James and Dick catch up.
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but it's not a special guest.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but it's not a special guest.
It's Dick.
Hello, I'm here, not being special.
Hello everyone.
I have just had some steak and salad for lunch.
Are you fasting today?
I have just broken my fast.
It's a mini fast for me on Fridays.
I don't eat from 7 o'clock the previous night.
It amounts to about 18 hours.
You're looking in the pink of health, Dick.
If only I could achieve that.
I've lost weight doing this thing.
I don't need to, but I have, and it's not bad.
It's just that dad tummy type thing that I'm shaking off, which is great.
This is the problem, isn't it, being of our build, that there's less of an incentive to do all the fasting thing and all the weird diet thing.
Because, I mean, there are definitely some people out there who really need to go on these diets.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm thinking I already look pretty emaciated as it is.
Anyway, I went and bought this ribeye steak, grass-fed, All the gubbins from a local producer where you can see the cows in the field eating the grass.
And it was huge.
And I brought it home.
Do you know how much it cost?
For a steak?
It was just a massive steak.
Just a single massive steak?
It was a single massive ribeye steak.
Right.
Quite thick cut.
20 quid?
13 quid.
That's not bad.
So, okay, so I divided it between three of us and I thought everyone's going to be saying this is fantastic and Boy Darling Pole was with me.
It was delicious melt-in-the-wife.
Melt-in-the-mouth.
Melt-in-the-wife.
Melt-in-the-wife.
And wife said, this is like dog food.
And I was thinking, bloody hell!
I know!
It was really, I think it was just a woman thing.
I don't think it was a genuine, a genuine taste response.
How rare do you do it?
Uh, not so rare that there were any bits that could be called blue.
So no, it was cooked through all the way.
I'd say it was medium rare.
Okay.
Genuine medium rare.
Right.
That's, that's how I like mine.
Sort of heading towards medium actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now I, I can't be doing with this a bit in the middle, which is uncooked because it's nice in theory.
You think, yeah, I'm eating proper man steak, um, almost raw, but actually the experience is not pleasure, pleasurable because the texture is not as good.
I don't think.
No, I agree.
I've always been that little bit squeamish about the uncooked bit.
But yeah, a good proper medium rare is a wonderful thing.
And I'm having steak more often than not on a Sunday now as well.
Although I have got it from the butchers, I still think those Aldi steaks that you put me on two ages ago, the 40 day aged ones, are just great for a work a day steak.
What?
Have we moved on from Aldi?
We've moved on.
It's really hard keeping up, but there's going to be lots of people at this point shaking their heads.
I know, I know, I thought Sodom, you know, it works for me, but does it turn out to be Bill Gates' vaccinated steak or something like that?
Well, I checked the labelling.
And previously, you see, I'd gone for the however many days aged, and I'd been fooled by this.
I'd think, yeah, it's aged.
Aged, that's good.
Aged, it must be good.
But now, this is the problem, isn't it?
That one becomes more and more refined in one's taste.
Have you tried playing the game where you look at anything from the supermarket which is in a jar?
For example, horseradish the other day.
We had some really nice horseradish brought from Ben's Farm Shop in Totnes.
And it was made of horseradish, and unfortunately left it behind.
So I looked in our larder to see what horseradish, and there was something promisingly called hot horseradish.
So I think, ooh, hot horseradish, that's going to be good.
You look at the label, it's got sodding rapeseed all over it.
Of course it has.
And quite a large percentage, I would have thought.
And you look at the Marks and Spencer one.
Oh, well, yeah.
And there's a Marks and Spencers.
You think, oh, good old Marks and Spencers.
They're going to be high-end.
At least they weren't.
And you look at the label, rapeseed oil.
It's like, it's, they think we don't notice.
And perhaps most of us don't.
Most people don't.
I've had conversations with people about this.
They weren't even aware, A, that it was in their food, or B, that it was bad for you.
So Dirk, finish off the Aldi steak bit.
What's wrong with them?
The Aldi steak bit, it says fed by grass and forage.
And you're thinking, hang on a second, what is this forage?
What, are the cows, like, going hunter-gathering, are they?
They're just, sort of, foraging?
What, for mushrooms?
No.
You know that forage is a euphemism for something else.
Right.
I don't know what it is, but it's not grass, is it?
Well, is that as bad as it gets?
Probably, sort of, cancer plants.
They probably feed them on cancer plants.
Or for a fiver for my sirloin steak.
I mean, I don't see that as a deal-breaker.
There is an argument, and I've heard this, people who go on the carnivore diet say that actually the carnivorousness of it, even if you eat crap, even if you eat processed meat like sausages and things, still the meatiness of it more than offsets the damage you're doing by eating the meat.
This is the thing.
There is no single authority that can tell you what is the righteous diet.
Because you've got all these competing people with their diet.
The carnivores are just like, you can't eat.
You eat a vegetable, you're poisoning yourself with all the poisons that vegetables produce.
Listen, you're the one who has to run to your podcast one by one with The weird and freaky diets and we can't do all of them.
Natasha Campbell McBride was kind of ruining, wasn't she?
I haven't done that one.
Oh, she's great because she's really common sense Russian.
Um, she, she obviously knows her stuff and you come away thinking, right, I can't eat out again because I can't guarantee whether they've, they've fried it in, in, in lard or butter as they should, or whether they've put something else on it and they might give me a vegetable and, and, and that's no good because we get our, all our nutrients from animals, animals.
And I should really be eating more butter and more fat and more blah, blah, blah.
It's very hard and then you talk to somebody else, you know, you talk to talk to Clive to Carl and Clive's like yeah, man, whatever whatever goes, you know, just just Take some methylene blue man And your piss will go go blue.
It does by the way.
I've been taking Methylene blue.
Yeah, is it a real pain in the ass?
Do you know why?
because it takes ages to come up and then you're only dancing for half an hour and Yeah, there's that.
No, unfortunately methylene blue is really, really staining.
It's like mega staining.
So if you get a tight... so when you screw your... because it comes with a dropper and when you unscrew the dropper you get inevitably a little sort of incrustation of dried methylene blue.
