A silent Halloween

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The observant will have noticed that there has been no call for stories for this year’s Halloween anthology, and that nothing happened with the Spring anthology.

I have been rather more ill than I would ever admit to myself. I am recovering but it is taking a lot longer than it used to. It’s probably time to admit to myself that I am getting old and no longer have the regenerative abilities I used to have. The last few years weren’t great – kidney stones, sepsis, flu – and this year’s bout of bronchitis left me far more damaged than I expected. It has taken months so far to get anywhere near normal. I will fully recover though. Through sheer persistent bloodymindedness. As always.

Nevertheless, I have taken the agonising decision to cancel this year’s Underdog Anthologies. I have a hell of a lot more single-author books in the backlog and the anthologies are a lot more work than those. A single-author book involves one set of edits on a single writing style, one contract, one person to talk to. The last anthology (Monster) involved 40 of them. I have not yet recovered sufficient concentration to deal with that. I have done no writing myself for most of the year either. If I can come up with a Halloween story in time, I will post it here, but I won’t guarantee it.

I admit it burns me to the core to cancel the Halloween anthology. It’s my absolute favourite. Still, I hope to revive the anthologies next year. There are now 24 of them and I remember feeling that I was being incredibly optimistic in calling the first one ‘First Volume’. There will be a Volume 25, but it isn’t going to be this year.

Also, none of the anthologies have yet made a profit. They weren’t intended to be for profit, that’s why I priced them so low. They were intended to showcase new authors. They did that pretty well, I think. Mark Ellott is a Leg Iron Books success story – he’s left us and gone solo and is doing pretty well, but he has stated that he might never have started otherwise.

Still, the outlay on the anthologies has been a bit of a drain on finances so I am once again approaching skint. I’ve been here several times before, it’s hardly a new experience, but this time I’m doing something about it before I hit the red line.

I have been loading all kinds of things on eBay. Their new system is a bit strange but I’m getting used to it. It could be a while before I actually get paid from them but it’s building up quickly. I have so may things i don’t need any more…

One thing that’s improved is the disconnect from PayPal. It used to be that eBay took their cut of the sale and then PayPal took a cut of the final price – including postage. Which meant that if something sold for 99p, after charges, you were paying to have it taken away. That doesn’t happen now. eBay takes control of postage charges which can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It’s a lot harder to combine postage on multiple sales now.

I have finally decided to give up on N gauge. 9mm track is hard to put trains back on after derailing, when your eyes get old. It’s just hard to part with some of the engines, especially the 9F, but I think the days are coming. I do have two 9Fs in OO gauge…

I also have OO, OH, O, and a little excess G scale to dispose of as well as a lot of lab and fermentation equipment and general ‘stuff’. Cleaning out my packrat existence could take a while but I doubt my kids want to deal with it if I ever manage to die.

Okay. I’ll get back to commenting on the state of the world soon, although it’s currently more horrible than any Halloween story I’ve ever written or read.

They were right

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In May I experienced, for the first and hopefully last time, a bout of acute bronchitis. It was the nastiest thing I have ever had, and I had most of the ‘childhood’ diseases before there were vaccines for them.

Still, by mid June I was starting to feel a bit better. At that time, everyone I know who had experienced bronchitis told me that it takes a long, long time to recover from it. Weeks to months. Naturally, I didn’t believe them – I was already able to sleep lying down and I could stand up for a while without gasping for breath, so I was surely recovering. It couldn’t take much longer. Even though CStM, who had a dose of the same thing in March, is even now getting hit with coughing fits and random fatigue. I still believed myself immune. Hey, I’m the guy who was diagnosed with sepsis, held in hospital for days, and who was sneaking out for a smoke several times a day. Surely a mere lung infection can’t stop me?

Well, they were right. I’m still gradually recovering but I’m certainly not there yet. I can still say ‘It all grows back’ but this time it’s taking a lot longer than usual. I’m still running out of breath with mild exertion. I have times where my lungs feel like they are the size of a grapefruit – breathing is shallow and gasping. Those times do pass as the day develops and my lung capacity improves after the overnight phlegm buildup is cleared, but that’s not the worst effect.

