I have just discovered that David Davis has shuffled off this mortal coil. One of the very, very few internet people I actually met in real life. A great guy, with a lovely house and a wonderful family. I’ve been working on a rather large and complex book he had written and was keen to see in print. I can only apologise for not getting it done in time. I’ll try to contact his family to see if they still want me to go ahead with this, after a suitable interval. Now is not the time.
Delays seem to have come thick and fast since the whole Covid debacle started. My father, my uncle, a cousin’s son all died. My father’s other brother died and so did his son. Several aunts have been hospitalised with not-good prognoses.
I was at my father’s funeral but the stupid people in government would not let me attend the others. Several authors have also died. David was one of the anthology authors, about to make his debut into novels. Taken too soon.
For me, I had car problems which could not be fixed because the dealerships all shut down, a bigger thing than you’d think considering I live where public transport is almost a conspiracy theory. Family issues (my grandson suffered a stroke which went undiagnosed too long because nobody believes a 10 month old can have a stroke, my granddaughter was diagniosed autistic because she doesn’t like people very much and taught herself addition – I don’t see any of that as autistic, I see it as sensible and genius). Then I got a kidney thing that turned out to be a stone that passed with much pain and red wee. Lately, Gloom Dog, approaching 15 years old, went downhill so fast we actually considered the Final Needle. She’s on better meds now but she still has canine dementia and doesn’t always remember who I am. She’s very clingy to CStM who she’s known all her life. Still, the vet says she’s physically okay and not in pain so we’re keeping her. She is, however, starting to get expensive with her drug habit.
It’s also author payment time. Only three authors made anything and none of them were me so those are going out a little late. It doesn’t really matter, nobody is retiring on this kind of income so a few days late on the price of a beer (I don’t actually know what that is now) won’t change anyone’s life.
I do feel terrible about not finishing work on David’s book before he passed away but I really didn’t expect him to leave so abruptly. He was so full of life and ambition, I expected him to outlive me.
I am seeing reports that there are plasmids in the mRNA jabs. I’ve been retired for years so have no means to check this myself and although I still know some who could check it, I’d have to get them vials of jab juice and I don’t have access to any. Still, those reporting the presence of plasmids are reliable sources so I have to take it on trust.
So. What’s a plasmid?
Bacterial DNA is not organised into chromosomes like human, animal or plant DNA. It’s a long circular loop of DNA that just sits inside the cell. There’s no defined nucleus.
A plasmid is a tiny circular DNA that isn’t part of the bacterium’s main DNA, but it can be read and transcribed just the same. So far there is nothing to say that plasmids do anything inside a human cell (doesn’t mean they don’t, we just haven’t found anything to suggest they do) but they have quite an impact on a bacterial cell. They effectively give it extra genes.
Now, plasmids do not spontaneously form so the argument of ‘well those vials were out of date so…’ is irrelevant. Out of date mRNA does not spontaneously form plasmid DNA. In fact, plasmid DNA is a lot more stable than mRNA so they’d outlast the actual treatment part of the jabs.
Where do plasmids come from? Do bacteria produce them? It’s not known for sure, but it’s speculated that they might come from bits of DNA picked up from shattered cells, or they might be the next logical step in bacterial viruses. Some plasmids cause the bacterium to produce long tubes called pili which can attach to another bacterium. The plasmid then replicates itself and sends a copy of itself to the other bacterium. Again, I have not seen evidence that this can happen in human cells. My guess would be that it probably doesn’t.
There was a classroom experiment to show this. A strain of bacterium (usually Escherichia coli since it’s easy to grow) that carried a plasmid with antibiotic resistance genes was mixed with another strain known to have no such resistance. You’d let them ‘mate’ and then break the pili by violent swirling at set times and see how long it took for the receiving bacteria to acquire the antibiotic resistance. In that way you could roughly ‘map’ the genes on the plasmid, especially if it coded for resistance to more than one antibiotic.
So we know they are there and we know how they transfer and we know what they can do. We are also pretty sure they won’t do much in human cells. So why do we even care?
You are not just one organism. There are at least 400 species of bacteria in your gut and the things they do are not inconsequential. They have a massive effect on your health and well being. If they are doing well, if the right species dominate, you are more resistant to gut infections and your immune system is in tip top shape. Encourage the wrong ones and you’ll soon be shitting water through every hole and will feel as if Death is tapping you on the shoulder every day. They really are that important.
