fifth anthology, published in the fourth month. Not really mysterious when explained but hopefully it will get attention when it scrolls past someone’s random browsing.

I will have a day off Thursday, possibly, or at least a part day off for my birthday, but I need to get this and the ‘You’ll Be Fine’ novel cleared before Longrider’s ‘Rebellion’ arrives. Which sounds like it won’t need much editing, but still, have to keep the flow moving. I have writing of my own to catch up with too, once the decks are clear.

The cover image might need to be drawn but it’s a lot simpler than what I’m working on for ‘You’ll Be Fine’. Won’t take too long.

Aiming for mid-April for this one. And Lee Bidgood’s too. There are visitors provisionally booked for May and again for August and I have to work around that.

Head down, back to work…

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Work, the curse of the drinking classes

I think all the real-life stuff has finally settled down. My birthday is up next but that’s not a real event. The best part of birthdays at my age is the knowledge that there aren’t that many left to endure.

So the book work is back on the cards. I won’t be blogging much the next week or so, I am finishing up on Lee Bidgood’s book and starting on the anthology. The weather is still shit but that’s a good thing – I won’t be tempted into any gardening. It’s far too cold anyway. Even the grass has barely started to grow and daffodils are only just beginning to open.

My original plan was to get all anthology author payments out before the 5th so they are in this tax year – but most authors prefer to be paid in books. Those who prefer cash can expect it by the 5th anyway but obviously I won’t have books by then! I’ll be contacting the authors tomorrow, to see which they prefer.

The anthologies have, I think, finally settled into a format. Christmas and Halloween themed ones already had, of course, but the third one was to fill the gap between Christmas and Halloween. The first of the interim ones (Tales the Hollow Bunnies Tell) was Easter themed – but Easter is a difficult call. It’s hard to come up with many stories about Easter without them starting to sound forced.

Therefore, the Spring anthology will always be non-themed. I think I will attach it to Beltain rather than Oestre. That will give me a regular 1st April story deadline and the book has to be available before the 30th. No need to hunt down Beltain themes though, it’ll stay non-specific. Still, if you have an idea, go for it.

Three anthologies a year –

Beltain, non-themed, closing April 1st, out in time for April 30th.

Halloween, scary story themed, closing October 1st, out in time for October 31st.

Yule, Christmas-themed, closing around November 15th to allow time for the book to be out and ready to order among the Christmas post rush in December.

As always, any genre, any style. I’ll be looking for shorts around the 2000 word mark, above or below that is fine but if they come in very short we’ll have to negotiate on price 😉

And novels or short story collections are always welcome.

Right. Better get back to work…

 

Books and deposits

Many years ago, back in nineteen-mumble-mumble, glass bottles had a deposit paid on them. You got that back when you took the bottles back to be reused. There were few, if any, plastic bottles around at that time. Everything came in glass.

We kids loved it. We could take found bottles to the shop and get a few pennies for sweets. Looking back, it was like a reward for litter-picking. Anyone who discarded a bottle, as long as it didn’t break, was funding our sugar habit.The environment was kept clear of bottles and we got free sweets. Everyone’s a winner.

Then came the terrible day of the ‘no deposit – no return’ bottle. It was moulded into the glass so there was no way to get anything on them. Bottles accumulated because nobody had any incentive to collect them any more.

Then came the plastic bottles. Again, no deposit, no return. Worthless, once empty. Some glass ones were good for beer making but the plastic ones, well they were no use at all.

So recycling began. We were to wash out all that glass and plastic and pay the council to take it away so they could sell it to recyclers. It was a great con. Here, the council doesn’t collect glass any more. We are expected to take it to the bottle banks and not put it in general rubbish. The nearest bottle bank is 3 miles away… needless to say, glass recycling doesn’t happen as often as it should.

I have a plan for the accumulated empty bottles. I’m going to try setting them up in the woods with the necks in different directions so no matter which way the wind blows there will always be a ‘woooo’ sound out there. They’ll gradually fill with rain, which will evaporate in warm weather, so the tone of  the ‘woooo’ will change over time and vary depending on the levels of water in each bottle. I’d call it an art installation. I suppose many would call it ‘that damn freak and his lunatic ideas’ but art is often misunderstood.

Recycling hasn’t worked. All the crap is shipped to China and Africa for recycling and the overflow gets dumped into rivers and then into the sea. China and Africa get the blame for this while we pretend to be all clean and holy. The truth is, it’s our crap plastic that’s coming down those African and Chinese rivers.

