Category Living in a Potemkin Village

Mar 26 2023

Neil Oliver – The Answer to Who Watches the Guards, Is Not Within The Question


For his weekly monologue, Neil Oliver ponders the collapse of checks and balances. The framework of new democratic norms where the government ruling elite police themselves and their conscripts for violations created by their own conduct.

Encapsulated within the question, “Who guards the guards,” Oliver outlines the answer is not within the question.  It is not a matter of watching the guards, it is now time for people throughout the west to change the guards and throw out the self-policing bums.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – Who watches the watchers? Who guards the guards?

The question was posed by the Roman satirist Juvenal 2,000 years ago, but it has never been more relevant. It’s applied now to remind us of the need to keep a watchful eye on those in power.

This should be our paramount concern now, when lies and liars are everywhere.

This week, former PM Boris Johnson told the House of Commons privileges committee he had not lied when he told the House that his own Covid guidance was being followed in No.10.

Note the word guidance – made especially interesting by the fact ordinary members of the public were, as I seem to recall, arrested, charged and fined for sitting together on park benches or on the beach. I’m not sure that’s how guidance normally works.

In any event, I honestly don’t care whether he lied or not to parliament. I don’t care if they were having cake or coke. This is a red herring, a sleight of hand, a tactic to distract the gullible. The point that must neither be overlooked nor forgotten is that neither Johnson nor anyone else at those gatherings was demonstrably afraid of Covid.

We know that because we have seen the photos of them standing together without masks. Standing apart and wearing masks was for the little people. We might also assume that we were being laughed at by those who knew there was nothing to fear and therefore no reason not to party.

Keir Starmer’s Labour party was the same – we saw those pictures too. He and they called for earlier, longer, harder lockdowns and all the rest, and then met for curry and beer and cosy chats.

Fear was for the little people and so Left and Right, Blue and Red and all positions and team colours in between laughed up their sleeves as the nudge units and the paid propagandists told us anyone breaching the regulations – sorry, I mean guidance – was a granny killing Covidiot and Pandemic Denier.

Look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t so.

So, who guards the guards, who watches the watchers?

Let’s notice, among much else, that this is the Commons sitting in judgment on the Commons, which is to say politicians sitting in judgement on politicians. This is the guards, judging the guards. This is the same Commons whose inhabitants worked together in unquestioning lockstep to impose policies that ruined lives, wrecked livelihoods and upended the economy. This is the same Commons that, far from accepting responsibility for the carnage, is actively seeking to have us look the other way while they get about the business of doing nothing more than playing politics, all they’re fit for, fiddling while Rome burns. The is the same Commons that empties when one of their own stands to speak up on behalf of people killed or harmed by medical products pushed as vaccines. And trust me, I’ll get back to that safe and effective nonsense they pushed in a moment.

We never quite got to mandated jabs for all, but people all over the world were sacked for opting to live by the ideal of my body my choice, the notion enshrined in the Nuremberg Code that states that a person should at all times: “Have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other forms of constraint or coercion …”

We didn’t quite get to mandates for the jabs for the general population, but I say it was a damned close-run thing. I say they were itching to mandate the vaccines. I say mandates weren’t pushed across the line in the end because enough of us made plain it would mean civil disobedience if not full-on civil war. I maintain that while they’ve gone quiet about lockdowns and face-masks, it can only be a matter of time before that playbook is brought out for the next crisis they can cook up. More and more are queuing up to distance themselves from the harms done during the last three years, while still priapic on account of all that unbridled power over the everyday lives of the tax-paying public.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

There are calls for a war crimes trial for Putin. What about a war crimes trial for Tony Blair while we’re at it? We hit the 20th anniversary of his unlawful war in Iraq last week – that unlawful war that led to over a million deaths, that destabilised the entire region to this day and gave birth to Isis. Wouldn’t the moral way to mark that birthday be a war crimes trial for all the people who took us there? And while we’re considering war crimes trials, shouldn’t we look again at precisely what successive United States administrations did in Korea, in Vietnam, and more recently in Libya, and in Syria and in Afghanistan and other sovereign nation-states too numerous to mention? Shouldn’t we look at what was done, and by whom?

US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute recently looked again at the behaviour of successive US presidents in relation to the Saudi Arabian horror show in Yemen. They reported, and suggested the appropriateness of war crimes trials for Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden:

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, schools.

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, school buses and other civilian targets, gave intelligence used for targeting and for a time refuelled Saudi and Emirati aircraft.”

“US officials could not claim to be surprised at their culpability,” they added. “The state department warned that they could be held responsible for war crimes.”

“George W Bush is another good candidate for a trial on his aggressive unjustified attack on Iraq based on manipulated and fabricated intelligence. His war ended up killing hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as triggering years more of conflict. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today spending his golden years profiting after acting as Bush’s poodle would be an appropriate co-conspirator.”

