Never have I ever

A personal essay

I learned about the existence of this game a few years ago from an episode of “The Walking Dead”, in which two characters took shelter in a moonshine shed and had nothing better to do than play “Never have I ever”. Well, with all the moonshine still intact it wasn’t hard to see it coming.

Anyway, though I have never played that game in real life (or any other drinking games. We didn’t play games in our 20s. We drank.) I’ve recently started catching myself thinking “Never ever did I think…” these days. It probably has to do with aging but I’m sure it also has to do with the amount of insanity that we have come to witness on a pretty much daily basis.

Never ever did I think I’d see people throwing paint at art.

Never ever did I think similarly minded people would risk hand amputation to make a point that few others care about.

Never ever did I think I’d see a degree of arrogance where certain individuals openly state they are better than the rest of us.

Never ever did I think I’d see a return to totalitarianism in my lifetime although, to be perfectly honest, it is the dream for a certain sort of mind that often ends up in politics.

Never ever did I think the word and concept of science could be abused to such an extent as to turn into an empty word devoid of meaning, not to mention the reputation actual science used to have.

Never ever did I think “1984” and “Brave New World” would become reality, and not juts become a reality but become a reality at the same bloody time! I admit, that was a low blow. With these two, even one is enough to ruin anyone’s life but both at the same time? No universe should be this cruel.

Ours, apparently, is, and Orwell’s and Huxley’s works are not the end, either. I just finished “Ready Player One” the other day and it’s very hard to resist making certain parallels with certain real-life initiatives such as, I don’t know, digital vaccination passports and CBDCs.

Never ever did I think life could turn into a game of “Spin the dystopian fiction-turned-reality roulette”.

Or that my morning routine of news reading would have me repeatedly wonder “Are these people insane?” in all seriousness, at that.

Or that I’d try to chase out a stray cat attacking my cat, hit a tree branch and open a magnificent gash in my leg after raising cats for 30+ years and knowing they don’t fight to the death. But I just did that on Sunday, so I guess that, yes, those people are insane. Power, I’ve heard, can go to your head the way drugs do. I’ve also heard power is the best drug. Or worst, I guess. It’s a matter of perspective.

Earlier this week, I learned from Google we were celebrating a lady named Eunice Newton Foote. Foote, apparently, was the first to discover the greenhouse effect. She started it all and look where it got us.

Where it got us is a moment in time when the words “carbon pollution” are being used in all seriousness by people who wouldn’t question the absurdity of their combination if you put a gun to their heads. Because they have successfully forgotten all they might have been taught about CO2 in school.

Never ever did I think I’d live to see a day when learning facts — scientific facts — was discouraged, the facts themselves were labelled propaganda or misinformation, and instead emotional responses to everything were encouraged and even laid down as law.

But enough with the depressing stuff. There’s a silver lining in all that. Because never ever did I think we will witness such overplaying of hands in such a short time. And the more it becomes obvious politicians and their ilk are overplaying yet another hand, the more they keep doing it.

It is this truly outrageous absence of any insight into their target groups that has kept me from crying “Conspiracy” and sticking with “These people are idiots” perspective. The belief that hundreds of millions of people will swallow anything you feed them without questioning it, no matter how foul it is, is just that, idiotic.

Right now, the climate hand is being overplayed once again. Red maps in the summer are now the norm but that wasn’t enough to frighten us all out of our pants, so now people are measuring land temperatures instead of air temperatures to make the whole concept of summer even scarier.

Within the next five years I expect summer to become an unnatural season caused by climate change. They did it to carbon. They can do it to summer, too. Winter as well. And then it will be the turn of spring and autumn until no weather is normal. That’s how you keep the masses in chronic fear while you strip them of freedoms but not, fascinatingly, responsibilities.

Yet, it bears repeating, the scaremongers are overdoing it. Measuring land temperatures may have worked on the least observant among us but most just laughed it off. It is such an obvious and crass attempt at manipulation it deserves a consolation price for effort.

Then there are all the shouting headlines how it’s so hot Europe is melting, it has never ever been so hot since time began and it is going to get worse unless we stop climate change, which is now apparently a sort of a train in the minds of the manipulators and we are totally capable of stopping this train by building a wall of solar panels and wind turbines, complete with some battery storage and hydrolysers.

These headlines would work on the sort of people who’d glue their hands with concrete and (petroleum-bloody-derivative) epoxy resin. They may very well work on more sensible people as well. But for a while only.

Because one of the many things those in charge of the fear campaign seem to have overlooked is that you can’t keep a lot of people scared all the time forever. If nothing else, they’ll simply get tired of being scared.

This is exactly what happened to me during the first year of the pandemic (oh, the very sound of it!). At first, I was not concerned at all. Then the reports about piles of bodies in Italy began pouring in. Lockdowns began, but only in the large cities here. It was as laughable as it was chilling because the police really took their new job seriously.

I got concerned, like millions of other people. I grew very concerned. You can’t consume this sort of reporting and not get concerned unless you are tough, old, and wise enough and I was none of these things. Also, I like drama and I have some anxiety problems, which made me ripe for the brainwashing. Until I got tired. I got really tired. Muck it, I thought, if we’re dying we’re dying but I’m not worrying about it all the time. I’m over my capacity to worry.