I had/have plans to read some of the short stories on YouTube. I can’t even attempt that until I can be sure to last long enough without a hacking coughing fit. None of the stories include any such coughing so I couldn’t even pretend it was intentional. The coughing arrives without warning and can last a few minutes so unless I feel like putting up videos with random jump-cuts, I can’t do that yet.

The worst after-effect so far has been on my ability to concentrate. I have not written a single line of a story since this thing hit. I cannot focus on editing, so the last anthology is likely to be aborted. I hope that at least some of the submitted stories can be moved to Halloween because I really want that to work, even if I’m not in it. I’ll even consider making the Halloween one an open genre book, just this once, just to be fair to those who have submitted.

I have achieved next to nothing since this monstrous disease hit. Model building? I haven’t even looked at any of the models in progress. Gardening is down to very slow grass mowing. I had plans for decorating – all shelved. My attention span currently suits X/Twitter and one-line responses. I even have trouble responding to emails. I can only apologise for that and also to the authors waiting for responses to other submissions, as well as those who submitted to the spring/summer anthology.

I am improving. Slowly. It is taking far, far longer than I expected. A long time friend told me he had bronchitis thirty years ago and it took him eight weeks to recover. He’s the same age as me. It might take a bit longer at our age now. Still, I have the advantage of sheer bloodymindedness on my side so giving up is never an option. I will recover from this. I’ll be back.

This last week, CStM took me to Denmark for her aunt’s wedding. It was a good trip, even though I was the cripple everyone had to wait for while I stopped to get my breath. This was dreadful for me, I cannot be that guy. So there will be suitable exercises to get me back to normal.

In the meantime I hope to get some actual work done.

SickAdvisor

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It has taken several days to complete this post.

Since the end of April, for roughly the past three weeks, I have achieved nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing.

We’ve had three weeks of perfect gardening weather. I have not trimmed a single blade of grass.

I have not written one word of any stories, and I have made absolutely zero progress on any book work at all. I have a whole raft of eMails I have to answer.

As for my planned eBay clearout of the excessive amounts of stuff here… nope. Not a thing has happened there either.

At the end of April I thought I’d caught a cold. Meh. A cold has three days before I lose patience with it and ignore it. Well, it wasn’t a cold. Nor was it flu. It was bronchitis.

I’ve never had that before and I’ll happily complete the rest of my time on Earth without experiencing it again. It makes the flu feel like the summer sniffles. The slightest exertion left me gasping for breath. There were nights when I couldn’t breathe lying down so had to sit up for hours until I’d cleared enough mucus to allow for actual breathing again.

Driving? No chance. I had zero ability to concentrate and kept getting hit by fits of coughing that seemed to have no end. I definitely did not feel safe to drive anywhere. Those symptoms have now abated to the point where I did manage to drive to the shops yesterday – although even that short trip left me exhausted.

The treatment for bronchitis involves sitting/lying down a lot and waiting for it to go away. Then, when the infection does go away, further treatment consists of sitting around waiting for your lungs to grow back.

That’s the stage I am now at. Still no gardening or heavy lifting but at least I can concentrate again and I’m no longer getting insane coughing fits (except at night when I first lie down, but I can breathe during those now).

Finally I am back at the book work. Nothing has happened for three weeks so it’s all hands to the pumps now. I won’t have time for any of my own writing so this will be the first anthology I’m not in, and in between working on that I’ll be working on Ian Caswell’s and other books.

Might be a while before I can get back to all the emails, sorry.

Naturally, I did not bother the NHS for this particular miserable episode since a quick look at their website told me all I needed – and since the only way I can get to a doctor is to drive there (see ‘driving’ above).