Those are the ones affected by the plasmids. They will take them up and they will use the genes encoded on them. Bacteria are not thinking beings, they are bags of chemical reactions and a plasmid is nothing more than the instructions for some new chemical reactions. Bacteria do not think ‘oh that instruction is a bad idea’. If they have the DNA to do it, they will do it.
So, what if you give them a plasmid that will harm their host? Will they use it? Yes they will. They have no concept of ‘host’ and don’t even know you exist. If you give them a plasmid producing spike protein it will be produced in your gut for the rest of your life unless Ano-Rod or an especially vicious Vindaloo blasts your gut completely clear. Which isn’t possible. No matter how hard you flush through, they’ll grow back. They are remarkably tenacious.
Unless… you give some bacteria a plasmid that gives them an advantage over some other group. It’s a constant battle throughout your gut between the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t want the bad guys to get an edge. So giving the bad guys a plasmid with an advantage means the bad guys win and that means… you don’t. I don’t know what is in these plasmids but what I’m hearing from intestinal microbiologists doesn’t look good.
There is no reason why these plasmids should be in the shots. They don’t form by themselves, they’d have to be included in the shots either by accident or design. They should not be there.
Why are they there? Well, I’ll leave the speculation to you.
Soon we are to be under some ‘treaty’ that is really a coup. The WHO, UN, WEF etc (all the same thing really) are about to be able to impose any ridiculous rules they like for any ridiculous reason they dream up. And the drones will not only delight in going along with it, they will join the mob to battle those of us who object to it. It’s not a new thing.
So, how will they get this through? It’s both insane and ridiculous to anyone looking at it, therefore they don’t want people looking at it. That’s why ther are so many silly Boris Johnson Covid breaches appearing now and the whole Phil the Gopher nonsense that so many of us have known about for years anyway.
We know Clownhead Boris, like all his gang of ludicrous government arses, wasn’t in the least bit scared of Covid. We know Phil the Phiddler had a thing for the younger male and we’ve known it for a few years now. None of this is new. None of it is going to result in prosecutions. It’s all a load of bollocks. Just like the new allegations against Rolf Harris that have only come out after he died and can’t deny them. He was over fucking 90 years old. If he had done something to you, wouldn’t you have mentioned it sometime in the last century? Why now? Distraction.
These are petty distractions and they work exceptionally well. So many are now talking about Phil the Poofter even though the things he did could be described as unprofessional, sneaky and devious but not actually illegal. So many are talking about the Boris Terrible Things while ignoring the obvious Terrible Things all his gang did to us. The other side too – don’t forget the Starmer Curry Party. Oh they are not different. You can pretend they are if you like but you are an idiot if you believe it. They are all the same.
Focus on the thing they don’t want focused on. The ‘pandemic treaty’ has nothing to do with pandemics. It is all about control. Ultimate control. Of the few that are left after the next round.
The UK lunatic government wants to impose price caps on food. Idiots think this is a good idea. Farmers’ costs are rising exponentially. The price they get paid, under price caps, cannot rise. So farmers go out of business and shut down. Do you really think that will be a good thing? Well then don’t come to my house when you’re starving.
There are many idiot children – and even some adults (I use the term loosely) who think they don’t need farms because they buy all their food in Tesco. They have a big surprise coming in their future.
The madman John Kerry, America’s carbon footprint messiah, has decided that farmers should stop producing food for the betterment of the starvinng masses. Let them eat cake.
In the Netherlands the government wants to take over all farmlands to stop them producing food.
If you support this, do not come to my house for food. You are going to starve and it’s what you voted for. You come here, you are food. It is going to come to that.
The idiots in charge do not understand what they are creating. They think we will all just do as they say. They think the illegal immigrants they drag in will be under their control. They genuinely believe they are some kind of master race when really they are just a bunch of smug dicks. The same species, the same race, but the worst, not the best of us.
They are not the ones we should worship. They are the ones we should cull.
The New Scare is bird flu. Two people in the UK, both of whom work closely with chickens, have been ‘tested positive’ for bird flu. We will leave aside the fact that the test itself is bollocks and assume, for fun, that the test reults were correct.