And if one tiny fleck of methylene blue lands on you on the surface and makes contact with water, then you've got a methylene blue stain there for life.
It gets everywhere.
I've got books stained with methylene blue, I've got surfaces, clothes stained with methylene blue.
Well, future historians will be able to find out your possessions based on little hints like this.
We know it once belonged to James Delingpole because we We found methylene blue stains on the cover.
Do you think anything is going to be left?
I'm not sure.
Well it depends who wins, doesn't it?
Because you've read Revelation.
You've read the bit where the horses are up to their withers or their necks in blood.
I must have made myself forget that.
There's going to be so much blood.
Yeah.
There's going to be so much blood and so much horror, and it would go on much longer if Christ didn't intervene, you know, saying like, I've just had enough of this, it's too much.
I mean, they kind of deserve it, but I've had enough, I'm Jesus after all.
Enough slaughtering already.
Enough slaughter already.
So, I just... I'm not sure.
I mean, the only good... There are some positives.
I think that all the wind turbines are going to be erased as if they never were.
Right.
They'll have a job with the concrete bases.
I know, they will.
They will.
Do you know what was really annoying me today?
Tell me.
You can probably guess, actually.
Well... Take and pick!
What could it be?
I'll roll a dice.
Go on, roll the dice.
I wish I had a dice to hand.
It had to be a 20-sided dice from D&D that would have lists of things that annoy you.
But what is it today?
Well, I glanced at... Loza Fox had put up another picture of an eagle which had been killed by a wind turbine, and he just captioned it, bat-chomping, bird-slicing, eco-crucifix.
Nice.
And, as always, there were the wankers.
Maybe they're not real.
Maybe they're just bots or trolls or whatever.
The depressing part would be if they were actually real people trying to justify wind turbines despite the fact that they kill all these... OK, so I'm just going to read you one of the ones that really particularly annoyed me.
I just thought this guy... Can he be real?
Can he be real?
Um, he's cool, okay.
I think there's a good argument for the fact that a lot of them aren't going to be real.
That a lot of them will just be on a bot farm, paid for by the big wind.
This man claims to be called Grumpy Old Man in Scotland.
He says... Aye, aye, that would be me!
Aye, aye, they go at the same speed in the UK.
Yes, 16... 16?
16 metre trees ripped out for green energy isn't good.
But those trees are predominantly commercial crops and would be harvested at some point anyway.
Birds are reducing in the countryside due to habitat destruction, not killed by turbines.
Well, who is this?
Who is this complete twat?
Okay, so he claims to have 785 followers.
He's got to have paid for them.
Grotes, or whatever they have in Scotland.
Well, no, actually, they probably have CBDCs, don't they?
Already in Scotland, because of their regime.
His last sentence, birds are reducing in the countryside due to habitat destruction not killed by turbines.
Sorry, there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance going on there.
How are turbines not habitat destruction?
I mean, they're the definition of habitat destruction.
If they've got these whirling blades going round, killing animals as they fly.
I call that habitat destruction!
And the amount of space those concrete bases take up.
It's just... It's a bollocks argument.
Yeah, it's just a self-defeating argument.
And then you get, then you get, because obviously the enemy, they prepare the ground.
So there's this popular trope that always resurfaces, if a trope can resurface, every time.
By the way, I so need a haircut.
I haven't got it booked till Tuesday, it's really annoying.
So sorry about my hair.
There's this trope that endlessly resurfaces, which is that, well, of course, cats kill more birds than wind turbines.
Now, apart from anything else, I've got, as you know, the biggest cat short of the Beast of Bodmin.
In fact, the two have never been seen in the same room together, have they?
Yeah, exactly.
If somebody photographed that cat through a long lens, they could sell it to the Sun, basically.
And never once have I seen that cat come home with an eagle clamped between his jaws.
Not even something smaller like a peregrine falcon.
I mean, cats just don't go for raptors.
They're not equipped for it.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, are really, really well equipped for killing raptors, which, as far as I remember, are a protected species.
And it's weird.
In fact, I was going to enlarge on this to a bigger topic.
It is weird how the enemy have persuaded so many people to say really stupid things and think in a way that goes against all evidence and all logic.
So, for example, they have now persuaded environmentalists, people who profess to care about nature, profess to care about the planet, something must be done.
They've persuaded them that these These devices that don't generate energy on any useful level, and yet kill bats and birds on an industrial scale, are green.
And they persuaded these people to come up with all sorts of justifications about why they're green, even though they kill birds and bats on an industrial scale.
But James, it's free energy, for goodness sake.
Come on.
What's not to like about that?
Yeah, I mean, look, obviously I've steered the conversation onto my pet topic, but I was thinking of other things.
Did you hear the Shane Sador podcast?
Shane Sidore used to be in the Illuminati.
He went to Harry Potter Magic School, trained by the Illuminati, so he could work dark magic.
I took some of his claims with a pinch of salt.
When we got on to the subject of chemtrails, he made the point that we are so compliant with the enemy's... he made the point that we are so compliant with
We're so malleable, we're so gullible, that we can look up at the sky and see these criss-cross patterns, like somebody's started off a game of noughts and crosses, being made in the sky.
And instead of going, well, hang on a second, why are the planes doing that?
Why are they flying one way and then opposite?
They can't be going anywhere.
They're not flying to Tenerife, are they?
And then moments later you see these trails, these vapor trails, as we've been encouraged to call them, sort of expanding and floating, and then later on it gets cloudy.
And they've persuaded everyone, pretty much, apart from people like you and me and a few other nutcases, to go.
Yeah, those are contrails.
That's what planes do, they make these things called contrails.
And I know a pilot, by the way, and he tells me they're contrails as well.
And people actually do this, and they think they're sensible ones.
One of the arguments I've heard for that one is one of our friends.
Is a pilot who goes, um, oh, I love the bit where I'm flying my jumbo jet and I press the, I press the contrail button.
Ha ha lol.
