You know what a ‘doomsday prepper’ is? No? A doomsday prepper is a modern person who believes that an event will occur that will effectively end civilisation. Communities will be bereft of food, clean water, commodities . . . they will have to fight and steal for these things. Hard and viciously. Unless, of course, they have Been Prepared for Doomsday.

Thus, they build bomb shelters, store food and weapons and two-way radios. They rig booby traps around their dwelling and stock up on canned food, water, fish hooks and so on. Now, nota bene, these people exist in real life today – have a look at https://www.doomsdayprep.com/.

Now I believe that doomsday may happen. In fact, I welcome it. On the occurrence of doomsday, a whole lot of great things will happen: all those so-called clients who delay paying their bills to us will die and our bank, which never answers the phone, will be put on hold forever and our phone calls to them, which is important to us, will hang up forever. Life-wasting meetings will come to an end. The women who ignore me will no longer be allowed to do so and the woman who does not want to love me will not have to worry about it. Boom! Gone!

But one thing that is all around us and we do not realise it is dumbsday. It is like this: out there is somebody who wants to rule the world. He or she has realised that to do this by force is impossible. The US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and Japan is still around and not controlled by the US. No, violence will not do it. The Allies dropped 3 400 000 t of bombs on Germany, and Germany is not run by the UK or the US. No, subjugation by explosives won’t do it.

What will do it is when somebody (a ‘master’) has control of your mind. To control your mind and to guide you by suggestion, cosy illusions and comforting half truths until you do what the master wants. The beginning of this is to feed you information that is not true or accurate and see if you question the information. It all happens by means of the Internet. Starting small. Classic example: if you type into Google ‘Inventor of the motor car’, what do you get? Overwhelmingly, you get ‘Karl Benz’. All the sites, Wikipedia included. But it is wrong. The inventor is Carl Benz. Mit einem C kein K. Have a look at https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/classic/history/carl-benz/.

Then we look at some other stuff – specifically, war movies. Skop skiet en donner movies with guns. Ah, guns. In each and every movie, when a machine gun fires, a flame shoots out the front. Bang bang bang. Which, if this was true, would allow all people in any conflict to identify their opponents with ease. Which is why no such flame actually happens. But we are used to it by now. Not true or accurate. But so what? Then we have a video of the Tesla Spacehopper Rocket craft static fire test. It is like no test we have seen before or since. An initial flame becomes a fireball and the rocket is enveloped. The commentator says: “Uh . . . well, looks as if the rocket is undamaged, which is good.” Is he kidding? It was a huge fail. But so what? Not true or accurate, but do we care?

Thus the process goes on. A true practical joke is one that builds on an increasingly unlikely set of circumstances, each made more believable by the previous circumstance. For example, buy a duplicate TV remote. Use it to secretly change channels. Tell whoever is watching that the channel changes whenever the dog (or whoever) moves. After a while, explain that this also happens when somebody on the TV says the word ‘night’. And so on. This is what is happening to us. We are being programmed to believe anything we are told, through the Internet. We will lose the ability of free thought. And dumbsday, when we can be controlled, will arrive.