There really should be a website called SickAdvisor where you can rate your illnesses. I’d give acute bronchitis 1/10- definitely would not recommend. It gets the one point because it didn’t kill me and because it saved an absolute fortune in tobacco. The NHS suggests you don’t smoke if you catch this, which only goes to show how little they understand smoking. If you catch this thing, no matter how dedicated a smoker you are, you will struggle to get through a cigarette a day. It’s the most likely thing I’ve ever come across that could convince me to give up smoking.

I was lucky to have the support of CStM during this episode. I really wasn’t much use around the house at all, it was all I could do to get from bed to chair and back again. She bought me this, I’m still not sure if it was to cheer me up or finish me off…

Image

I’m just waiting until I get my sense of taste back.

Wild times

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Okay. First of all, I am still alive and Leg Iron Books is still going. It’s going a lot more slowly than most authors might expect because it’s a tiny, tiny publisher that has suddenly and unexpectedly become very popular. I’ve just closed the deadline for the Spring anthology and it’s as massively oversubscribed as last Halloween’s ‘Monster‘.

It was fun to make a massive book, but its size makes it expensive so it’s only made back less than a quarter of the investment so far. The point of the Underdog Anthologies was to showcase new authors and that doesn’t work so well if the anthologies are too expensive. There’s no point being part of an anthology if hardly anyone buys it or reads it. So there will have to be a limit to this one.

Many of the submitted stories are horror stories. I love a good horror story so it’s very hard for me to consider leaving those out, and yet this is the open-genre book. It’s not supposed to be filled with horror stories. Instead I’m thinking they might work better in the next Halloween book.

I’ll be contacting some of the horror authors over the weekend to see if they’d be okay with holding back until the Halloween book. There’ll probably be enough that I could then have the Halloween book done in August – so no last-minute rush for a change. Depending on the rest of the workload, that also raises the possibility of a Christmas book – but no promises. If there’s time, I’ll do it.

This anthology will also be the first one without a story from me. Honestly, I haven’t had time to sit and think up relaxingly nightmarish stories for some time now. I will make a special effort for Halloween.

Well, back to work. RooBeeDoo and I still have quite a bit of editing to get through. Hopefully the long weekend will help us catch up – and then Ian Caswell’s book can finally be finalised and released into the world too!

Still quiet here

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Yep, still tied up with books. The next anthology (number 25) used to be linked to Easter but isn’t any more. We just ran out of Easter stories. It’s now the ‘any genre’ one and as it’s not fixed to a specific date, it’s become rather more flexible in its timing. So this year, submissions are open until April 30th, publication is aiming for mid to late May depending on how many stories we have to get through.

This will allow time to complete Ian Caswell’s book and get started on the next in line.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to get a new sump fitted on the car. It was cracked and leaking oil, always a bad thing. Not too serious but it was only going to get worse so I thought it best to get it done. I knew the part wasn’t all that expensive, but I also knew that the bolts holding it in place had been there for 20 years. So I was expecting a massive bill. It was expensive but nowhere near as bad as I expected. Still, an unwelcome dent in the finances.

I have noticed the lunacy in the news, but it’s hard to pick out one thing to talk about. There’s so much of it. If anyone set up an April Fool story this year I doubt it had any impact at all. No matter how bizarre the fool story might be, nobody is going to so much as blink.

Lately, I’ve been hearing about an approaching snowstorm that’s going to blanket the entire country, while we are simultaneously to expect a 22C April ‘heatwave’. Yes, it’s another room temperature heatwave. At the same time, the Met Office website predicts sunny weather in the 10-14C range for the next week. I have no idea where those news outlets get their weather scares from. Most likely from ‘experts’ living in basements and just making stuff up. It seems the Church of Climatology has split into two opposing factions. The Climate Wars can’t be too far away now.

I look forward to animated weather maps flashing between red and blue while the real weather stays firmly in the middle.

Anyway, I’ll be quiet for a few more days yet. This publishing hobby has become a full time job. Pity it doesn’t pay all that well, but maybe one day…

About time too

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Yeah, it’s been a pretty crap time so far but it’s improving. Well, improving for me but not really improving for the rest of the UK. But first – book stuff. I’ve put it up here so there’s no point repeating myself on that.