China is getting sick of being sent contaminated and generally crap stuff for recycling so are clamping down on what they’ll accept. No more of the shitty stuff.

Recyclers are complaining that the councils sell them crappy stuff. Councils complain that people aren’t washing out the plastics etc before putting them in the recycle bins.

The ones at the end of the line are at fault. These are the people who make no money from the recycling game and who actually pay to have theirs taken away. But they are the ones at fault.

On that basis it’s never going to work. Not while those at the end of the line are expected to not only work for free, but to pay for the privilege. That won’t change.

It was therefore good to see the return of deposit-paid bottles. Some are calling it a tax. It isn’t. It’s a deposit. Basically you pay a retainer to have the bottle and if you bring back the empty bottle, you get that retainer back.

If you just throw the bottle out of your car window or drop it in the street, someone else will collect it and get the deposit money. We can look forward to a return to volunteer litter collectors who turn that litter into sweets.

It would be good to see this applied to glass bottles too but one thing at a time, eh? Besides, glass is not a big deal in the environment. Chuck a bottle into a river and it will soon sink to the bottom. The river will gradually wear it down back into the sand it came from. No toxins, no floating around getting tangled up with marine life, just a gradually eroding bottle.

I’ve seen the plastic bottle deposit in action in Denmark. Other European countries use it too. It does need a good network of the machines that accept the bottles. The machine checks the barcode to make sure it’s not an imported bottle (it’ll spit those back at you). If it’s a legit bottle, the machine shreds it. It doesn’t give cash, it gives a voucher to use in the shop. Well no problem, you’d have used some cash in the shop anyway and not giving cash means junkies can’t load up with bottles to get a fix.

It also means there’s no purpose in printing fake barcodes for a load of imported bottles. Oh, it happens  😉  but only on a small scale – one or two that someone brought back from a holiday. There’s no point in organised crime getting involved, it’s pennies per bottle so once you take off paying for the printed barcodes, paying someone to print them, paying patsies to take them to the machine, there’s nothing left. Besides, it’s all in vouchers.so no cash. You can sell the vouchers at a fraction under face value, sure, but you’ll be lucky to make a penny a bottle. And you have to ship in a load at a time from somewhere that doesn’t have the deposit. No, the crims won’t be interested.

Of course, if the idiots in charge ramp up the deposit enough, it could then become of interest to the Mafia…

It’s a good idea. I’m all for it. The deposit is not a tax, it’s entirely refundable on the return of the bottle just like in the old days. Rather than pay the council to take away our recycling and earn money on it, we get a refund on the used plastic. It will work better than the present system.

As for the vouchers, well, we used to spend the deposits in the shop where we took back the bottles anyway. Vouchers or cash, makes no difference to me. As long as the vouchers aren’t banned from use on baccy and booze, which would be a silly but predictable move on the part of our lunatic government.

Even sillier but impossible to rule out – you’d take back ten Coke bottles and can’t use the voucher to buy Coke. Oh I can well believe the dickheads we have in charge now are capable of making a rule like that.

If the vouchers turn out to be only good for salad and vegetables, I might add plastic bottles to my glass-bottle ‘woooo’ machine.

Or maybe retry my old attempts at melting them down into bricks for garden use.

***

Books –

Underdog Anthology 5 is a definite. There are more than enough stories to make it a ‘go’ but it can always take a few more. Deadline is midnight GMT on the 1st April and if you’re a few hours late, I’ll still consider it. It’s Easterish timed but not Easter themed. This one is the one filling the gap between Christmas and Halloween and I think I’ll keep it that way. The Spring non-themed anthology.

Price rises at the end of this month will not apply to the anthologies because the authors are paid in advance, there are no royalties, and the prices are as low as I can make them. None of the anthologies have made break-even, possibly because I keep giving them away, but that is not what they are for. They are advertising for Leg Iron Books and its authors.They might take a decade to reach break even, if ever, it doesn’t matter.

The price rises will also not apply to books by me. The only ones I have to increase are the ones I pay royalties on – the novels and single author story collections. They won’t go up by a lot but I need to pay my authors more than they get now. They aren’t going to be keen to send me more books if they get a pittance every quarter, and I don’t want to lose any of them just yet.

