It's curtains for us all.

One has to wonder in this day and age, how hard can it be to find some plain curtains, pale-cream, biscuit, off-white or linen-looking, Tape top or pencil pleat, 1.9mtr drop to fit a 2.2mtr track? Machine washable, blackout, and or thermal (or both), ready lined if needs be. I mean, for fucks fucking sake, there are enough curtain retailers online, you would think they would spend some time rationalising their web offerings, so they at least stuck to the parameters requested. I'm going to have to be sexist here and suggest their websites are designed by committees of women with too much time on their hands and an inability to make a decision (Don't hate me, and if you do ... whateveaaaaaar).

And as for fucking Wayfair they get their very own FOR FUCKS FUCKING SAKE!!! Can someone, anyone come back to me with a definition of the word plain, because unless I've slipped across a dimension of reality or two, the word plain clearly means something else here.

Anyway. If anyone with the patience of a saint can spare the time to prove that I'm a misogynistic, sexist arsehole who can't see the wood for his impatient trees, feel free to find some curtain links, specified to the top paragraph, and reply in the comments below.

PS: Dunelm, close but no cigar. Who the fuck in this day and age wants to piss about taking their curtains to a dry cleaner ... or sending their butler to do it.

PPS: The best invention ever are in fact window blinds ... Otherwise, it would have been curtains for everyone. baboom chaa!

I'm here all week.

Storm Surge Eunice

I haven't about for a while... far too busy, however, I have been about elsewhere. 

Here is a recent video I shot prior to Storm Eunice making landfall.

I will spend some time unifying the various streams of both media and consciousness here. But in the meantime, look at the power of low-pressure air above water in the Bristol Channel.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/storms/storm-surge

A short but steep walk.

 A little video I put together today 9^th January 2022, from a walk I took on Sunday the 2^nd of January 2022. I had a bit of a think about some of the things I said on the ascent. I probably hadn’t walked up that particular hill for over a year given the injury I’d had in 2021.

The tree that had a fallen limb is a Beech and was probably once just a part of a hedge on top of a drystone wall, clearly, the hedge was abandoned in some far distant time, and now the row of trees straddles the remains of the wall. It’s a mixture of bark-covered root structures and dry-stone walling, a symbiosis of two manmade artefacts writing their own rules in the absence of man’s attendance.

I said at the end “I came I saw I reacquainted.” And that was the case, walking up that hill was symbolic to me and to me alone. I needed it to underline the fact that after a fairly horrible 2021, that I had come back to Somerset, fitter and stronger than I have been for over a year, and could enjoy the breathtaking view from the Trig-Point beneath Shervage Wood, and share some old lore, and tree knowledge.

Dr Gary Fettke ( Low Carbing, Keto and the Vegan Agenda)

I have been following these subjects for a while. In an age of media saturation, it is difficult to find near-absolute truth (there is no such thing as absolute truth … only the Sith deal in absolutes, and we all know what a bunch of arseholes the Sith are).

I follow Neal Asher a Sci-fi author in the Space Opera realm, and he has been using his body as a laboratory for what seems like a couple of years now. I think the spur for him was the death of his wife way back now in 2014 from colon cancer. Though it is fair to say he had been showing a burgeoning interest in longevity-semi-immortality for some time prior to that pivotal event. You can read Neals Blog here:

The Skinner blogspot

and here: https://www.nealasher.co.uk/ and follow him here https://www.facebook.com/neal.asher and various other places on the interweb … of things in the metaverse of re-inventing the wheel … lookout for random cynical tangents.

Fortunately for those of us that follow Neal, we don’t necessarily have to go through the sometimes-icky business of using our own carcasses for the research (caveat below). We can just learn the lessons from the distillation of Neals experience. This is useful. However, while it is useful, it is also important to remember that Neal is a Science FICTION author not a scientist and so one must actually question his results and do one’s own monitoring and research of self when implementing one’s own plan. What you don’t have to do so much of is: trawl the web finding all the articles and videos. However, self-monitoring and research is important, lest one ends up in hospital `properly fucked’. To make the point. I have been living a fairly awkward life recently (see the earlier post) and I had to maximise my bang for buck in the absence of cooking facilities, storage for food etc. So, it seemed like an ideal time to go balls deep on a low-carbohydrate high-fat, high-protein diet.

I reckon my current fridge is 25 litres maximum (it is borrowed, inefficient and really not much more than a drinks fridge). So, high fat, that means fatty meat, nuts seeds etc and trying to avoid too much processed food, which is difficult when you are living out of packets. However, if you use your eyes and are prudent and read labels, you would be surprised how you can maximise your fat and protein, while eating fresh cooked meats from packets. Fruit, veg, nuts are easy peasy (I recommend Lidl for Nuts and seeds, Tesco do a range as well, but their pricing is Tesco pricing, and being cynical and knowing where nuts are grown and by whom, I rather suspect that you’re paying Tesco for the word Tesco on the bag and not the contents of the bag).