So, Kim Jong Starmer has forced Apple to remove privacy settings from their ‘cloud’ storage. Which means anyone can now hack into it, not just his uniformed Stasi. China will be delighted.

Fortunately I abandoned Apple products a long time ago. It was when they said their warranty would not be valid for smokers because they were scared one of their technicians might open an iPhone and find a molecule of nicotine inside. They are no doubt hoping everyone has forgotten about that but my Welsh temperament allows me to hold a grudge until the end of time. So this is no issue for me personally, I never use any kind of cloud storage because it’s silly. I still work out my taxes in notebooks.

Not that I’ve earned enough to pay any for some time now. I even have a letter from the tax office to the effect of ‘please stop sending us tax returns until you actually make some money.’ I might, one day, but there’s no rush. I have rooms full of stuff I can convert back into cash via eBay and I’ll start doing that soon. There is so very much of it…

I wish I’d known, back in the 1980s, how much prices for model railway stuff would rise. It was a better investment than gold. I still have quite a bit of N gauge that these old eyes can’t really deal with any more (I moved up all the way to G scale, lovely big stuff) and there’s also a lot of OO gauge, some of which I’ll keep for the grandkids.

There’s a lot of electronics I know I’ll never use again and then there’s the weaponry… I’m keeping most of that but I’m not sure I can draw the 165-lb crossbow any more, after having a hole drilled in my back to zap a kidney stone. I should maybe downgrade to a 50 or 60 lb one. Well, while it’s still possible to get one, since our idiots in charge now seem to think that kitchen knives kill people on their own. They can ban crossbows and regular bows, but those can be made from bits of wood without too much effort.

As for the new terror of kitchen knives, we already have strict knife laws. You cannot carry a fixed blade knife in public even though I spent my teenage years in the 70s camping with a sheath knife always on my belt. Never stabbed anyone. You can only have a folding knife with a blade less than three inches, it cannot be a flick knife (illegal for many years) or a butterfly or gravity knife or lock knife (more recently illegal) so there are already strict laws on what you can carry in public.

And yet the crazy slashers are out there with machetes. Illegal on so many levels but no, it’s your filleting knife or fruit knife that’s the problem now. Nothing is going to change for those who ignore laws anyway, just as the handgun laws changed nothing for those who ignore laws.

Also, you can make a pretty decent knife out of a scrap leaf spring from a scrapyard with a grinder and a bit of filing. At a pinch, any old bit of scrap metal can be made into a blade. I’ve watched YouTube videos where they made a sword out of a pile of ball bearings but to be fair, you need at least an O level in metalwork (I have one) and a forge to do that. But a forge isn’t an impossible thing to make. Blacksmiths had them many centuries ago. Once you know how it works… it’s really not that hard.

So most weapons can be made because most are really simple things. You don’t need to buy them online or even on the high street. I know most modern people have no idea about this because they’ve been conditioned to think they can’t make anything themselves but I suppose it’s up to us oldies to teach them.

We should have done this sooner. I already have, with my kids, and I look forward to teaching my grandkids.

I’ll also have to teach them how to catch and clean hunting and fishing game. Kim Jong Starmer is destroying all food sources so the local pheasants, partridges, trout and rabbits have to start getting scared.

The Mirror Men

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Book stuff is still keeping me busy. I have yet to complete adding all the new athology authors to the website (it’s not easy to do, and I’ve never had so many to add before), I owe a couple of authors payments for most of the year (I intend to deal with that just before Christmas) and I am still trying to get three novels published before Christmas. I might well be working Christmas day but then the entire country is closed for days anyway. Looks like I might not quite make the Christmas deadline, this damn Christmas thing keeps interrupting my work. There have been several more submissions but sorry guys, nothing is going to happen with any new stuff before New Year.

There was a song by Captain Beefheart called ‘Mirror Man’, which inspired me to start a children’s story on that theme years ago. I thought it was going well but since three characters were dead by the end of Chapter One, I was advised that nah, it’s not going to fly as a kiddie story. I still don’t see why not, I’m sure my grandkids would love it and enjoy the vivid dreams it would give them. Still, I shelved it. Might revive it one day.