Right. I can see why schools no longer teach real science because this result means nothing at all. It will scare the pants off those who have no grounding in real science because it sounds like those two people have some new deadly virus. That’s the game we play now.
Oh no! They are doomed! What are their symptoms?
Um… they don’t have any. They are in perfect health. They just ‘tested positive’.
They work with chickens. A chicken with a respiratory virus, indeed a thousand chickens with it, means the air in the chicken sheds is loaded with it. Anyone who goes in there will breathe it in. It will get stuck in the mucus in their respiratory tract. Test for it and you will find it. That does not mean it is infecting those people, it means they breathed it in and it got stuck.
If you work with dogs all day, every day, sooner or later you will test positive for distemper and kennel cough. Does that mean those diseases have crossed the species barrier?
No. It means the air you breathed at work had those diseases in it. You inhaled it. The bugs got stuck in your mucus. They are in there, inert, because they cannot infect you. The test shows positive for their presence, not for their infectivity.
If I were to test you for an E. coli variant called K88, I might find it in you. Then I can scare you shitless with all those pig studies showing how damaging it is. Oh, it is. In pigs. It has no effect on you at all.
E. coli O157 is very dangerous to you. It has no effect whatsoever on cattle, some of whom carry it and drop it out in those large round blobs of stinky brownness they leave in their fields. Still, you could test those cattle and they’d test positive for E. coli O157 while totally asymptomatic.They will remain asymptomatic forever. It doesn’t infect them.
Just as those two chicken farmers are going to remain asymptomatic forever. Bird flu will infect birds, it will not infect bird farmers. It might, but it has never shown any sign of human to human transmission and the supermarket’s frozen chickens have had their respiratory organs ripped out so they pose no danger to you.
So what is this new bird flu bollocks all about? As usual, it’s about money. Money derived from a form of science that the alchemists of old would find derisory. I did suggest this a while ago.
Bird flu has not produced a human mutation. We cannot know the form it would take if it did. Therefore a vaccine for human bird flu is not possible.
If we have a vaccine for the current form of bird flu, why are we not vaccinating chickens? Just let that float around your head for a minute.
Bird men… that puts me in mind of the really old Flash Gordon movie in which the flying people were led by one Brian Blessed. It sounds like a digression but really, it’s relevant.
I have just heard from Amazon that print book base prices are to rise on June 20th. It was bound to happen, costs are going up everywhere, but hopefully it won’t be by much.
This should not affect eBooks at all. I hope.
The book prices for print books include the costs of materials (paper, ink etc), the cost of getting someone to print it and put it all together, and postage. Yeah, postage is only free to the buyer. It’s in the price of the book. Leg Iron Books makes pennies in royalties on each book sold, most of it goes to Amazon.
At the moment, with sales low, all the royalties go to the authors. I get the pennies from the anthologies and my own books, I don’t take a cut at all from other authors’ royalties. Everything is priced as low as possible while still leaving a little profit.
So… all the print books are priced very close to the minimum. This inflationary increase means that, to keep the authors actually getting something, I will have to increase the prices. I will do this once I know what the cost increases are going to be. Around June 20th, all the books on sale are going to have to increase in price to keep the author royalties the same.
I don’t want to do it. Amazon don’t want to do it. But inflation is running so high that neither of us have any choice. It is possible that the increases might send some books, especially the very tight margins on the anthologies, into zero royalties and that is not a good business model.
As I wrote above, this should not affect eBooks although those have a ‘delivery’ charge too. There has been no mention of an increase in that so far.
Fortunately, all our books are 6″ by 9″ format or smaller. Books over that size seem to be getting hit harder – we don’t have any of those here. So, it is likely that the price increases will be small but there will be increases.
This does not affect just Leg Iron Books. It’s going to apply across the board on independent small publishers and self-publishers. If you’ve been eyeing up a book on Amazon and thinking about buying it, make that decision before June 20th.
Of course, if you prefer eBooks, you probably have nothing to worry about. Yet.
There is a proliferation of people claiming to be trans-something. Transsexual is a real thing, sure, but it’s a very rare thing. It’s also a spectrum that starts with transvestite (feels comfortable wearing clothing traditionally intended for the other sex) right up to those that go for the full surgery to change their bits forever.
