Quo Vadis

or Where Are we Going

I often find myself looking across my garden to the trees that track the stream, and wondering what I’m worrying about. Even if I go up to my balcony, or even to the top of the garden and stare out across the fields towards the sea, however hard I look, I cant see any advancing armies. Yes, everything looks okay. Everything looks normal. But of course everything is not normal. There are four serious wars in progress on this planet, all of which are really about nothing except man’s inability to get on with his neighbour.

In the meantime I think I’ll take the dog for a walk, and you can come along too.

We’ve had a few drops of rain, but nothing that is going to fill the reservoirs. This means, unless things change rather dramatically over the next four or five months we are going to be in serious trouble.

According to the weekly reservoir bulletin on November 20th, the volume stored increased in 3 river basins in the country, and decreased in 12 compared to the previous week. Naturally down in the Algarve the reservoir levels decreased. Here are the levels of our two reservoirs. The Arade is at 15% and the Bravura at 8%. I would say that is disastrous but so far we have no rationing.

The local administration has been discussing desalination plants ever since I have lived here, and that is twenty-five years. They are still talking, but so far no-one has done anything.

In the meantime here is the local forecast for the next few days.

The figures have to be translated. The percentage chance of rain doesn’t mean much. The other day we had a 2% chance of rain, and it poured. This morning (friday 8th December) we were told that it was a cloudy morning. There was not a cloud to be seen. And that isn’t a forecast, it’s a matter of looking out of the window. I dont know how they compute all this rubbish, but rubbish it is. Generally speaking it doesn’t rain here unless the percentage is listed above 65%.

But let’s move on.

It looks as though the Ukraine war is effectively over. It seems that the US Congress has decided that in an election year enough is enough, and the money needs to be spent in the US, not in some far off land. Not only that but there is a fierce disagreement between the Ukrainian president and the chief commander of the army. The president wants the fight to go on, the commander is keen to stop the carnage. Clearly the man commanding the guns is going to win against the one commanding the paperwork. But rebuilding Ukraine’s economy is going to be a major operation, and a terrible waste of time, energy and finance, for something that could have been easily avoided. All Ukraine had to do was abide by the Minsk Agreement. But that is now history. It certainly didn’t help that Johnson stopped the Istanbul peace talks where Russia was agreeing to halt its advances if Kiev would agree to a self governing Dombass, and stop bombing the province.

However, this has now become another nail in the coffin of US hegemony.The USA has now clocked up yet another failure. I dont know why they keep embarrassing themselves. In my lifetime they achieved nothing in Korea (well, the British government did manage to take our home away from us to turn it into a training camp, which they later sold, and apparently twenty-three bungalows were built where I use to lay in my pram).

Then they lost big time in Vietnam. I have to admit I never did work out what they were doing in either country.

Since then they have bombed over 35 countries, caused regime change in over fifty countries, and annoyed most developing countries by the antics they get up to with their interest rate manipulations, which have seriously affected several countries’ ability to manage their borrowing contracts. Most recently they have started no less than three wars in Western Europe, one of which Julie and I got caught up in. And they are currently involved in no less than four ongoing conflicts, all of which are going badly.

So where are we headed next year? Clearly, serious changes are in progress and the Western Alliance is looking very very weak.

The financial charts look terrible, and it certainly seems as though we have come close to the end of the current financial system. Fiat currencies are imploding. The only way out is a return to some kind of gold standard. The teenagers masquerading as politicians have gone mad with their credit cards, and there is no way to support the current quantities of debt. The question we are facing is: will Russia put the rouble onto a gold standard? If so, that will cause serious problems for the countries keeping their currencies secured only by political idiocy. That means those of us in Western Europe are heading for serious financial trouble.

I think it is a waste of time trying to buy land now to act as a safeguard. I suspect its value is about to collapse. In fact, in the USA the collapse has already begun. Here is an interesting chart:

Private real estate prices are still rising where I live, but once fiat currencies start to fail that will no longer be the case. I think it really is time to start converting your investments into gold.

I will try and work out what I think is the best way to cope with the various possibilities in next week’s blog.

Now, back to the really important issues; where the heck is the dog?