And it's like, well, yeah, I don't think anyone is assuming that the passenger jets are the ones that are putting out these chemicals.
It's kind of like the straw man argument that says, surely the pilots would know that they're carrying this stuff and they'd have told us by now.
And so they do that typical strawman thing, and then there's the argument that says that they don't have the technology.
We know they have the technology to do things like cloud seeding and this sort of stuff, but they'd have to do it on an enormous scale.
Well, they don't.
They're just doing it regionally, in a piecemeal way.
There's so much more to it, but people shoot it down with strawman arguments.
And it's actually almost more divisive than the moon landing argument.
Even more divisive almost than Paul is dead, which seems to have divided quite a few of my followers.
On a different note altogether, I very nearly was late for this little Get together because I chanced my arm at booking a very late optician appointment.
My optician just wanted me in for my every two yearly checkup.
Now, I last saw him just over two years ago and I managed to squeeze an appointment in this afternoon and he's roughly my age and he's a Muslim.
And he's from the Black Country, and he's really switched on.
Don't buy a car from Dick.
Whatever he's selling you, don't.
If he's selling you a Ferrari for a fiver, don't.
I let him burst air into my eyes, so I do trust him.
But he's kind of rabbit-holey.
Two years ago, when I first started talking God to him, he was completely excited by the whole thing.
He really wanted to talk about it more.
So what we now end up doing is a 10-minute I-appointment, and then a 20-minute discussion on religion, and we continued that today.
And basically, we talk around how close Christianity is to Islam, and he was talking about, you know, I could say things like, what we're lacking today in society is the morality that, whether you believe or not, that faith lays the groundwork for the morality of society.
And he said it was equally true of his faith to mine.
That we lamented the demise of that.
So that was one of the little ones that I knew we'd have common ground.
But he's an enthusiastic student of comparative religion.
So he loved talking about the differences between Christianity and Islam to me.
And we just, we agreed on 99% of the stuff.
Dick, it's Islam.
Islam.
Islam.
But his bone of contention is with Paul, the Pauline stuff.
Yeah, but you see, you get into trouble for that with Christians because Paul is kind of key.
I know he's absolutely key, but to a normie it wouldn't seem like a big deal.
This is what I said to him.
I said, yeah, we're 99% In agreement, but that 1% has caused wars that 1% is enough to to completely fall out over and it's really key and I said in a nutshell It's whether or not Jesus was the Son of God and the Trinity and apart from that you you guys are cool with us But they're kind of key and key facts So yeah, I wasn't giving it away.
I was just You know agreeing with him how close we both were Anyway, it was a good appointment.
I think you should, next time, you'll get a really good pair of glasses for this.
Say to him that you think that English girls go around dressed like sluts and they deserve to be raped.
He's a nice, modern, very westernised guy, and we get on great.
I'm teasing.
Of course you are.
I'm teasing.
Funnily enough, my guy is also a Muslim, but I haven't broached the... I think most of the Muslims are on our side in this war.
I think a lot of them are wise to...
Well, I said to him basically, just to put a line under this one, you and I have far more in common with each other than we do with atheists.
Yeah.
Yeah, we do.
But actually, not to draw a line under it, because I have to say to you, Dick, you obviously haven't gone down the optician's rabbit hole.
Oh, for goodness sake!
Yeah, just think about this.
Think about this.
We know that dentists are, by and large, a massive conspiracy against one's health.
What with mercury, amalgam fillings and so on.
Certainly against one's teeth.
Yeah, exactly.
Doctors, medical doctors, they're trained in the allopathic medicine, which we know is deleterious to our health.
Why do you think that opticians are going to be exempt from this?
They're not.
We know that our eyes will degrade over time, whether opticians intervene or not.
Yeah, but you see, are the glasses, the ever-stronger glasses they're selling to you, are they actually contributing to your decline?
Well no, a good optician will tell you only to wear them when you absolutely need them, because he knows that your eyes will get lazy with them.
I see your dicks being a normie day-to-day.
I think you just haven't spoken to me for a while, just because I'm not saying opticians are part of the great conspiracy.
Well, I think they probably are.
I think they probably are.
Evidence!
When I go for a walk with the dog now, a sort of long walk, I tend not to wear glasses.
It's a trade-off.
I'm going to miss out on all the hedgerow creatures that I might otherwise spot, but at the same time, maybe my eyes looking into the distance is what they need.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
But, as I said, this guy told me pretty much the same.
He said, don't wear your reading glasses for doing computer work.
You don't need them.
It'll only make you lazy.
It'll only make your eyes lazy.
And he hasn't changed my prescription.
What's annoying me now is that Boy has not brought me my cup of tea yet.
I said, if you're making a cup of tea, Dear boy, will you make me one?
And he sort of made noises like, so you're asking me for some tea are you?
And I was like, yeah.
But it hasn't come yet.
Well that's appalling news and obviously I will pray for you.
Yes, yes.
Talking of that, I am now on, I think possibly my favourite book of the Bible.
Right.
Daniel.
Yeah.
Um, uh, Dan... Dan Cure, Sir Dan of Sea, is, uh, that's, ironically, not ironically at all, that's his favourite book, because he's one of the first of our Thursday Circle group who... Do you know who Belteshazzar is?
No.
Have a guess.
Is he a king?
No.
Ha ha ha ha ha, you see.
You're confusing Belteshazzar with Belshazzar.
Oh, Belshazzar, right.
Belteshazzar, actually, I'm just confused by this as well.
is actually Daniel.
So what happened is that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Chaldeans, a.k.a. the king of Babylon, captures Jerusalem, obviously destroys it and nicks all their stuff.
And then he decrees that the most beautiful and bright boys from Jerusalem should be brought to the Babylonian court to learn the language.
I suppose the Romans did, didn't they?
They sort of Romanised people, so he's Babylonianising And he gave them Babylonian names.
So Daniel became Belteshazzar.
And Daniel's mates, do you know what they were called?
You'll remember this.
In the recesses of your memory, you'll remember this from scripture classes at school.
No, you'll have to hit me with them so I can go on yet.
Shadrach.