I only want to lose an author when they get an offer from a big publisher. That’s the point of this venture. I don’t want to be a big publisher, I don’t want to be rich, I don’t want to be in the 40% tax bracket. I’ve been in it twice and it was horrible both times because I don’t want to succeed for half pay. I’d like to make enough to live on, eventually, and see the Leg Iron Books authors make it into the big time. I am not the big time. I’m a step on the way, I hope.

I have been staying up far too late working on Lee Bidgood’s ‘You’ll Be Fine’ because it’s a compelling read. A complex story, tightly written, where even the most apparently irrelevant detail is woven in to a logically bizarre tale. And it has an orange Lada. I actually once worked with someone who had an orange Lada and he took a lot of stick for it. It was a uniquely revolting vehicle.

I hope to finish my so-far trivial edits by tomorrow. Then I have my son’s 30th birthday to deal with (yes, I am old enough to look unironed and well slept in) and then the anthology.

Today I was up in the horrible early time when the sun was on entirely the wrong side of the sky and the car was still frozen to the ground. It was day-job stuff, actual microbiology, but it won’t take effect for a while yet. It will not stop the anthology and will not stop Lee Bidgood’s book work. It won’t even affect Longrider’s next one, which is imminent. It just meant that tonight has been a bit of a wipeout because I’m not designed for mornings.

If you have something for Underdog Anthology 5, get it in by midnight on April 1st. There is a +/- day or so tolerance on this deadline, since it’s not specifically linked to a calendar event but a week late is far too late.

The next anthology will be Halloween. If you have a good scary one, you might want to save it for that.

Free speech is not a gradient

Either a country allows free speech or it does not. There is no in-between. There are no qualifiers. ‘I believe in free speech but…’ No. Stop there. You do not believe in free speech. You believe in approved speech. It is not the same thing.

Free speech means that, sometimes, people will say things you find unpleasant but there’s a way out of that. Don’t listen. Just because someone has free speech does not mean they have the right to force you to listen.

You do not have to agree. You have free speech too, you can tell the speaker exactly what you think of their opinions. And criticise their fashion sense and general hygiene at the same time.

Does this mean that we’d be bickering all the time? Well, you can if you want to. Or you can just not listen. Just walk away. Ignore the idiot. You can still filter through your own preferences by listening to the speech you agree with and ignoring the ones you don’t. You can still have that echo chamber if you want it.

Free speech means you can say whatever you want. It does not mean anyone has to listen, or agree, or publish or disseminate your speech. If you want to write a book filled with antismoker bile and Puritan crap, fine. Under real free speech you are free to do so (actually it would be approved by the current Puritan regime anyway). You do not have the right to demand Leg Iron Books publish it, nor to demand this blog even mentions it.

A couple of years back, there was a troll who insisted I was denying his ‘free speech’ because I blocked him. He was, and probably still is, incapable of understanding that being blocked here does not affect his free speech at all. He can speak all he wants, but I’m not giving him a platform. Similarly on Twitter, blocking/muting someone does not stop them speaking. It just means you’re not listening any more.

Actually, blocking on Twitter works the other way. The person you block can’t see your tweets any more. You have basically muted yourself on their timeline. It’s your own voice that is silenced by blocking. I wonder if all those Righteous Ones who mass-block pre-emptively will ever work that out?

Recently we have seen three people banned from the UK for holding right wing views. They have no history of violence, they just say things some people find uncomfortable. So our government have removed them from the country because our government are idiots. These people are not silenced – far from it. I had not even heard of them and their views before they were banned. I bet there are many people who could say the same but now the internet is abuzz with the news of this Orwellian idiocy perpetrated by, of all things, an allegedly Tory government.

Then we have all this stuff about Jezza Corbyn and his antisemitic Facebook groups. Should he be silenced for saying the things he said? No. If you have free speech it has to work both ways. If I now say ‘I believe in free speech but that kind of talk is hate speech and must be silenced’ then I would be as bad as the screaming harpies of the ‘progressive’ lunatic fringe.

I don’t say Jezza, or anyone else should be silenced. However, if there is any downside to free speech, it is this: what you say can have consequences.

If you go around saying the UK is rubbish, the IRA are the good guys, Muslim terrorists should be celebrated, all white people must die, etc, then you are basically making clear that you are totally unfit to be put in charge of anything.

This doesn’t seem to work though, does it? MPs who state that ‘white people are a problem’ are not even called out on it by their parties. MPs who support anti-Jew groups are excused. There really don’t seem to be any consequences of ‘free speech’.