I increased my swimming, I got back to my floor-work (lunges squats etc), vigorous walks after work and started eating high-fat high-protein, lots of fresh fruit and veg, homemade kefir,l low carbohydrate. No booze, and what I thought was good hydration. I had a bought of Keto-flu. If hadn’t known what it was and why it happened (thanks to Neals experience) I would have thought I had real flu or Covid. The day it hit, followed a very vigorous exercise day; the bodies thermostat went crazy, and I hurt all over, predominantly in the muscle groups I’d been working the day before (Legs). The knock-on effect was severe back pain, just like I had been suffering for most of 2021. I was going on a short road trip to my friends in Hillperton and spent the evening at their place wrapped in blankets shivering, until about two hours after dinner; burgers and bacon in a bap with chips and Coke. Within two hours I had stabilised, with a couple of Neurofen to assist recovery, all the back pain dissipated overnight. Lesson learned, you can keto and the weight falls off, and you will still have energy in abundance and generally feel “more”. It’s hard to describe, better is probably a good word. There are issues and there needs to be some fine-tuning (ideally when I have somewhere to live permanently), but on basic principles low carbohydrates, lots of meat and fat appears to be better for the skin, there is less wind, and fatigue. And the fatigue itself may be different … not gone (I don’t sleep well) but the impacts of fatigue on cognition seem to be less intrusive. I also went through an odd but expected process of urinating all the time, demonstrating how much fluid we carry that we don’t necessarily need.

Al the words above are a preamble to introducing a video. For some time, I’ve known the bare bones of the story of Kellogg, and the fact that for nearly a hundred years a religious whack-job created a cult around his product. I didn’t quite realise how deep it ran, but I did know that because Kellogg stole the march on the narrative and was so good at self-publicity in a religious America; that by dint of the passage of time and the absence of historical context for us as a modern population, we grew up inured or oblivious to the reasons why breakfast cereals and cereal culture carb-culture etc became ingrained. 

The video presentation below lifts the lid a lot higher and having had a rummage around the internet on the back of watching this video, you discover for yourself that what the doctors in the video are talking about is solid. It won’t be everything, do your own digging, but be aware the Adventists were there first and their reach is long.

Also appended is an article from JAMA network (Journal of American Medical Associations (again)). You need to read it all, to realise that, the article suggests that the Adventist Health Studies results appear only to be true within the Adventist cohort and that if you measure their results relative to a non-Adventist cohort that the results are `null’ or put another way falsifiable (in laymen terms, the Adventist results may be a load of bollocks, however, a cautious writer, writing in the Journal of American Medical Associations may be careful of saying exactly that, because underlying all this corruption for want of a better word, sits the pharmaceutical industry …. again).

That’s enough from me here’s a link to the YouTube interview, with Dr Brett Scher and Dr Gary Fettke who has been the victim of both the food and the pharmaceutical industries machinations, to maintain the status quo, or put another way … to maintain their profits.

Dr Gary Fettke's, website

Journal of American Medical Associations (full article)

For interests only. This Wikipedia article refers to the Loma Linda University. One of the Universities that conducts the research and is itself a part of the Adventist network. If that isn't bias, then I am a Monkeys Uncle. It also suggests Wikipedia isn't doing its job properly.

Adventist Health Studies Wikipedia entry

The Covid-Omicron show.

Sitting watching the news on the BBC (I have to do it just to have a rough idea of what’s going outside my bubble of one … at most a few more than one). And then comparing to all the other mainstream news outlets I currently have access to. I am compelled to think, I am actually watching  Covid/Omicron show. Endless punditry and opinion. To be entirely fair to the BBC, it’s also Al Jazeera, RT, Sky, and even GB News (though the GB News take on things are more in line with my opinion, based on information gleaned outside the mainstream media … see links below).

What’s actually going on if you look beyond the demands for more money from the government (nuanced reactive money to cover losses caused by staff absence, not mandatory not by lockdown)? That’s a difficult question to answer. Let's say "My business usually makes a £1000 a day … on Tuesday it only made £500. Can the government make up the difference?" That is a slight oversimplification, and deliberately so. It’s deliberately broad brush, because the sensible will immediately find layers of complexity in the notion. It isn’t impossible to create measures, however, it may be prohibitively expensive in terms of administrative overheads, unless the tax system is used as the input-output buffer. Again, not impossible, but whenever you add layers to systems, you lose clarity, and at this stage ripping out a system and trying to replace it with something bespoke … again why? Crisis end. This crisis is coming to an end (there is a massive caveat to that further down).