Yes, forever. It cannot be reversed and the procedures involved are still experimental and leave lasting problems and scars. They also provide the Pharmers with a lifetime customer.
Lately there is ‘transabled’ in which perfectly healthy people demand to have limbs cut off so they can be disabled. This is just pure insanity. Any disabled person will tell you they wish they weren’t disabled. Nobody sane wants to be confined to a wheelchair or to be missing an arm or to be blind or deaf. For some, that’s the reality of life but I very much doubt you’ll find a single person who wouldn’t rather be fully fit.
Sure, you can live a full life with a disability but it would be so much easier without it. I was lucky, my mother refused thalidomide when pregnant with me, otherwise I might be typing with my toes now and dealing with the consequences of that deranged experiment. I’m not, I’m typing with a full set of fingers and I recognise how lucky I am to be doing that. If I’d been a thalidomide kid I’d hope I’d have the fortitude to adapt to living with it, as many have, but I would never want to be disabled.
I am not even remotely trans anything. So I don’t know how it feels. In Scotland, a man in a kilt means nothing – I wore kilts to both of my children’s weddings and I actually own the full regalia now. It’s bloody expensive but it’s comfortable and I don’t feel at all strange wearing it. I do not feel as if I’m pretending to be a woman. But then, it’s the only legal way to walk around with a sharp knife in your sock. I don’t think many women do that. Maybe in Glasgow…
Anyway. Any adult who wants to take hormones for the rest of their lives and who wants to have the experimental surgery with a full understanding of what it entails… fine with me. They are adults, they are entitled to make their own decisions. However, that is no longer what it’s all about. Look at this –
As the original poster said, it’s a billion dollar industry now and billion dollar industries don’t just give up and go away. There are nowhere near enough genuinely fully-trans people to sustain a business like this so they have to ‘encourage’ new customers.
Where do they find them? They go after children. Especially those on the autism spectrum who are prone to being persuaded, and those with idiot parents who are willing to sacrifice their children to appear ‘right-on’.
Well now. It could be considered a form of Darwinism. Those idiot parents won’t be getting grandchildren so their DNA is going to be removed from the gene pool in a generation. Is that really a bad thing? It’s a tough call. In one sense it would be good to clean up the gene pool but in another it’s condoning child abuse. And I cannot condone child abuse.
Now there is a whole trans activist movement and a real push to get kids mutilated and sterilised in the name of money and fashion. They are putting kids on puberty blockers to stop their development, and the lunatics say ‘oh but it can be reversed if they change their minds’. No. It really can’t. You have stopped their development at a critical time. There is no ‘catch-up’ option. You stop genital and breast development at that critical time and their bits will be child sized for the rest of your childrens’ lives. Okay, maybe you didn’t sterilise them but you have ensured they are very, very unlikely to give you grandchildren and therefore.. Darwin award.
I’m also seeing a conflation between drag acts and transsexuals. Drag artists do not claim to be real women, at least not the genuine ones. I remember Lily Savage, Dame Edna Everage, Cupid Stunt, the acts done by Les Dawson and Dick Emery and many others. None of them ever claimed to actually be women, none of them tried to get into women’s toilets, and neither did the drag ‘aunts’ of pantomime.
This is where I take issue with ‘drag acts are only for adults’. The likes of Lily Savage and Cupid Stunt were definitely adult-only. Their material was hilariously filthy. But the pantomime dames… the shows were for kids primarily. Still, the pantomime dames didn’t flash their danglies and read stories about bumsex and wanking. They were just funny caricatures. Seems that has changed now…
Then there’s Eddie Izzard. He used to be funny when he was just doing the travesty thing. Now he’s queueing outside women’s toilets when he still has the bits for a quick wee in the gents
We have rapists who suddenly identify as a woman and they get put in women’s prisons where they indulge in a bit more raping. Well, who saw that coming eh? Everyone but the judiciary, it seems. I’d say that if a rapist identified as a woman and wanted to be put in a women’s prison, they should be surgically disarmed first. Not optional. You claim you’re a woman? Fine. Surgery on the way to prison.
I have a feeling that the trend for rapists claiming to be trans would stop remarkably suddenly.
It’s a joke, but it’s a profitable joke. Not for the activists, those are just useful idiots, but for the clinics it’s a goldmine.