That’s because we don’t have free speech in the UK. We have approved speech. And approved speakers, who can say things with impunity that the rest of us would be arrested for saying.

We certainly have non-approved speech.

Incidentally, what we have here is another of those ‘charities’ that depend on a constant client base. It is not in their interests to declare any child isn’t transgender. You take your son to them and you will bring home a daughter, and vice versa. These ‘charities’ are very dangerous groups of people and the scope of their activities now goes way beyond the ostracism of smokers and the nagging of fat people.

Note from the article that the police take their policy advice from a charity with a vested interest in keeping themselves in a job. It is no surprise that they use the police to silence dissent and criminalise wrongthink. And why not? Everyone else does.

There are those who have long referred to the UK police as ‘gestapo’ or ‘thought police’. I used to laugh that off as exaggeration. I’m not laughing now. The police do not work for the public now. That is undeniable. They are enforcers for vested interests.

If you are a champion of free speech in the UK you are not fighting to keep it. We used to have it, we don’t have it now. You are fighting to regain it.

It won’t be easy, and you can fully expect to be arrested for it. Wrongthink is a very high priority in the police now. A far higher priority than burglary, shoplifting or the mass rape of children.

You can stick to approved speech and blend in with the herd or you can stand up and say ‘I’m not going to take this any more’. If you stand up, be prepared to be knocked down and then stand up again. Otherwise, resign yourself to the cattle life.

There are many who see this but who stay silent, afraid to break ranks. Their resentment is building and this constant needling over petty things is going to make that resentment explode at some point. It can take a very long time to push the British, especially the English, to go beyond a mere disapproving look here and there. But when they do, they’ve built up such an internal rage that there will be no slow transition. No warning signs. They’ll simply explode.

It can be avoided. All it takes is for the authorities to stop acting like total dicks.

The trouble is, I don’t think they can.

The 23-hour day

Tonight, in the small hours of Sunday morning, 2 am becomes 3 am in the blink of an eye. There are only 23 hours in this Sunday. And I have to be awake for most of them. I know, we get the hour back in the 25-hour day in October but that is six months away so it’s cold comfort.

My parents are visiting. As I expected, they wanted to spend a lot of time with their new great-granddaughter, but this has meant me driving a lot. There are two buses a day out here, no trains even within earshot and the nearest taxi firm is 12 miles away. So I have achieved bugger all publishing work this week and since the office is also the guest room, haven’t even been able to keep up with emails.

Still, the enforced holiday has done me some good. It’s like a refreshing dose of procrastination and I’ll be back with a vengeance after Monday, when they fly away home.

Granddaughter is doing very well and at seven weeks, already has the beginnings of a particularly wicked smile. She is having reflux issues at the moment and wearing her parents out but that will pass. It’s ‘only’ heartburn, which to an adult is a bit of discomfort. To a seven-week-old it is the most agonising thing life has thrown at her so far. And she is very, very capable of expressing her displeasure with a level of unbridled rage that makes her granddad very proud.

Tomorrow is their last full day and they want to spend as much of it as possible with the new arrival. So I have to drive them to Son and Daughter-in-Law’s house and I don’t mind at all. I hope, if I make it to great-granddad age, my son or daughter will do the same for me.

Monday, they have an early flight (by my reckoning) so I might be shattered Monday night but then, it’s back to business.

Having a new granddaughter does mess with a one-man business but I hope everyone finds that understandable. I couldn’t prioritise anything over training a new family member in the Way of Dume. She has to learn taunting, double entendre, insulting the pompous in ways that sound like compliments, and much more.

She’s probably too young to appreciate a toy shrunken head or to inherit my first war axe (I still have it, now well over 40 years old) but I think she needs more gore around her room.

It’s a bit girlie in there…

 

Thinking dark thoughts

It’s what I do. It’s how I find the stories I write. ‘What would happen if…’

The thing is, fiction has to make sense. Real life doesn’t, but fiction does. You can’t just set up a whole future world with no explanation of how it came to be. Okay, you don’t want a long explanation in the story, just hints here and there in conversation, but in writing future-based stories you have to reason out how the world came to the point you’re writing about. If it looks impossible, or implausible, readers will give up on you.

There is an easy way out – set it on another planet or in a fantasy reality, but if you want it to really raise the hairs on the backs of reader’s necks, set it in the near future and make it horrible. It can’t just ‘happen’ though. There has to be at least the possibility that it could really happen.

