Year-End Blues

Things Just Keep Getting Worse

This is getting exceedingly silly. Here we go again. Nato stirring up more trouble, this time in the Balkans. Give it another twelve months and there wont be any Europe left. Washington’s plan has to be to destroy Europe. Why, I dont know, but it is beginning to get serious. This is the second time in a generation that Nato has caused trouble in the Balkans.

Much more of this and the entire continent will have turned into a no-go area. We already have the farms shutting down in the Netherlands, industry shutting down in Germany, and energy starvation right across the continent, with half the EU countries bickering with the other half, and the banks close to collapse.

Unless there is a drastic change within weeks rather than months, Western Europe will be heading back into the dark ages with a standard of living considerably lower than anything seen in living memory.

Here in the Algarve after a very profitable year in the real estate market things have slowed right down. That is to be expected. People are no doubt beginning to feel up against it. I suspect we are in for a relatively quiet Christmas. Here are some of the figures.

For last October’s figures the Algarve housing valuations rose by 18.8% over the previous year. However, things do not appear to be continuing with increased valuations. For instance the number of bank mortgage assessments has decreased for the fourth consecutive month, showing an 8.6% reduction from the same period last year. This is also reflected in the third month of reduced mortgage loans. However, still the most expensive regions in Portugal are the Algarve and Lisbon.

In short, most people seem to be deciding to ‘wait and see’. The two things that most people ask me are, what do you think will happen next? and Where do you plan on moving to?

In fact, only yesterday at lunch I was asked both those questions. My reply is usually the unsatisfactory “Dont know”. The big problem for most of us is that what is happening makes no sense unless we fall prey to the claim that we are doomed, and increasingly it looks as though conspiracy theorists are right after all.

Most of us have naively taken the view that Russia is the ultimate rogue state causing all our troubles. That view is only held in what is called politically The West. And even now more and more people are waking up to the fact that there has been deliberate skullduggery by Washington, aided and abetted by Germany and France. And only a week ago Angela Merkel gave an interview in which she effectively spilled the beans, telling us that the Minsk Agreement was only a ruse to give Kiev time to build up its military. In other words, this war in Ukraine was totally contrived. There are already mutterings that the same is going on in Serbia over the Kosovo problem.

We have to ask several very simple questions and wonder what the real answers are.

I am reasonably intelligent, and have visited almost all the countries behind the old iron curtain, lived extensively in some, had a Hungarian girl friend and a Bulgarian companion, and visited Russia and Ukraine. I therefore know that part of the world very well, and still have friends there. I have also lived extensively in Spain, France and England. I have to admit that I no longer recognise any of those countries. I feel a stranger in all of them. I also view the political structures in France, Spain, and the UK as being in an appalling mess, operated by total half-wits, or by people who are unbelievably evil.

I also have what I consider to be an absurd attitude to life, namely that I am glad that I am getting old, rather than just starting out in life. It must be a nightmare to be young.

Increasingly I get the impression that I am far from being unusual in this respect. That in itself is a terrible indictment of the world we currently live in. The real problem for so many of us is not where do we go next, but do we want to go anywhere?

It is with that background that I ask myself how much longer the conflict in the Ukraine goes on, and if it will cascade into something else far more dangerous.

I have to ask if any European politicians are acting as representatives of their electorates, and if anywhere in the EU remains in any meaningful respect democratic. I very much doubt it.

I also have to ask if those in control are stupid or simply evil?

I also have to ask if I am rich enough to be able to insulate myself from a very unpleasant kind of social Ice-9 that seems to be creeping towards me.

Sadly, a lot of questions and not an answer in sight. What a way to confront the end of another year.