Meshach and Abednego.
Meshach.
Exactly, Abednego.
Who are the ones who went into the fiery furnace?
So it all comes back to you and meanie, meanie, teckle.
It's like Shem, Ham and Japheth.
They just all spring back into your mind, don't they?
Oh, exactly.
Some of it must have something.
We had quite a good...
We had quite a good grounding, didn't we?
Yeah, yeah.
Prep school to public school and some really switched on divinity teachers and chaplains, yeah.
And as you were telling your Psalms guy, your Nick Mackeson, that, you know, chapel every day, twice on a Sunday, it's gonna, no matter how much you hated it, you're taking it in, especially if you're a sponge at that age.
But do you, you say that all these people were sort of experts or, do you remember who our first scripture teacher was?
At prep school, at Hillstone.
Um, well I'm not thinking Ted Ed.
No, exactly.
You've got your memories been...
It was Mr. Greaves.
Was he scripture?
Mr. Greaves, the art teacher, also taught scripture.
Mr. Greaves, who fought in the Long Range Desert group and then in tanks in the Western Desert, but wouldn't talk about it annoyingly.
Hmm.
Yeah, him.
He taught scripture and I suppose anyone could, and we just used to get tests on it.
So you'd get tests like... I don't remember him being a scripture teacher.
Well, maybe.
I can't believe that it was streamed.
Maybe it was.
No, no, but I thought it was maybe Torrance or someone like that.
No, no.
Anyway, this is a bit niche for those who weren't at Hillstone School in the early 1970s.
I wonder how many of them are listening to this podcast now?
Two, maybe?
Two, if we're very, very lucky.
But it is great to have this stuff.
And I wonder, because I was really good at scripture at school.
I used to always come top of the class.
And I'd love to go back into my mind, as I was then, and try and recall what it was that I felt about this stuff.
Did I think it was just a waste of time?
Did I... Well, I used to say my prayers every night, so I must have believed to a degree, mustn't I?
Where were you back then?
I thought it was all allegory.
I thought it was, especially as even the odd chaplain would brush it off as kind of like, we're not to take it all literally.
Did they?
Yeah.
I feel a bit betrayed on that front, because no one actually came out and said, this Wu stuff, you'll love this.
The stuff to actually reel in kids, A little bit of woo would have gone a long way, but no, we were taught not to believe the weird stuff and certainly not to dabble with revelation.
This is how I white pill the kids who I go riding with during the school holidays when they're on their ponies.
I just sort of red pill and white pill them, it's great.
I say, what are we covering today kids?
Are we going to do the Titanic?
Or are we going to do Dinosaurs Aren't Real?
They say, oh, we're learning something in our history lesson.
Can you give us something to... Oh, nice.
Well, my big favourite at the moment is creationism versus Darwinism.
And you're a Darwinist.
Darwinists haven't got a leg to stand on, have they?
Their theory is such a load of bollocks.
This whole idea that there was this combination of chemicals at just the right temperature for the right number of millions of years that spontaneously started single-celled life, and it's just... They can't honestly believe that.
At best, they'll say, yeah, well, it's better than your theory that there's a big sky fairy.
I say, you know what?
I don't think it is a better theory.
Yes, how is it?
It's... I like the Big Sky Fairy theory.
I think it's really good.
It's really compelling.
Mock him at your peril.
I mean, it's just obvious.
Once you think about it, if you stop and look at the evidence, it becomes so obvious that... I'm reading a very good book at the moment called In Six Days.
Have you heard of it?
It's 50 top-level scientists who believe in six-day creation, and a short essay from each of them, starting off with their credentials as scientists, and to then say why it's not just plausible, but likely.
And they talk in terms of, OK, so you think there's a primordial swamp that somehow one day came up with the first single cell that ultimately split and became everything that was life on Earth.
For that to happen, you don't just need the right ingredients.
Where are you getting the amino acids and the correct... You need an oxygen source.
It needs to have actual life in it and the nucleus and the DNA and RNA within it.
It's not just... A cell is not a simple thing that will happen if you throw the right amount of chemicals together.
And this idea that... Yeah, but you've got to add in.
It's got millions of years for it to happen.
It can't happen over millions of years.
It all has to happen simultaneously or it doesn't happen at all.
You can't expect one part of the cell to create and then wait a millennium for the next part to just happen along.
That cell isn't going to wait around.
It'll be dead in seconds unless all the ingredients are there together.
So, this was only one of the essays, but after you've read about four or five of them, you put the book down and you're going, well, it's so glaringly obvious.
I thought this book would be a good counter to the Darwinists, because I didn't have any particularly good arguments against their theory.
And now I'm like, well, how did I ever believe that Darwin crap?
So, yeah, I'll certainly put it your way, but I'm enjoying it at the moment.
You believed it, we believed it, because it's everywhere.
You pretty much cannot read an article on the subject of certainly the biological sciences or wildlife or anything without encountering, just dropped in casually, something about evolution.
Although weirdly, I was watching Only Connect the other night.
Do you ever watch Only Connect?
I don't watch any live television.
Okay, it's the only BBC show we watch, because it's the only one as a family that we can tolerate.
You're still a TV reviewer, so you're allowed it.
Apart from Australian Masterchef.
Of course.
And Victoria Corrin, who I consider kind of liberal elite, bordering on Satanist, Luciferian, you know, Illuminati.
There was a question that came up about evolution, and she just said, of course, I don't believe in evolution.
And I was thinking, this was a really striking thing for anyone to say on the BBC.
And we all did a double take, because we were thinking, is it a joke?
Is it one of her... Is she taking the piss?
She doesn't do jokes.
I mean, she tries jokes, but she's famous for unfunny jokes.
So anyway, Boye did a Google thing and discovered that she's... well, it wasn't totally clear whether she is Jewish or Christian.
I mean, the Korans are Jewish by family lineage, I should think.
She may have converted, I don't know.
But anyway, she believes in God and doesn't believe in... doesn't believe in evolution.
Right.
So that's good.
I'm amazed that got through.
The one that slipped through the censors.