Until those mutilated kids grow up and start to sue…
Anthology 20 is delayed because I can’t contact one author for final comments and a bio page. He hasn’t been online in his usual haunts since April 13th and I know he’s been unwell for some time so I’m hoping it’s just an internet glitch on his end.
I can’t delay it any longer. It’s now May and I need this one done so I can get back to the other books in the queue. So, I’ll be going ahead with loading up, and I can load an updated version in the event he comes back with any changes. This does mean that the early versions won’t have those changes but it can’t be helped.
There have been so many delays this year. I’m going to have to crank up the caffeine to catch up!
UPDATE
It’s all loaded up but the print books are delayed by a new Amazon thing, whereby the books are not listed as ‘in stock’ for up to 5 days after they appear on the site.
They are print-on-demand. They are never ‘in stock’. I don’t know what game they are playing here but I have no choice but to go along with it.
Lately we are being bombarded with this insane notion of ‘fifteen minute cities’. Apparently it was thought up by some French guy who envisaged a world where everything you needed was a fifteen minute walk or less away. Work, school, any shops you required, all within a short walk.
It sounds really nice, and it was. We had that back in the 1960s and 70s. There was a butcher and greengrocer three streets away. Doctor and dentist about five streets away. I’d walk to school – about 15-20 minutes. I didn’t need a lift in a car. Even the fancy shops were less than half an hour’s walk into the ‘big town’ that had a high street. That’s how it used to be and I’d be quite happy if the Frenchman’s vision took us back to that.
However. That is not what we are getting. Our lunatics in charge have taken the ’15 minute city’ idea and swirled it in a pot with Orwell and Stalin. They have interpreted it as a place where you will be fined and punished for moving outside your defined zone.
They are not installing amenities within 15 minutes of your home. They are installing blockades and cameras and fines if you dare move outside your alloted space.
This was not the idea. It was not meant to be enforced. It was meant to be convenient. The 15 minute city idea was intended to produce places where you didn’t need to go far to get stuff. Not to produce places where you weren’t allowed to go far. The original concept still allowed travel, it just meant that for the essentials, you didn’t have to.
There were no lockdowns, road blocks and fines in the original concept. No need. You want to go shopping? There are local shops selling all you need within walking distance. You want to go further? Fine. You can. You just don’t have to.
The original concept is what I grew up with. Sure, you could take a bus to the ‘big town’ but you can just walk there in 30 minutes anyway. I walked to school, to the shops, everything.
What happened?
Supermarkets. The first one I remember appearing was Carrefour. It looked like an aircraft hangar. Everything was in there. Now we have so many of them and they really can’t set one up within 15 minutes of everyone.
The supermarkets killed off all the little shops. They couldn’t compete on price. Those small shops that were the heart of the original ’15 minute’ communities were eradicated by the big guns. They are not coming back and there is no effort underway to even try to bring them back.
The ’15 minute’ cities are going to be ghettoes. If you are more than 15 minutes from one of the supermarkets you will have to pay for delivery and since you have no options, they can charge whatever they want.
If you get sick and you are more than 15 minutes from a doctor then, basically, write your will.
The implementation of 15 minute cities and ‘low traffic zones’ does not include the provision of essential services within 15 minutes of your home, as the original idea intended.
It will simply stop you travelling more than 15 minutes away from your designated pod.
Quick book update – Underdog Anthology 20 is now out with the authors for final checks, some have already responded and it hasn’t been 24 hours yet. So, hopefully not much longer. The next one is a complex job with many photos, it’s already under way and I hope not to be too much longer about that one either.
Okay. the carbon dioxide bollocks. Anyone my age learned the carbon cycle at school but it seems they no longer teach that. At its barebones basic, animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2, plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen, using the carbon to make sugars and polysaccharides and proteins. Eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere and all the plants die, and shortly after that, so does everything else. Because we need oxygen and there won’t be any plants producing it. Everything dies.
Except a few species of anaerobic bacteria. They don’t need oxygen. Life on Earth goes back to its original state – factory reset, if you like – to start all over again. I have to wonder if this kind of Great Reset has happened before. A thriving planet sent back to the beginning by a species as stupid as us. Or at least, as stupid as those who think they rule us.