What I had envisaged in that story was a creature created to absorb and store all knowledge, and which could not be killed. At all. Ever. By any means. You can’t kill this thing by melting a ring in a volcano. It’s a living library, a repository of knowledge, a creature that does not need to be taught, it can suck out everything your brain contains and leave nothing behind. It was meant to be kept in captivity but it escaped and it’s still doing its job… But I digress. Although only a little.

Science has decided to create ‘mirror life’. While this is an interesting concept, it’s a very very bad idea to actually do it.

Life, basically, is made of DNA and proteins. Okay, that’s overly simplistic but I’m trying to get this idea across to people with no grounding in science, much less biology. I’m trying to avoid lecturing to people who have not already learned the basics of this specific subject. So if you are a biologist, this is going to sound overly simplified to you.

There is a thing called ‘chirality’ in certain molecules. It’s like your hands. Your left and right hands are mirror images of each other, they are not the same. If you were to lose your right hand and the only graft available was a left hand, you’d find that graft didn’t work as you expected. Your thumb would be on the outside of the hand instead of the inside.

It’s like that with amino acids, the molecules that make up proteins. It’s also like that with DNA. The way the molecules are constructed means they can either be left handed (laevo. L) or right handed (dextro. D) arranged and one cannot fit in a place where the other belongs.

All life on this planet uses D- arranged DNA and L-arranged amino acids. Put the wrong one in there and it stops working. A protein made with a D-amino acid in place of an L-amino acid won’t fold correctly and won’t do what it’s supposed to do. It might do nothing or it might do something entirely different to its intended purpose.

DNA codes for proteins. That’s all it codes for. Most of those proteins are enzymes that then go on to catalyse reactions that are going to produce energy or structures within the cell. Screw with that and the cell will die. This applies to all cells, animal, plant, insect, bacteria… all of life.

Your cells won’t see much D-amino acids or L-DNA because, while both are chemically identical and equally likely to arise, none of the food you eat will contain much, if any, of either. Whether you live on meat or vegetables or both, all of that life is based on L-amino acids and D-DNA. There might be a bit of the stray mirror images in there but not enough to cause any significant interference in your metabolism. One dud copy of an enzyme won’t be a big issue, the cell will simply make another.

Even if you have an infection, and your immune system or medication deals with it and breaks it into pieces, the pieces left are D-DNA fragments and protein fragments made of L-amino acids.

However, if you were infected with a mirror image bacterium, made of L-DNA and D-amino acids, when your immune system smashes it up you suddenly have a lot of the wrong amino acids and DNA fragments in your body. The chances of your protein construction system making a mistake just went into the stratosphere.

Mistaken protein construction, or worse, mirror image DNA ensuring the wrong construction is encoded in the cell forever, means a total breakdown of the system. And it’s not just you.

All your food sources, be they plant or animal based, will experience the same thing. So what you eat might go from negliible D-amino acids and L-DNA to pretty significant intake of both. Which will of course just make the problem worse.

Although… when I say ‘encoded forever’, I really mean ‘encoded for the lifetime of that altered cell’ which really isn’t likely to be very long.

The mirror bacteria, if they can be brought into existence, will have metabolism based entirely on D-amino acids and L-DNA. There is a problem there which I’ll get back to, but they would have purely D-amino and L-DNA structures.

When they get into a normal organism, and the organism’s immune system or digestive enzymes break them apart, that organism is going to suddenly experience a huge input of the wrong kinds of DNA bases and protein amino-acids. Errors will be many, and that organism’s cells will end up inserting D-amino acids into proteins and L-DNA bases into DNA on replication. Basically, it will be a bloody mess. It would be like trying to build a Lego model when some of the pieces are Meccano, but you slot them in somehow anyway.