But it's one of those things that you don't challenge, and if you do, you're an absolute loon.
I remember someone recently saying, yeah, but now, of course, James Dellingpole is a young Earth creationist, and who saw that coming?
It just puts you so totally out there.
Do you remember my two bosses when I worked back in Cheltenham for a branding agency?
And they're both evangelical Christians.
And they're both, whenever we talked about this sort of stuff at work, it was like, yeah, yeah, fossils, it's all, it's not what you think.
I said, but carbon dating, yeah, that can be falsified.
And I said, do you really believe the earth was created in the way that you're told and above?
Yeah.
And they didn't try to convince me, they just had a perfectly rational argument every time I had one for them.
And I was thinking, you guys are really confident in your complete lunacy.
Good on you for believing it, but woo!
And so I know that's how we come across.
In fact, a lot of people watching us now will be going, woo!
And we don't care.
We don't care.
We totally, totally don't because we're based.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Based AF.
I thought you put it very well.
Yeah, based AF.
I thought you put it very well, actually.
Because it is one of the hand-waving things that people defending evolutionary theory do, is they say, look, it happens over millions of years.
And you think, oh, well, if it happens over millions of years, well, that explains everything!
Anything could have happened in that time!
Anything, exactly, anything!
Because they don't want to go into the detail, because it's, oh, dick!
Oh, my goodness!
Have you come across the staircase of disbelief?
No.
I'm going to send you the link to the Staircase of Disbelief.
Unfortunately, I've forgotten the guy's name who came up with this.
It's not a theory, it's a framing device explaining why... I was thinking there was literally a staircase that was really... because there was someone on Facebook posting lots of Facebook pictures of really terrifying staircases.
You only see it, you would have missed it, the blue moon, right?
That was the other night.
Oh right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was a blue moon which will not appear again until probably we're dead, you know, like... Which of course I missed totally, because I only found out about the day after, so yeah.
Well, if you looked just underneath the moon, you would have seen the Staircase of Disbelief, which is actually what Robert Plant was thinking of when he wrote his... Stairway to Heaven?
Literally, when he wrote Stairway to Heaven.
Right.
No, no, I'm making that up.
Oh, for God's sake, don't do this on your credulous brother!
Sorry.
Sorry.
The Staircase of Disbelief is essentially the gulf that separates Norm is from from us.
Mm-hmm and He explained I'm not going to explain it as well as he does but he says look you don't you don't embrace Conspiracy theories all at once you you you get on the first step say it's that maybe there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in the the Gulf War maybe maybe
Unbelievable that might seem maybe Tony Blair actually lied to us and President Bush lied to us in order to engineer the war.
They just need an excuse or it might be a similar one might be.
Maybe there was more than one gunman involved in the assassination of JFK and maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was a bit too far from the bookstore, the book depository for this guy Oswald to get in a decent headshot.
Maybe.
And so you're on there and so you've got your doubts about the system and that enables you To move on further and further up the staircase of disbelief.
So, once you've accepted the possibility that state agencies are morally compromised, that they do not necessarily act in your interest, that the authorities are not your friend, and they lie to you, and they do worse, you're ready for things like false flags.
Yes, not only did they lie to us about the Gulf War and about JFK and all the moon landings, but also they actually kill innocent people.
To, in fake attacks, to blame the Muslims or to justify new wars which benefit from the military-industrial complex, whatever.
But you cannot reach that point on the staircase of disbelief until you've taken the baby step towards first accepting that, hang on a second, maybe the authorities are not as trustworthy as we thought.
You see that?
The problem is, with normies, is that they know, instinctively, that the moment they step onto the first step in the staircase of disbelief, that that is the beginning of a journey which will lose them friends, lose them credibility, possibly even cost them their jobs, which will change their world forever, that may even endanger their lives.
And so most people, You know, they can sort of flash forward and see what's... Thank you.
Are you still there Dick?
Yeah, I'm still here, but I have in fact lost your image, and you're just about in a faint voice at the moment.
Okay, that's apparently... And I know it must be your end.
I know you traditionally blame your guests, but... No, it's saying your internet's shit, not mine, actually.
Yeah, yeah, that's the line all the time, isn't it?
Okay, anyway.
This is why we have such trouble reaching a chunk of the population.
They never want to go even onto the first step, because they know instinctively what it's going to cost them.
So they'd rather remain in ignorance than know, because they know the consequences of knowing are so great that it is better to remain in ignorance.
Do you see?
Yeah.
No, I get that, and it works on a lot of levels.
On a very simple level, it's the sort of people who will still go to Costa every time they want a coffee, because even though they know it's not going to be the best coffee they ever had, it's reliably the same as the last coffee they had, and they will have surroundings that won't challenge them in any way.
And they won't risk an experience in the unknown by going to the local indie cafe.
And there's those of us who wouldn't go anywhere near a Costa.
If a little girl chops her breasts off, it doesn't matter because the main thing is they've got consistent coffee.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's why normies won't take the first step, as you say, because, you know, it's a can of worms, and they'll just keep the lid firmly on it.
But, yeah, you'll have to send me links to the entire staircase of disbelief theory, but... Also, I'll send you a link to... I'm a bit discombobulated at the moment by not being able to see you.
Is there anything you can do to make... I can see you.
I can see you.
Okay.
Your voice is now at least quite clear.
Yeah, well, I can see you, you, blurrily.
And the main thing is the viewer.
They'll get it all and it'll be fine.
Is one of your children playing Call of Duty or something like kids do?
They don't.
They don't play video games.
No.
Are you saying that was a bad thing?
I think it's probably a good thing.
Yeah, it's definitely a good thing.
They think about the life wasted in playing video games.
Yeah, no, that's why they're there.
How is that a good use of life?
It's bread and circuses, isn't it?
It totally is.
Totally is.
The other thing I want to send you Dick, when I send you The Staircase of Disbelief, is I'll send you my substack.
I've been on a sort of substack roll, and my other platforms as well.
I was halfway through the Hitler one the other day.
Oh the Hitler one, yeah.
