A Roundup on 2023

Oh What a Mess!

It is now December and time for my annual look at life, the universe and our backyard, with my usual attempt to guess which way things are likely to go over the course of the next year.

Usually life is relatively stable and one can have a reasonable guess at the likely way forward, even if that is for just one year, but these days that is impossible. The last three years have been absurd and a complete nightmare.

We’ve had a serious health scare that may have started with governments being careful, but soon generated into a complete farce. We were ordered to take injections that had not been passed as safe or suitable for purpose. It took over a year and a court case to get the issuing drug companies to even print and circulate a list of contra-indications, some of which are horrendous, and we still dont have the full story, except that people have been dying from heart disorders, more people have had their foetuses aborted, or found themselves to be sterile, and more problems keep appearing.

Supply chains were disrupted, people living in high rise apartments had an appalling time, and the suicide rate soared. Then we had the disruption from the failure of the Kiev government to stop bombing the Donbass. Admittedly that was a consequence of the American led regime change at the beginning of 2014.

Not content with that disruption Washington is now involved in no less than four wars; Ukraine, Syria, Lybia and the Sahel, and the Middle East.

The USA has also bombed the main energy sources of Western Europe, and sent energy prices for most of us through the roof, and we are still supporting an army of occupation here.

However you look at things, the world is in one almighty mess.

I left school and entered a world with a bright future. I belonged to the world. And that meant the whole world. We called it The Global Village.

I am now of retirement age but I have not retired because I enjoy what I do, however I now feel the exact opposite to that bright future that faced me when I was starting out. I feel that I dont belong anywhere, and that I live in an alien world which I do not understand.

We now live in the world envisaged in that frightening novel called 1984. One of the main structures in that world was based on language, which is called double-speak. You say “x” but you mean “not x”.

I used to live in Budapest with my Hungarian girl-friend during the cold war. Her opinion of the East-West political stand-off was described simply: East says one and means two, while West says three and means four. I still think she was spot on. That’s one way of describing double-speak.

I dont think I am alone in my feeling of almost total alienation in the current world order. This isn’t a generational thing. This is a seismic change.

The language thing can easily be described by the Ukraine intervention rhetoric. The US and the Western Alliance says: “We are fighting for democracy.”

What do these people think is democracy?

I thought it was where the grass roots folk could vote for a representative to represent them (not to lead them), and act on their behalf. Democracy, as promoted by the Western Alliance in Ukraine represents an ousted democratically elected president, replaced forcibly by a foreign government of a puppet surrounded by nazis, who refuses to allow elections. In other words, the word democracy has become synonymous with the concept of fascism. That’s 1984 doublespeak.

I happen to believe that the worst thing you can do in life is lie. Lying leads to all sorts of chaos because nobody knows who is who, and what is what, and therefore no sensible decisions can be taken. Everything is based on shifting sand.

I currently live in Western Europe. The continent of Europe is a complete mess no matter which way you look at it.

In terms of finances, every single European country is broke. We are living in a debt-ridden mess where currencies are being devalued year by year, which is described as inflation. It isn’t inflation at all, but currencies being debased by money printing, which is the consequence of bad government.

Simple infrastructure doesn’t work properly. I have friends who are at their wits end trying to get medical assistance, often for very simple problems, but they are having to wait months and even years to get that treatment.

I have spent a lot of my life as a lawyer. Recently I have been trying to get the government to pay me for a claim against a trustee company that went bust. The whole point about trustees is that you are supposed to be able to trust them. This one blatantly lied. The government is supposed to backstop such institutions, but wont even accept the database of members in this case, and we are all still waiting for our payouts. And the argument goes back over a decade.

Another case took over a year to come to court, and was a two day trial. There was a year between those two days. That’s ridiculous.

No matter where I look there are similar situations.

Across the whole of Western Europe we have governments quite deliberately destroying our standard of living.

Who, a few years ago, would have thought that upsetting a country that provides a majority of the area’s power and agricultural products would have been a preferred way of going forward? No-one. The project was only viable in the brain of a complete lunatic. Yet here we are, stuck with just such a scenario.

The USA is, according to the UN, illegally occupying half a dozen countries, but in fact the USA is an occupying force in Western Europe. Why?

How many regime changes has the USA set in motion since the end of the second world war? It’s over fifty. That too is a ridiculous state of affairs.

I have to chart my way forward knowing that normal people who are concerned for our wellbeing are not in control of our planet. The guiding principle seems to be: your neighbour is your enemy, grab him by the throat. The trouble is that rhetoric ends up being turned on its head. The West insists on attacking Russia, and the West ends up suffering. Where is the sense in that?

I have already mentioned that we are using debased money. Our lines of trade are being deliberately sabotaged. We have wrecked relations with the countries that supply us with food and other agricultural products, plus energy. Our cost of living is rising at an uncomfortable rate, and our taxes dont seem able to pay for the things they were meant to pay for.

The US dollar is still pretending to be a reserve currency with a value based upon “the full faith and support of the American administration”.

For heaven sake, who would be prepared to accept the full faith of an entity which was bankrupt, and headed by a man in the advanced stages of serious mental illness? If that is what supports value in the world, does that give you comfort? It certainly doesn’t give me comfort.

We dont have a viable financial alternative at the moment. But how long are certain other jurisdictions going to put up with a system that is based on bankruptcy and zombie banks, zombie governments, and zombie companies, and of course, zombie currencies.

The only viable way forward is a return to a gold standard, which would at least bring some honesty into the financial system. Is that possible?

Not in the West. But it could be possible for Russia to put the rouble on a dollar valuation. Is that likely to happen? Who knows? But if it did happen that would create even more chaos in the West. How can fiat currencies compete with gold backed currencies? The answer is simple; they cant. That would leave the West even poorer.

The BRICS countries are proposing an international currency as an alternative to the US dollar. Whether it comes to pass is another matter. As the US dollar gets more debased the need for an alternative will grow. If it does come to pass it will probably not be redeemable for gold but will be valued at a weight of gold. Since it would be truly international, creating a bond market in the currency would not necessarily be a useful course to take. But it would certainly be possible for the issuing central bank to pay a premium for gold invested in its system.

In other words, the first alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency is not to replace it with a reserve currency, merely an international currency specially created as a financial exchange mechanism. But that leads us straight into problems with politics. I will attempt to look into that aspect of the near future in next week’s blog.