The Billy Gates Gruff and his pals think that it’s a great idea to blot out the sun to stop ‘global warming’ while simultaneously making us reliant on solar power. They cannot see any issue with that. They want to spend millions – perhaps billions – on machinery to take CO2 out of the air while cutting down all the trees that already do the same thing for free so they can install solar panels under a blotted-out sun.
This whole planet is going to be the galaxy’s Easter Island to alien explorers. Dead, treeless, and covered in meaningless monuments. They will wonder how any species could be so stupid as to destroy their environment in the name of saving it. They will marvel at the environmental destruction of lithium and neodymium mining, the horrors of cobalt mining, and the ruins of the ridiculous ‘carbon capture’ buildings and they will wonder why we didn’t just leave it to nature and accept that the climate has cycles we can do nothing to stop or change.
Carbon dioxide is 0.04% of the atmosphere. With all our burning of coal, oil, gas, wood, why is it not far more? Well our contribution is infinitesimal compared to all the animals, birds, insects, sea life and bacterial activity pumping it out. The only way to prevent carbon dioxide emissions is to eradicate all life on the planet. So why aren’t we seeing so much more of it?
The Church of Climatology want you to believe that CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries. The truth is, every emitted CO2 molecule has minutes at best before it’s taken into a tree, shrub, flower or blade of grass. What is actually amazing is that we can detect any at all.
So you can’t get on a plane carrying 200 people for one trip while they can get on a plane carrying one person for a much longer trip. You must fear rising sea levels while they live in beachfront homes. You must give up your one car while they ride in armoured cavalcades.
The most amazing part is that they have useful idiots who believe it all. They will slash the tyres of SUVs so they have to be replaced with new tyres while the old ones go into landfill and that’s ‘green’. They will block roads so traffic sits idling or goes the long way round, wasting more fuel because that’s ‘green’. They claim gas fracking is deadly for the environment while they ignore the toxic lakes and acid pools of their masters’ rare earth mines. And yet they still believe they are saving the environment even while they are helping to utterly destroy it.
The useful idiots do all this while making full use of petroleum products. They live in homes where they wake up warm because nobody has to get up to light the fire (how many remember that – and frost on the inside of the windows?). They film their antics on plastic machinery that cannot exist without oil. They sail their righteous voyages in ships powered by diesel engines.
They usher in a new 16th century world that they think will not apply to them. Oh they are going to be so very surprised and unprepared.
Well, if they win, they’ll all be dead within a week. They have no idea how to grow or hunt, the evisceration of a rabbit, pheasant or deer will make them throw up or pass out, they have no idea which wild berries are safe to eat and using any tool that doesn’t need to be plugged in or recharged is absolutely alien to them. As is any possibility of making fire, which they are terrified of anyway.
How did that happen? Less than half a century ago (well it was yesterday here) people had no issue with lighting a fire in their living rooms. Now they think a tiny wood stove will kill them all, when a roaring coal fire was pretty much all that kept them alive in winter.
The descent into stupid was fast, and it’s continuing. Perhaps it can be reversed.
If we stop putting morons in charge, and stop doing the moronic things they say.
Just a quick note to prove I’m still alive. The kidney thing seems to have cleared up on its own. Blood and urine tests showed nothing, although they were nearly the same colour so the doctor knows I’m not making it up. I’ll get an appointment for an ultrasound scan to see what’s up at some point. By the time that happens I’ll probably have recovered completely. I’ll go anyway – hell, I paid into this system throughout my career and they rarely even saw me. Plus, I want to know if there’s anything else lurking that could cause problems.
In other news, my mother is visiting this week so I’m not getting much of anything done. There’s no public transport out here so I’m chaffeur until Tuesday. This has (further!) delayed several books in progress including Anthology 20 – although I have done the author contracts and payments for those who wanted cash, and made some progress assembling it and making a cover. The cover isn’t complete, here’s what it looks like so far…
Yes it’s dark, as are most of the stories in it. I have to admit I like it that way. I hoped to have the final-checks PDF out by now but I’m pretty knackered by the time I get to the computer and if I’m not concentrating while assembling, it all goes to hell very quickly indeed. Especially when inserting internal and external links in the eBook version!
I keep saying we’ll get back to normal service soon but I’m not going to say it this time because every time I do, something else happens.
So, I’m not ready for the Last Ride just yet. Still working, just at a very, very slow pace at the moment.
underdogs bite upwards 