I got halfway through it before I realised there was another several pages of it, so I paused and I thought I'd save it for another day, and I haven't got back to it yet.
But I was smiling as I read it.
Well, that is the joy of... I mean, that's the upside and the downside of Substack, is you haven't got an editor saying, you know, yeah, can you give us 1,200 words by 3pm?
words by by 3 p.m so so what i find is that i deliver sort of two and a half thousand words by by 3 p.m about three weeks after i started the piece right because because you've got you've got no limits and and and there's lots of room for digression and so yeah but you've got an internal editor uh you know sat on your shoulder whispering into your ear
and and after years in journalism uh which actually segues really nicely into this Do you remember my old London friend Malcolm who gave us a story about the story of his brother meeting that girl at the party who liked to be mole gripped?
That's a long time ago, that story.
That story came from Malcolm, anyway.
And of course, we're using mole grip as a euphemism in that.
Anyway, before we go too much further into that, Malcolm contacted me the other day and said, I've been trying to contact your brother to tell him how much I enjoyed his old article on Sixto Rodriguez.
Yeah?
Oh yeah.
And I thought, what a funny thing to say.
He said, but I can't get him to reply or I don't think the message is getting through.
Could you just tell him how much I thought that was a brilliant piece of writing?
So one, to make Malcolm happy, I'm doing that now, telling you how much Malcolm enjoyed that piece.
So I thought I'd go back and reread it.
And in the process found out that it was because the man died last month at the age of 81.
But I went back and read your piece from the Telegraph, and I think you can do this by googling Delingpole and Sixto Rodriguez, from 2009.
And it really was an excellent article.
It was... You were good at that shit.
You were good at the interviews and the background story and engaging the reader.
It was a real pleasure to read all over again.
Well, I was really good.
And I find this really interesting, knowing what I know now about the world, which is that I was, like, I don't believe in false modesty.
If you're good at something, you, like, you know, don't you?
Like, I mean, I'd love to be really good at riding and jumping over hedges, and I know I'm not as good as I'd like to be.
No, you've never claimed to be good at the shit that you're not.
No.
But I think when it comes to writing there's not many people particularly articles and sort of think pieces and stuff you know I mean like I mean Toby bless him is not even in the game I'm so much better than him.
I'm, you know, Rod Little is pretty good on his day, but once he finds the formula, it's like, and his insights are just like rubbish.
I mean, he's got nothing actually to say about the world.
He's got no coherent worldview, because he doesn't know.
He's stuck in the kind of normie paradigm.
Can you say Weltanschauung?
Weltanschauung.
But rather than diss all the people who are not as good as me, I mean, Douglas doesn't write as well as me, for example, but I used to feel not so much bitter, that would be too strong a word, but I was puzzled why somebody who was as good at but I was puzzled why somebody who was as good at this stuff as me, good at kind of features, good at think pieces and
Why I was never rewarded with the golden ticket, the column on the mail or the kind of...
Or one of those jobs like Brian Appleyard has on the Sunday Times where he's the go-to colour supplement feature writer and stuff.
It's a sinecure.
Once you're there, you get loads and loads of money and it's great.
And I realise now, it's got nothing to do with whether you can write or not, or how entertaining you are.
You've got to have the extra ingredient, which is how willing are you to spread your butt cheeks for the man?
And I suppose people like Rod probably think of themselves as sort of free spirits, but they're not.
Because what they're doing every time they bash away at their keyboard is that they are endorsing the mendacious paradigm in which everyone is stuck.
So, you know, you're going to get Rod talking about how maybe Trump is a bit A bit right-wing and crazy and stuff, and how, I don't know, global warming is a problem, probably, because Rod thinks it's a bit green and so on.
They're faux-edgy, but in every word they write, they are actually endorsing the narrative.
And everyone who's got a column in, I mean, Brian Appleyard, for example, I'm sure many years ago I would have read pieces by him, long, long pieces explaining why the next viral pandemic was going to be a real problem and it could be happening any time.
You think, these guys are just like the bitches of the system, of our evil overlords.
You've managed to say controlled opposition without saying controlled opposition.
Yeah, nobody ever asked me, do you want to be a bitch of the evil overlords and many benefits will accrue and you'll get a scarlet cloak with a gold thing around your neck like Daniel got given by Nebuchadnezzar and by his son Belshazzar, by the way, before Belshazzar was killed that very evening.
Do you know that?
Oh, spoiler alert!
The very evening when Daniel revealed to Belshazzar what the meaning of his dream about the feast, it says in one sentence, and then Belshazzar was killed.
He does that in the Bible.
He was replaced by somebody else.
There it is.
He was replaced by Darius, I think.
The Sixto Rodriguez thing.
Interesting that actually you seem to be talking to someone who knew the score with the fact that the music industry is just as what you described in journalism.
That it's fully corrupt and he wouldn't play the game.
And I think he was probably awake.
If you go back and reread your article, It could have been written by you very recently in that it touched on all the... He didn't want to play the music industry game.
He wouldn't be their bitch.
Dick, you've actually just poked a... I was going to say you've poked a hornet's nest of thoughts in my... This is something I've been wanting to talk to you about and I'd forgotten.
But have you ever wondered Whether all the music that we liked, we actually only liked because we were brainwashed into liking it with various sort of cultural stimuli.
Whether those stimuli might be the image of the band or just the associations with the band or sheer repetition.
Have you ever thought that actually you could take any piece of shitey music and turn it into gold and that this is how the music industry has always worked?
I think there's only a certain amount of legs in that one because I remember, I think back to what I liked back when and sometimes you liked a song despite the fact that it was by a band you hated and were really uncool and you were slightly embarrassed to like the song Which leads me to believe that there must be songs that are of their own merit, good and listenable and enjoyable.
But are they getting you on a sort of a satanic level?
Are they getting it because, you know, the devil has all the best tunes?
The image and manipulation of our emotions through image, I think, only plays a part.
I think some of it has to be in the songwriting and the tunes.
Yes, I think that was a very good answer.
