A couple of years ago I was averaging 7 miles a day walking around the country roads near my home in Scotland but those sorts of distances and the lack of adequate footwear took it's tole on the joints in my feet so I gave it up and bought an Elliptical Cross Trainer. This worked a treat, the low impact exercise and high cardio was just the job for my physical health but it wasn't doing my mental health any good at all. So I decided to put the machine on Gumtree, free to anyone willing to collect it and it went literally in minutes. Then I bought some new shoes and off I went, back on the road. This was both literally and metaphorically a breath of fresh air. I'd forgotten just how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful part of the UK and how much those open spaces were essential to my sense of wellbeing. I read an article once that suggested that living in large cities was so alien to humans that the lack of open spaces was effecting our vision because we never got the opportunity to focus over longer distances. The mental and emotional effects are well documented, we just aren't wired to live in large groups. Everyone who has ever lived in a large city knows that feeling of isolation even though you can hardly move for the crowds. I was born in 1951 and my teenage years were through the 60's. Back then the crisis of the day wasn't Global Warming now called Climate Change because folks up in Scotland were looking forward to it, It was The Population Explosion. North-South: A Program for Survival
by Willy Brandt outlined an almost nightmare scenario where the southern hemisphere became almost uninhabitable and the populous migrated north in huge numbers. Sound Familiar ? For me climate change if it exists at all is just one symptom of the population explosion, more people, more industrialisation and more CO2 but we are supposed to regard Willy Brant's nightmare as a good thing these days. We are importing approximately the population of a city the size of Leicester every year since the late 1990's so our need to escape to those open spaces has never been greater while those spaces are becoming smaller by the day. I find it impossible to believe that the people who are creating this nightmare are not aware of what they are doing. Conservative and Labour are in the words of George Galloway just "Two Cheeks of the same Arse" so hoping for root and branch reform through the ballot box seems unlikely and after watching the total capitulation of the British people during the Covid fiasco any hope of a populist revolt seems highly unlikely. Are we really going to sleep walk into the nightmare of the Great Reset controlled by a Chinese style Social Credit System ? Will we really be happy owning nothing and eating bugs. Somehow I doubt Bill Gates will be giving up his private jets or Klaus Schwab will be living in one of the pods he envisions for us. Make no mistake this is an assault on everything that makes our lives worth living those simple pleasures that we used to take for granted but now we are being told might not be available to us in the future because of "Global Warming" because of our "Inherited White Guilt" and we are being told this by the same type of people who presided over Soviet Russia, The Cultural Revolution in China and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Just look at Antifa and Black Lives Matter and their activities around America and tell me that this isn't a re-run of the same mindset that drove the Red Guard in  Mao Zedong's China. I've never gone along with the theory that the entire Covid thing is some clever plot to engineer change but there's no doubt in my mind that a group of extremely influential and ruthless people around the world supported by their Antifa and BLM useful idiots are using the Covid chaos to push through policies that they could never have gotten away with under normal circumstances. These people will tell you that this time it's different. This time they will usher in the perfect society. No, no they won't, they will create the same living hell as those who came before them. Until last year when I witnessed The Democrats in the USA steal the election in plain site and even have the brass neck to brag about it in a massive Time Magazine article asserting that they had "Fortified Democracy" I could have clung to the hope that we might get a Trump 2.0 a Populist who actually understood how the system worked and was able to push through the policies required to begin to reverse this 70 year old attrition from the left. In the UK we have Boris a Conservative in name only who has been busy with Covid and Brexit but still found time to extend the Hate Speech Legislation introduced towards the end of the Brown Government and is also introducing sweeping powers for policing Protests. It seems you're never to busy to take rights away from the electorate. I've always been a bit of a Black Hat Thinker but this time I fear I could be right, I desperately hope I'm not.