The cell will be making proteins that don’t work and if it manages to replicate it will contain DNA that codes for proteins that can’t possibly work. That cell is doomed. The mirror bacteria would destroy every living cell in every organism and they won’t really even need to be pathogenic. The mere presence of that much mirror-protein and mirror-DNA will be a massive and unstoppable spanner in the works. All of life on this planet would be terminated and it would start again with the mirror bacteria.

However. There is a problem with this idea, a possible way to avoid utter destruction.

As the mirror bacteria multiply and kill the normal cells, they will also experience an influx of the opposite chirality of DNA and amino acids. Their metabolism will suffer the same fate of hybridisation leading to inactive proteins and dud DNA. Then it comes down to which of us dies out first. Not great odds but a chance.

Further, enzymes work by physically fitting to the structure they are intended to break or create. A mirror-image enzyme might not be able to do what it’s supposed to do. It might do something entirely different. To sustain these mirror bacteria it might be necessary to supply them with mirrored substrates to live on. Those won’t be likely to be found in nature so the mirror bacteria won’t survive.

(It’s taken a few days to put this post together. I had to edit out the parts where I went into detail you’d need to be in the third year of a microbiology degree to follow. I tried to keep it non-scientist friendly. Hopefully I managed that and yet kept it understandable.)

So these mirror bacteria – will scientists try to create them? Of course they will. Tampering with the very fabric of life is all part of the mad scientist’s manifesto, along with unleashing mighty forces they will not be able to control. Mirror bacteria covers both of those points.

Will they succeed? That’s a ‘maybe’, along with a resounding ‘I hope not’. Although knowing scientists as I do, they are not going to stop trying now that they have the idea.

If they do succeed, will they be able to keep it confined in the lab? That should be possible as long as they don’t keep the monstrosity alive for too long. Once they’ve proved the concept, the sensible course of action would be to write it up and then put the whole lot in an autoclave and steam it to death. However, scientists, especially mad ones, are not known for taking the sensible course of action.

If it gets out, what then? A lot depends on which species they mirrored. My bet would be Escherichia coli because that’s really easy to work with and to grow. It’s also well adapted to growing in every animal’s intestines. In there, it can pick out all the mirrored amino acids and DNA bases from everything that animal (including you) eat. It’ll be slim pickings at first but as they grow and concentrate those mirrored molecules, they’ll pass from one animal to another and eventually become a big enough population to be a problem.

It would take decades, I think, before the effects of an escaped mirror-E. coli caused noticeable issues, but once set in motion there would be no way to stop it. Antibiotics? Will they work on a mirrored bacterium? I don’t know and it’s pretty likely they won’t. Anyway, the only way to get E. coli out of an animal’s gut would be to totally destroy that animal’s gut microflora and that involves treatment so drastic it’s likely to kill the animal anyway.

A further complication – some bacteria can make any, or sometimes all, of the amino acids they need from simpler compounds. If the mirror bacteria can do that then they’ll make massive amounts of D-amino acids and the disaster they’ll cause will strike much sooner. If they have to hunt out the few mirror image amino acids in food, they’ll only be able to grow very slowly but if they can make their own, well that’s a rapid onset of disaster for life on this planet.

Too many variables to say whether this will really be a major apocalypse but the potential risk, I’d say, is far too great to continue along this line of research.

I think they’ll do it anyway.

The Fart of Doom

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19

Okay. First of all, I don’t believe the Arla dairy company is involved in the whole ‘population reduction’ game. I don’t see any reason why a big company would want to kill off most of their customers. It makes no sense.

However, the Billy Gates Gruff is most certainly heavily involved in it. He has stated it himself, repeatedly. He has the opposite goal of a big commercial company: he wants to kill us all and take all our money. He doesn’t plan to do it by selling us stuff, he plans to do it by getting our governments to tax us to death and then claim that tax money as funding for his insane and murderous schemes.