Back to the question of what’s actually going on in the wider UK as far as Covid-19-Omicron-Variant is concerned. Not much it seems, 100,000 infections plateauing, a lot of staff absence due to positive tests. The result being a train timetable change in Scotland and a critical incident being declared by Lincolnshire Hospital trust due to staff absence. Hospitality is still suffering from staff shortages, and people are self-regulating themselves away from socialising outside of their immediate bubbles.

I’m going to suggest that the pundits who are suggesting there needs to be even more testing are not thinking clearly. The testing-for-Covid-industry is booming, and positive Covid tests that result in staff absence are jerking the economy like an eager dog on a leash. Herd immunity and the spread of Omicron are likely to be the key to ending the current `not really a crisis’ crisis. Yes, I wrote that and published it.

There are so many fronts to argue on, you spend the whole of the rest of your life arguing the toss about your opinion and where you gathered your facts that formed your opinion. My little voice mostly unheard in an unknown corner of the internet is an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t sit idly by and be counted with the sheep and the useful idiots. So, to this end I’ll leave this digital impression here as my personal testament, that I disagree with the sheep and the useful idiots … never mind those in the pharmaceutical industry who have realised that all their dreams have come true … for a while.

The sheep, I think just love the pandemic and being told what to do. It’s easy comfort, you can signal your virtue and look like a law-abiding citizen, shed non-friends and irrelevant social engagement by the expedient use of plague … and you will be applauded for it … win win. Crack on, as your freedoms are curtailed, and random uncertainty is introduced into your life, by other well-meaning but misinformed partisans; or by petty bureaucrats in your workplace, on the bus, the tube, the miserable whining hypochondriac who shares office space with you and needs a drama to spread their own misery to anyone else they can. Crisis perpetuators at all levels of society, a semi-hive mind driven by a nebulous cloud of finger-wagging, fear of being different, fear of being outcast, while simultaneously out-casting-self (it’s tail eating of the first order, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening).

Useful idiots, those who have found a cause, a lever for financial or political gain. Crisis perpetuators, who are using low-grade Machiavellian machinations for their cause, and driving the fear of uncertainty, to create uncertainty. Above them are the `Vile expedient arseholes’. Let’s throw the broadest figures we can at the pharmaceutical industry, so we know what the Borg Queen at the head of the collective is all about. Currently, $1000 dollars per second are going to pharmaceutical companies, approximately $90million daily for Covid related products. Lobbyist’s outnumber congressmen three to one in America and it is estimated that the pharmaceutical industry has spent $266-million dollars on lobbying since the start of the pandemic, and there is talk about the pandemic rolling on until 2024. It’s 2022, the pandemic has been with us for two years already. Do you want two more years? Do you want the pandemic as the world's president? Four years that’s a presidential term, that is how long the pharmaceutical industry projects this rolling on for. Buy shares in big-pharma … if you have £52 going spare for a Pfizer share.

Let us today be thankful, that our government is tracking the optimistic line rather than kowtowing to demands for more restrictions, and actually looks to be following the data, rather than the forecasts, which are based on models, that have been designed around worst-case scenarios, and to a greater or lesser degree have been consistently wrong (wide of the worst-case scenario) since the outset of the pandemic.

In the beginning when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was playing fast and loose with numbers and the truth, while the BBC amongst others was ramping up the fear, and Covid variously moved from killing less than 1% to killing more than 6% in periods measured in 24hours (the number of dead relative to the number of hospitalisations in Wuhan). I was all over it. I joined a group to dispel misinformation and to point people in the direction of the right information. I was shitting bricks, this SARS (severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) could and likely would kill me, so I believed. I still believe given my asthma and the medication I take for it -Montelukast, an immune suppressant for a system that Covid attacks-  though I have found no papers looking at asthma drugs and Covid outside those steroids used for severe asthma- that for me Covid could be deadly. However, I have been double vaccinated and boosted, I look after my health and fitness, I take care of myself (even in trying times). I stay abreast of the actual science around Covid, not the media distillation, or the projections from the models. And what I see now doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the financial and social fallout from Covid.

Tangent: Note the public health messaging about looking after your health, diet and fitness has slipped off the agenda. Many luminaries of the scientific community and alternative media world have been asking this question. Joe Rogan springs to mind. Could it be that unhealthy lifestyles and the medicines that treat them would be an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to lobby against health messaging for the general public? Or are people genuinely too lazy and too reliant on medicine to fix things after the fact? Rather than mitigate problems with lifestyle choices?

Anyway, rant over, here’s some links to the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is the source.

The front page for the journals Coronavirus recourse centre.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert

Now historic articles. January, February, March 2020.

1.  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2760500

 2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762997

3.   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762688

The latest from South Africa (specifically regarding Omicron)

4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787776

Compare and contrast the content of article 2. Above with the content of article 4.