I think though, do you remember you and I used to sit down with the Beatles Red Album and the Beatles Blue Album?
We used to play them a lot.
I remember there came a point in our lives where we felt we really must get to know the Beatles better because they are part of our musical education and not to know about them will leave us Empty.
And although we found certain songs which were very, very good, I mean, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields, a few others, I do remember even at the time, not really expressing it because one had been programmed not to express such things, but how so much of their catalogue is absolutely shite in different ways.
And Looking back on it, I mean, well, looking at their back catalogue now, I think there is no way that that was written by four lovable mop tops from Liverpool.
The variety is far, far too great.
There's no common aesthetic there.
Even if you had, oh, scabrous, cynical John Lennon versus twee winsome Paul McCartney.
Even that doesn't explain the variety of their stuff.
I very much buy into the idea that this was all written by other hands and then say, I think I've written something a bit Ringo-ish today.
This is a good one, Dick.
Yellow Submarines.
It's a clue about flat Earth and about the nature of our experience that we are living in a yellow submarine and sky of blue and sea of green.
It's all... Right.
It's all the description of... A bit like... They're telling you what they're doing.
In plain sight.
They're telling you what they're doing.
A bit like Psalm 19, I think, tells you, it gives you a clue as to the nature of, it talks about the firmament.
Right.
The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmaments showeth his handiwork.
And it goes into detail.
There's a really, really good line in it.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber.
And rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.
I love the idea of the sun coming out like a bridegroom out of his chamber and running about like a giant, delighting, enjoying what he's doing.
I haven't got on to that particular psalm yet, but what I have done is, as I mentioned earlier, watched your first psalms podcast, and obviously you're covering... Let me just do this... So, which line have you quoted from Psalm 23 on the back?
Well, can you read that?
No?
Yeah, it was... King James Version.
no yeah it was yea thou watch in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me um King James version you've got the key bit the central bit thou art with me yeah I like the fact that he pointed out that that was absolutely the middle part of it and it's a line on its own um But I'm thinking of going for Psalm 1 next.
What do you think of that, for a learner?
Oh, I think Psalm 1 is absolutely key.
I was hoping you'd say that.
Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law will he exercise himself day and night.
I'll get on to it.
I thought I'd be okay with 91 and 23, but I'm feeling like there's room in my life for another one.
Some people, I think it was Assistant Ben, I'm very ungracious when people give me these little Christmas presents and a few years ago, I think it was somebody on my team, I think it was Ben, gave me this fantastic old book about the Psalms and it talked about the Psalms in history.
And it's particularly interesting on the early church, and it tells you that certain figures just took maybe one or two lines of the Psalms, of their favourite Psalms, and that was the model for them.
They built their life on that.
I mean, you could build your life on Psalm 1, actually.
Ruskin, you know, the Victorian who wrote about painters.
Ruskin said there's about, he named about five psalms that he said that those lay out the ground rules for how to live your life and you can skip the rest.
But, yeah.
Well, I'm glad you finally started your series.
I think that God sort of got one of his fingers and went, it's about time.
It's about time.
Also, I think that when we get cancelled, I think we're fast approaching the stage where even talking about so-called conspiracy theories will have you branded as a terrorist and get taken off the air.
I suppose when that happens, I can still do the Psalms until, of course, they make that illegal.
Oh, I can completely see the time coming very soon, and Calvin Robinson's been clear on this, that we're going to get persecuted, and it's going to become alright to persecute Christians again, and they're not going to see the irony of the fact that they've been protecting every other faith but Christianity all these years, and the same people will completely endorse the persecution of traditional Christians.
It's already happening.
Yeah.
It totally is, and it's not like we don't know that that's the deal.
Because it says it, because Jesus says it all the time.
No, no, and we're told in Revelation that we're going to face persecution, so yeah, that's something else to look forward to.
It makes us kind of, it makes us kind of badass, I guess.
Oh, we're going to be really badass, because it's not exactly going to shut us up, is it?
No, it's not, it's not.
I think that People who haven't looked into this, the ones who are immune to the Christian message, I think haven't thought very hard about how long eternity lasts.
I mean, that's the very first thing that got me, the day I woke up to it all, and it was our good friend Richard Mutter, who is now an army chaplain, and he said the words, he said, all this Covid nonsense, everyone's so worried about dying, and no one seems to give a damn about their immortal soul.
And I went away.
That was the last thing he said to me that night.
And I just went away thinking about it.
And I thought, immortal soul, immortal soul.
Immortal soul is a real thing.
Eternity is quite a long time.
Our 90 years on Earth, however long we get, is but a blink of an eye in comparison.
Yeah, you really should be spending that short period of time making sure you're good with eternity, because that's a heck of a long time.
And that's one of the things that really got me going, got me switched on to the whole thing.
Eternity.
And yeah, you don't want to be in a bad place while that's going on.
The other thing is though, Dick, I am As you know, I spend a lot of time in my head and I don't think I would ever have been converted to true Christianity.
If I hadn't been persuaded by the intellectual case, as well as the, you know, lots of people say, oh, well, you know, you just feel it and you have this emotional connection with Jesus and stuff, which I think is probably true.
But I find that the intellectual case for Christianity, where you outline some of that with evolutionary theory, it just doesn't stand up compared to creationism.
I know we're supposed to just get into this thing through faith, and like, there's not supposed to be anything beyond that that's, well okay, miracles, but lots of people don't believe in miracles and things.
But actually, there's so much really compelling evidence that this stuff is real.
I mean, for example, I commend to you some of the podcasts on the Turin Shroud, which, like, It feels like cheating.
It feels like cheating because there was no question that the guy who was underneath the Turin Shroud got resurrected after three days.
There's just no doubt about it.
And I think, oh no, that's slightly unfair.
That's, you know, I mean, we're supposed to just like, in our hearts, just, just to take the risk of the leap of faith.
And actually here it is like God saying, no, no, no.
Here's some evidence for you.
Or, I recommend, somebody sent me this, I'll send it to you, Chuck Missler, have you come across Chuck Missler yet?