So, why is the Arla company getting their farm suppliers to feed some noxious chemical to their cows? This stuff, incidentally, is so noxious that those handling the pure form have to wear full hazmat gear. It’s really nasty. Here’s one report on its nastiness, from Japan. There are more.

https://twitter.com/realpetesanford/status/1862122482599149659

Again, I do not believe the Arla company has a population reduction agenda. That really does not make sense – and if they were intending to sterilise or kill a load of their customers, they’d hardly be bragging about it. No, Arla are not the bad guys here. I still won’t touch their products because of the crap that’s going into it, but I don’t believe they are guilty here.

I think Arla have been sold this stuff on the basis of ‘methane reduction’ and they thought it would be a great virtue signal. The adage ‘go woke, go broke’ doesn’t seem to have reached their boardrooms. I suspect it will, soon.

I should say that I researched and wrote a PhD on ruminant digestive microbiology so I do have some idea what I’m talking about in this post. You can still argue, of course, since that’s how science works (or used to) but you are up against someone who spent three years of his life doing nothing but research the subject and the rest of his working life researching intestinal microbiology in general. I’ve also seen many attempts to reduce methane production in cattle since the beginning of the 1990s, none of which have ever worked.

The ‘cow farts’ story is, I’m afraid, bollocks. Sure, there’s some methane in the farts but most of it is produced by methanogenic bacteria in the rumen. Most of it comes out of the mouth via belching and rumination. As one of my very early influences, Julian Czerkawski (the man who invented the rumen simulation device RUSITEC and his technician showed me how to use it) once remarked, ‘To get a real dragon you just need a ruminant with a spark plug up its nose’. Sure, if you had a ruminant that produced both methane and phosgene, it could indeed belch flames. Fortunately, no such beast exists. It’s not an impossibility though.

So I think Arla have been told they will gain much kudos from this methane reduction nonsense. I wonder if any of their research team thought to mention that ruminant digestion has evolved over many thousands of years, probably longer, to the point where a cow can actually survive on urine soaked newspaper. They just need a carbohydrate source and a nitrogen source. The microflora of the rumen will produce every amino acid, every vitamin they need. Oh they do need a salt lick for minerals but that’s all. You mess with that well developed system at your peril.

Cows can feed on grass but they don’t live on it. Mammals cannot digest cellulose and there’s really not much else in grass. The cow eats the grass to feed the massive fermentation that’s going on in the rumen. The bacteria and protozoa (and the only anaerobic fungi so far known) in there will break down the grass and the resulting mush, along with the microbes, then goes to the omasum and abomasum, the actual gastric stomach, where it’s digested and gets the cow every amino acid it needs. The fermentation also produces short chain fatty acids which the cow absorbs and converts to sugar in its liver. The cow gets no direct sugars from its diet, the rumen microflora get those first.

By the time it gets to the lower intestine there’s not much more than residual fibre left. So there is some methanogenic activity there but it’s nothing compared to the rumen. It’s not cow farts. It’s cow burps that produce the methane. Something that has never caused any problems in the past, and really doesn’t now.

It’s not just cows. It’s also sheep and goats (which Billy Boy will come for soon) and a host of wild ruminants that have been producing methane for many, many thousands of years. There’s also the matter of swamplands and mud flats that have been pumping it out since those things first came into existence, which was very likely much earlier than any eukaryotic life (that’s cells with actual nuclei like the ones you and I and all animals are made of) came into existence. Bacteria are prokaryotes, they don’t have a defined nucleus. Methanogenic bacteria are archaebacteria. They are very. very old indeed. Older than eubacteria like Salmonella or Escherichia (E. coli to those not familiar with the subject). It’s all to do with the cell wall… but I’m not in a lecture hall now so I’ll let it go.

You can look up all those terms if you care to. I apologise for the jargon but it’s just the words I have used for most of my life.

So why hasn’t Deadly Bill gone for sheep and goats yet? Well, there is some sheep and goat milk and cheese around but it’s a niche market. Lamb is available but expensive, goat meat really hasn’t caught on in the UK, mutton is pretty tough and not very popular except in Scotland where mutton pies are a big thing. If you want to hit a big part of the population, beef and cow milk is the main target.