So let’s say you want to set a future dystopia in a world with a vastly reduced human population. Not just decimated, but driven pretty close to extinction. You have an elite who run things and who made this near-extinction happen so they have a small and easily controlled slave workforce. I actually have a much darker theme than just a slave workforce but I’ll keep that surprise for another time.

How did they do it? How did they reduce the billions of people to just a few million?

Well, there’s war of course. Tessie the Impaler is currently trying to start a war with Russia. The old adage ‘Pick on someone your own size’ comes to mind. As in, someone you have at least a remote chance of beating. I have a feeling war with Russia would go something like this –

Monday: Tessie declares war on Russia.

Tuesday. The EU suddenly finds it doesn’t have to worry about Brexit any more, but now has to hope the easterly winds continue, so they carry the radioactive cinders out into the Atlantic.

Yeah. We aren’t going to win that one. Best to back off a bit, I’d say. Besides, all this talk of ‘we won’t stand for you killing people in the UK’ rings rather hollow when they won’t even identify the ones doing the daily acid-based face changes, street acupuncture demonstrations and occasional exploding vest incidents. Yet one dead Russian spy is enough to declare war?

War won’t work for this story because it would leave large areas of the planet uninhabitable and spread a radioactive cloud over most of the rest of it. No point achieving your goal of massive population reduction if you have to spend the rest of your life in an underground bunker.

The same goes for a rapidly-spread disease. How can the elites guarantee they won’t catch it and how can they be sure it’s finally gone once it’s done its job? Back  to the underground bunker…

I need, for this story, a world largely pristine but with an awful lot of unmarked graves. How to get there?

An idea arrived today. Two more days to the vernal equinox, the official start of spring, and it’s -2 degC out there and snowing. It’s still snowing heavily on a lot of the northern hemisphere and we’re told it’s global warming.

Because it’s ‘global warming’, heating costs are taxed whatever you use. Electricity, gas, oil, all taxed to combat ‘global warming’. We are told the wood burning stoves and fireplaces are a very bad thing and we should get rid of them. New houses are built with no chimneys and have been for some time now. When the power goes off,  the gas runs out and the oil delivery trucks can’t get through, there is no way to heat those houses. No way at all.

So, I thought, wait for signs of a coming ice age and make sure nobody has the means to survive it. Great. Population wipeout with no effort and no environmental impact. Well, apart from clearing away the thawing corpses when it’s over.

There’s only one little niggle. A small ice age, not a total snowball earth, would really only affect countries near the poles. Those in the middle, around the tropics, would hardly be affected. That’s a lot of people still to get rid of. How?

Aha. Make them move north.

Tell them global warming is going to make their country too hot for human life. Tell them they can have free benefits and never have to work if they come to the north. Even go so far as to start wars in their countries so they have to flee.

A solar minimum is approaching. It’s going to get colder. Maybe not a full-on ice age but the cold this year is only a taste of what’s coming. The scene is set for this story to be plausible, I just need to work out the details.

So, all you need to do is concentrate the world’s population in countries that are going to freeze, and then wait. When the ice hits, turn off the power. Stop the gas. Make the oil too expensive. Make coal and wood fires illegal. Wait for inevitable crop failures. Even if you don’t get a real ice age, a few of those seriously cold winters will drastically reduce your population for you – especially among those who moved from hot countries and who are unused to sub-zero temperatures.

You’ll have riots, sure. You’ll have people attacking each other for food and shelter. What the cold doesn’t kill, the neighbours will.

In this context, a new tension with Russia actually helps. Russia might get sufficiently pissed off to turn off the gas pipelines. They’ll need that gas themselves anyway, when it gets seriously cold.

I don’t think this is enough to get to the low population levels I need for the story but it’s a good start. There’s still China and India, for example, densely populated and probably mostly okay in a hypothetical ice age. Russia also – they know how to deal with deep cold and Putin isn’t playing the globalist game. He’s not going to turn off the heating.

But then I’m working in fiction. Putin might be replaced, as might Trump (who also wouldn’t play along) and then the corpsicle count goes way up.

Actually, the story can work even if China, Russia, the USA and India are untouched in this first round. The major wipeout would be in Europe. Once it’s done you can further reduce population by means of constant wars with other countries. Would the other countries use nukes? On what? You have nothing left to aim a nuke at! The major cities are abandoned and the population is now in a series of small towns, reliant for news on a media that’s totally under elite control.