I've seen the name, that's as far as I can say.
He's dead now, well obviously he's alive in heaven, but he's, he did this one really good thing where, well he's done lots of good things, he did this one on, he said There's a way of looking at the Bible.
How do you know it's true?
You know you get this line from atheists all the time saying, yeah, but it's just stories made up by people to justify their fear of death and you can't trust any of this stuff and all the stuff that we hear.
And he says, actually, God has put this imprint on the scriptures, where you know that this couldn't be accidental, that this stuff is real.
And it has to do with the number seven, which is the holy number.
It's a bit like the mathematical possibilities of evolution.
There's no way that animals could have evolved because the chances of each successive stage where they kind of mutate from, I don't know, a fish to a whatever, a cat or whatever, they're so implausible that you string them all together and you've got sort of infinity to one against.
And he goes, he demonstrates that, well, I can't explain it, it's just, you sit there listening and your jaw just hits the floor when you realise, wow, there are all these codes embedded in the Scriptures, in the Bible, I think particularly the King James Bible actually, for some reason.
There's a guy who does another podcast explaining why the King James Bible 1611.
It's all the kind of gematria and the numerology and all the significance of it.
This is the book that the prophets predicted would be the binding scripture that united all Christians under God's word using universal language English.
And Anyway, um... Well, you're going to have to send me a link to it.
I lost it.
Yeah, I will.
I lost it in the telling.
Anyway, yeah, look up, look up Chuck Missler and... Well, look, there's one other thing.
You were talking about the, uh, you were enticed by the intellectual arguments.
I think the, as a painter and an artist, I think there's a lot to be said for being enticed in on those grounds because, little story, My good friend Andy invited me to attend choral matins at Hereford Cathedral last week, I think it was, or the week before.
We've been looking around for non-woke church services where we're not going to get a rainbow flag, Black Lives Matter, Ukraine sermon.
So he found this choral matins, which is the third service of the morning that's gone on at Hereford Cathedral.
You've already had morning prayer and you've already had the main communion service.
So it's the third service.
No, it's 11.15.
Hardly anyone's there.
I think the congregation amounted to about eight people.
Easily outnumbered by the choir, who is a visiting choir.
Each week a different choir.
There's a season for this, and they normally have the Hereford Cathedral Choir, but they have a period of time off, during which time visiting choirs come.
So, you get to sit in the unoccupied choir stalls, because the choir, being about 14 people, only occupies a small part of it.
And all the liturgy is sung in responses, and the choir is singing it.
There is a little bit of participation.
You sing two hymns, and they both happen to be belters, so that was nice.
And you're surrounded by this complete beauty of Hereford Cathedral, which is a lovely cathedral.
Of course, it's got the Mappa Mundi in there as well, which is another good reason to visit.
Is that flat?
Yes.
It's not a globe.
But I was thinking that if you were a member of the public who drifted in to come and have a look at this cathedral, because you're in a city, a cathedral city, you go and have a look at the cathedral, you'd be hit by the stained glass and the beauty of that.
Oh, and you can go to the SAS monument in there, the SAS Chapel.
And all around is the beauty of the architecture and the glass.
While this choir is singing something that could have been sung a thousand years before, you can be completely transported in the moment.
And if you were even slightly Christian, Or had your doubts about atheism?
This thing would surely take you the rest of the way.
You'd be swept away by the beauty of the whole thing.
You'd have to ask yourself, there's got to be more to this than I initially thought.
So there are lots and lots of ins.
You can have an in on an intellectual basis.
You can have an in on a purely an artistic basis.
But I think They'll find you, depending on what your particular, well let's call it a vulnerability is.
And it's great that it got you on the intellectual front, but I think a lot of people will be brought in by the beauty of the whole thing.
Oh, yeah.
It was just another facet, I think.
You're right.
The beauty thing is something else.
And also, going back to the evolution and stuff, there's the nature thing.
Consider the lilies.
Yeah.
And it's just like, yeah, well, do.
Do consider the lilies.
How would that have been created by Random processes.
Well, I always use the example of a butterfly.
I said, you can look at a butterfly's wings and tell me that that was once an amoeba that just happened to get lucky.
It's just a ludicrous argument.
So, you know, consider the butterflies and the lilies, but yeah.
I have been considering the butterflies recently, and what I love about the butterflies, apart from the fact they've got lovely fluttery wings with lots of colours on them, Is that butterflies seem to be really, really fussy about when they come out.
And when they come out is when it's sunny.
They love the sun.
They just absolutely love it.
Sometimes if it gets a bit cloudy, your buddleia is suddenly empty.
But as soon as the sun breaks through, the butterflies emerge from somewhere and they're always fluttering about and they're really, really happy in the sun.
And they're not plastering themselves with Factor 50, are they?
No, they're not.
They're not.
And yet, neither do they sew!
Listen, we're going to go soon, because I've noticed that we're over our hour.
But, I think when you ask all your other guests, where can we find you?
This is the time when I say, look, you can buy this branded Deling Pod.
Well, these aren't, but the t-shirts are.
Why aren't they branded Delingpod?
Well, because of what... that probably wasn't... No, they are!
Sorry, yep, they are.
There you go.
And, um, the t-shirts... Yeah!
Yeah?
And you can get them on delingpolestudio.com So you could put that as a nice little link at the bottom of your thing.
delingpolestudio.com Yeah.
That's good.
And there's also a Psalm 91 mug, but I haven't got that with me right now.
But yeah, I should get better at selling the merch.
I'm very lazy with it.
We should both get better at monetizing our things.
You're frozen now.
That's probably a message for us to wind it up.
Well Dick, thanks that was great and thank you everyone for listening and please keep supporting me.
I really appreciate your support on Locals and Substack and you get early access to my podcast if you sign up to these ones.
I mean I think you should do it to support me rather than because you want to get early access but you do get early access.
Um, and also you can buy me a coffee, which is nice.
Um, and yeah.
That's it.
Oh, and my sponsors.
Don't forget to use my sponsors.
The Pure Gold Company and Monetary Metals and a few others.