This Billy Gates Gruff feed additive isn’t untested. It’s been tested and been shown to be dangerous. They are feeding it to cows anyway. It makes beef and milk unsafe. Why? Well, Billy Boy is heavily invested in meat alternatives like insects and lab grown Frankensteaks so he doesn’t want you eating the real thing. Making it unsafe will result in people getting sick from the real stuff but slightly less sick from his fake stuff. You get sick either way, but if he can make you scared of the real thing he can make a fortune selling the fake thing.

It causes infertility in males. That is now demonstrated. So, when bull calves are suckling they will get dosed with this even before they get it in feed. Dairy cows, cows in general, are going to decline. Humans who drink this milk will also go into decline. It’s a more subtle way of getting rid of a food source than the bird flu nonsense that is currently wiping out poultry.

Basically, the ruminant digestive system is a marvel. It can subsist on minimal nutritional input and produce all it needs internally using the rumen microflora to ferment the crap they eat into useful protein which it then digests. This can turn grass into a prize winning bull with enough strength to overtun a car. From nothing but grass.

Billy the demon thinks he can mess with this with impunity. The toxic chemicals he’s persuaded (more likely paid) farmers to add to the feed are going to fuck up more than just the methanogens. There is a massively complex ecosystem in the rumen and he’s just thrown a chemical spanner in the works.

Arla, and others who fell for the money boy’s lies, are really going to regret this virtue signal. if it doesn’t kill their cows, it will very likely kill their business.

Triple layer tinfoil

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5

I haven’t been keeping up with the news too well, what with all the book stuff, but a hell of a lot has happened. Including the imminent start of WWIII. Looks like Google Maps might have to start all over again.

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Image from here: https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1858238229792653382

In the UK we have the Starmer government which includes the utterly deranged Eddie Moribund, assisted by Rachel Thieves. She’s going to kill family farms so that Moribund’s mob can pick up the land at bargain prices and cover them with solar panels. We don’t see a lot of sun in the UK, especially in winter. So they won’t work, and food production will be wiped out. Guess I’m ploughing that big lawn next spring and probably going pheasant hunting.

The funny part is, it’ll wipe out beef and lamb/mutton production but most piggeries are under cover already and cover very little land area by comparison. No use for the solar farms. So the only meat available in the future will be pork. I’m okay with that but a lot of Labour’s vote base might not be.

Also, with the entire West seemingly hell bent on wiping out farming, where will they import food from? Russia? China? They might not be feeling too inclined to help. Especially if we just sent Ukraine missiles to fire at them.

Oh I know, we aren’t firing missiles at China yet. But you bring in a war with Russia and guess who’s on their side?

This is the most ill thought out tactic since the Polish sent cavalry against German tanks. We shut down our own food supply and then go to war with our starving and energy-depleted soldiers against a well fed and energy-rich opponent. We no longer even have a steel industry thanks to Starmer’s lunatic government. So we can’t even make guns, we have to import steel to make them from… China. Oops.

Basically, Western civilisation ends when China says ‘no more’. They don’t have to invade. They don’t need a war. They let us, through the likes of Starmer and Moribund, shut ourselves down and become dependent on them and then close the taps. It’s working.

I know, it’s all tinhat foilery and conspiracy theory but it’s actually happening if you pay any attention at all. We have the idiots in charge shutting everything down while China builds more coal fired power stations. Farms are being destroyed because they cause climate change, something farming hasn’t caused in the last few thousand years but suddenly it does.

Idiot people actually believe food comes from supermarkets and cannot even conceive where the supermarkets get it from. They think farmers are all millionaires living in mansions. Most are living in decaying 15th century houses they can barely afford to keep going. Okay, their land might be valued in the millions but that is not the money they get every year. Lefties can’t seem to grasp the difference between turnover and profit so they can’t possibly understand the difference betweeen land and money.

It does feel like the horseman Famine is next up, and soon. War is still busy, Pestilence isn’t doing so well so Famine is coming.

There’s only one horseman left, and he has a nuclear solution.