Once you have a base (Europe) you can then unleash biological weaponry on the rest of the world. Probably best to do that before the ice age ends so nobody from the other countries wants to come to Europe. The elite are sealed in to one area while the rest of the world’s population is vastly reduced by a particularly virulent virus. Such a weapon would, of course, be most effective in densely populated countries.

This still needs some thought, but I think I can come up with a plausible scenario for a fairly rapid depopulation of the planet. Leaving an elite and a small, easily controlled population to serve them.

If I do though, in the current climate, should I publish it or just keep it quiet?

 

More writing stuff

A magazine called ‘Three-Lobed Burning Eye’ is looking for submissions and they pay well – but they only need six stories so competition is pretty damn fierce! It’s speculative fiction, something I’ve never been able to define accurately. If anyone fancies a go, here’s the link. (thanks are due to my old pal Lesia for the tip).

They used to pay per word, with a maximum. That’s not a bad idea. It would get around the issue of authors getting paid the same per anthology story even when one is long and another is short. I’ll give it some thought. Maybe apply something along those lines for the Halloween one. It’ll be Number Six, appropriately.

The next anthology (5) isn’t really Easter, it’s just coming out around Easter time. There’s no defined theme so I need a title for Underdog Anthology Five. Might just put a two-finger salute on the cover and call it ‘V’. Suggestions welcome.

Stories have been coming in. The book is a ‘go’. There’s still time, I won’t close submissions until midnight on the 1st April because I won’t be able to anyway. I will have a week of parental visits next week, I have a meeting about actual science work on the 29th and I’m working on Lee Bidgood’s book this month too. You have until the last chilling toll of the midnight bell of All Fool’s Day to get a story done and emailed in.

I will have contracts and author payments completed by the 5th April so the whole book will be in this tax year. I can do without the complications of having half a book in another tax year! Also I want all the expenses in this tax year because of a devious reason  😉 The book might come out after the 5th but the money side needs to be settled before.

These anthologies are not going to be subject to the price rises I mentioned. Those increases are only for authors getting royalties. The anthologies are paid in advance and none of them have so far reached break-even but that’s not really the point of them. The point is to get Leg Iron Books and the authors advertised so the anthologies are going to stay as cheap as possible. They will make me a few pennies per book, no more. It will probably take quite a few years of sales before they tap the door of profit. That’s okay. The single-author books are what the income is aimed at.

Remember to include every previously published work in your author page in these anthologies. Even if it’s published outside Leg Iron Books. That author page is your CV and you never know, maybe one day a big publisher will find a copy and actually read it. Then you’ll move on to much bigger things.

I don’t want any author thinking ‘I’m with Leg Iron Books for life’. I’m never going to be a big publisher and I’m very unlikely to ever be able to pay big money. If you get an offer from the big boys, go for it. I, and the remaining authors, would really appreciate if you were to mention this little starting point but nothing is compulsory. Other than the author contract, of course, and the big boys could buy that out without a second thought.

 

Well, I suppose I should get the blog back to its normal ranty self soon. I could comment on the Muslim child-rape gangs who have been operating in UK cities for decades but the government, police and the BBC have ignored them and still do so what can this little backwater blog achieve?

I could go on about FGM but the government, police and BBC don’t care about it. Feminists are too busy dressing up in hijabs to care about girls being mutilated and then forced to wear the things they wear for fun and they don’t care about women who take off that same hijab getting two years of prison in Iran. No, the feminists wear it to prove they are Righteous and then take it off and nothing happens to them. Must be great to be a feminist. It’s like being a Muslim woman for a day with no downside.

Until they find out what happens to any Muslim who tries to leave. Basically, feminists, when you put on that hijab you have converted. When you take it off you are an apostate. Let the games commence.

This past week, three people of right-wing persuasion were denied entry to the UK in case they say things that might upset someone. Meanwhile ISIS fighters are welcomed back with a free house and free money. Saddo the Khunt has been to America to tell them free speech is bad if it contains hurty words while the city he is mayor of descends into a place even Somalians would flee.

The government cannot understand why the population are getting a bit miffed. Haven’t we banned any words that could hurt them? Haven’t we wrecked enough of their favourite foods and vices yet? What are they complaining about? If they have no bread, let them eat cake.

If they have no sugar, let them eat aspartame.

Yeah. If real history was still taught in schools, everyone out there would know exactly what happens next.

I don’t think the government reads history.