Something similar is now happening to a lot of people who may genuinely worry about the effect of human activity on the planet’s atmosphere. We all have limits, after all. The harder we are being pushed to those limits, the faster we reach them and, ultimately, stop caring.

That’s the good news about the whole climate hysteria. The fearmongers are pushing so hard, the limits for most of us are well in sight. Because this push is forcing us to compromise things related to our basic physiological needs such as heat in winter and coolness in summer. Things such as food security and a reasonably comfortable living standard.

The belief that we can first be kept scared of Covid and then immediately switched to being scared of climate change with zero break was perhaps the biggest mistake that was made in neo-totalitarian circles.

That, and the rush to pile on degrowth, central bank digital currencies, year-round “extreme weather”, and the certainty of future pandemics at the same time. No reasonably normal mind can withstand all this and not start wondering if it might just be a little bit too much.

This is exactly what is happening. People are beginning to wonder. They are beginning to doubt. And they are starting to call the fearmongers out. The Dutch farmers’ protests toppled the government as much as the migration crisis that the media gave us as the only reason for the collapse. Sweden’s new government scrapped net-zero plans. The EU, for all its talk, is building more LNG import terminals. The list goes on.

This is not to say that the pushers will stop pushing, of course. They are going out of their way to keep pushing and push ever harder.

Banks, Tammy Nemeth told us in our last Energy Transition podcast, are being instructed to keep climate change at the top of their minds whenever they have to make a decision, regardless of the nature of that decision.

Businesses of all sorts are being told to track and report emissions regardless of the cost. People are being told to switch to veganism and crickets, get rid of their cars, and stop using so much energy, really, otherwise we’re all going to die on a burning, drought-stricken planet. And it will be our fault.

I turn 45 today. I care about things and I care about people (Well, just a few people but when I feel generous it extends to the whole species). I don’t believe that people are necessarily good and innocent by default but I have zero truck with confidence tricks and negative truck with huge, big lies that will hurt millions being passed as truth.

I’m not giving up my car to ride the bus to town because the car’s faster and more convenient, and I also have a sentimental attachment to it.

I’m not letting my daughter get brainwashed into apocalypticism, despair, and bug-eating by the fearmongering crowd.

I’m not giving up on shouting about the scam that the whole energy transition push is with the hope of reaching some people who may have not started to ask questions yet but will start asking them now.

That includes investing questions, by the way. I recently had a hilarious piece of feedback from a now former subscriber who said I wasn’t providing enough actionable advice here.

Because I have somehow managed to retain my childish sense of wonder all these years this was exactly what I did — I wondered if I was being too subtle in my takes on things like wind, solar, and hydrogen. I wondered if I needed to spell things out even more bluntly. Then I wondered how much blunter than “Get out of wind now” could I get.

The truth is, I can’t get any blunter than I already am. Not without descending into vulgarity, which I only do in the privacy of my own head. Oddly, and funnily, enough, days after that feedback from the unhappy subscriber I got a new founding subscriber. This subscriber’s motive for joining the Founders’ Club was that what I wrote added up to a macro landscape that he found useful. It was quite flattering, I won’t lie.

A lot in life comes down to perception. The perception of impending doom. The perception of massive profits to be made from wind and solar power because governments are 100% behind the switch. These, and other, perceptions, however, can be very misleading if you only feed on the hype or, as it were, the doomsaying.

It’s because of the misleading nature of perceptions based on scant, cherry-picked information that I started this Substack. The facts were there, in plain view, and yet they were being ignored on a vast scale. This annoyed me quite considerably so I thought I’d find an outlet for this annoyance in the form of the overlooked and deliberately ignored facts.

Some of the articles I post here may read like investment advice, which they are not because I’m not qualified to give such advice. What I have learned to do is what that new founding member described — getting bits and pieces of information and laying them together to reveal the big picture. It’s a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, only the landscape is often a gruesome one. But also often funny.

Other of these articles read like rants against the EU, which they totally are and I feel no embarrassment about it. The EU deserves all the rants we could give it and then some. It also deserves a good flushing and I do hope this flushing is coming.

The other day, as I showed my daughter the picture of the two confused girls risking hand amputation she wondered aloud why she’d got to be born in such times, why people were so stupid, and what’s all this nonsense about carbon pollution and people thinking boys can turn into girls when that’s clearly impossible.

Well, I said, at least these times are interesting. And you get a chance to change them. Isn’t that a lovely thought?

On a much lighter note and because if you’ve read this far you clearly don’t bore easily, I have an announcement to make. I like it here on Substack so much that I’ve started two more blogs.

Slavs in the Garden is, shockingly, about gardening, done by trial and error, by laziness and frustration, and with the help of my entire family as well as various vegetables and fruit. All content is free.

The Basilisk Journal is where I’m uploading all my fiction work, also free. I wouldn’t dare assume that just because you read an energy blog you don’t read fiction, so if you, or people you know, enjoy romance in supernatural settings with some gore and a bit of laughs, and maybe some unintentional profound messages, give it a try.

The first two books are the usual first-work crap that’s never seen the light of an editor’s eye but “Afterlife Ltd.” is fun, I think, and “The Dreamer” is what I consider my first kind of mature work.

Stay healthy, eat, drink and be merry because all of our days are numbered. Even climate activists’ and Brussels bureaucrats’.