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

We are trained to fear Global warming … the warming of the planet … while that world burns still on account of the fire Tony Blair helped light in the Middle East with UK taxpayer-funded missiles and bombs.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

Let’s look again at the banks and the simmering chaos there … in that world in which banks are secretive, privately owned businesses, in which central banks have the power to create money out of thin air and lend the same sums over and over and over again while growing fatter and fatter on more and more interest and debt. Another former PM, Gordon Brown traded on and perpetuated a myth of being a safe pair of hands when it came to money matters. This is the same Gordon Brown who sold off half of the UK’s gold reserves at a knockdown price so low it was remembered ever after as the Brown Bottom and one of the worst deals in recorded history.

In 2008 Brown bailed out the banks with billions and billions of pounds worth of our money and those banks duly stayed open, the bankers kept getting their bonuses and nothing changed when it came to stopping their reckless games with fantasy money. We were sold down the river and now the banks are shaking on their fantasy foundations once again and for more of the same reasons.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The MHRA – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is supposed to monitor the information we get about health and the safety and effectiveness of the drugs we are offered. But the MHRA gets 86 percent of its funding from the pharmaceuticals industry. Is that the recipe for unbiased behaviour always and only in the interests of the people? I’m only asking.

It’s the same the world over: 65 percent of the US Federal Drugs Administration comes from Big Pharma. Between 2006 and 2019, nine out of 10 FDA Commissioners went on to secure jobs with pharmaceutical companies. 89 percent of the European Medicines Agency funding comes from Big Pharma. 96 percent of the funding for the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia comes from Big Pharma. In Japan, the relevant agency gets 85 percent of its funding from Big Pharma.

No lesser publication than the British Medical Journal asked, in a headline over a recent article:

“From FDA to MHRA – are drug regulators for hire?’

Obviously, I couldn’t possibly say one way or the other. A recent report from Australia’s TGA – the Therapeutic Goods Administration – equivalent to our MHRA – a report made available only by a Freedom of Information Request – makes plain that in January 2021 it was known to anyone privy to Pfizer’s own data that the lipid nanoparticle was widely distributed all around the body.

All of this was known before the so-called vaccines were approved for injection into billions of human beings, from babies up. Those entrusted with our health care knew, in advance, that the tiny oily bubbles carrying the making of the toxic spike protein could and would go to brains, hearts, livers, ovaries, testes, everywhere, and they went right ahead and did it anyway.

Safe and effective they said, over and over and over. Misinformation, anyone?

If they were doing their jobs and reading reports like this, then Chris Whitty would have known, Patrick Vallance would have known, Antony Fauci would have known.

This information is out there now, in the public domain, though heavily redacted – and God alone knows what remains redacted – and so why isn’t this front page and main TV news all around the world? Why not?

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The answer is as stark as it is depressing:

Westminster awards itself the power to make laws, enforce those laws and decree the punishment for any transgressions of those laws. This is a textbook definition of the tyranny that our constitution, enshrined in Magna Carta 1215, was specifically shaped to prevent. And yet here we are – with the watchers watching the watchers, the guards guarding the guards.

It is as obvious as Boris Johnson’s estrangement from the truth that this tyranny should never have been allowed to evolve and that, since it has, we must not tolerate it a moment longer.

Decisions of importance must be made by those with skin in the game, but with no means to profit either directly or indirectly from the decisions they come to.

Who guards the guards is a 2,000-year-old question. Older by 500 years is the Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way, by Laozi, the Old Master.

Last week a friend reminded me of words that sound as though they might have been written this morning:

“When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land. When government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures. When the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn. All this is robbery and chaos.”

Robbery and chaos – that’s what our leaders and their little wizards have inflicted upon us. It was true two and a half thousand years ago and it’s still true now.

That old book also warns us about:

“Those who try to control, who use force to protect their power … They take from those who don’t have enough and give to those who have far too much.”

This is how we will beat them, how we will win – by remembering what our ancestors learned long ago and finally, finally doing something about it.

Here’s the thing: it’s long past time to watch the guards. What we need, all over the West and once and for all, is a changing of the guards.

[Transcript End]

March 25, 2023 | Sundance

Mar 24 2023

US National Debt – A Different Perspective


Armstrong Economics Blog/Uncategorized Re-Posted Mar 24, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

In 2010, Barron’s wrote a piece on me effectively laughing at my forecast that the share market would rally to new highs. What seems to inevitably unfold is this notion that whatever the event might be in motion, the mere thought of a reversal in trend appears impossible. When the press disagrees with Socrates, I know it will be the press who is wrong. And because they end up being wrong, of course, they cannot print a retraction so they will just pretend you do not exist rather than admit – Sorry, we were wrong. The Dow made that new high above 2007 by February 2013. That was 64 months from the October 2007 high.

I have been in the game for many years. With each event, it appears to be like Groundhog Day. They pop their heads out and declare they do not see their shadow, so the entire world will disintegrate and that is always based upon opinion. It is never backed by real analysis. Just the standard human trait of assuming whatever trend is in motion, will remain in motion.

Being an institutional adviser, I have never had that luxury. We have had to deal with some of the biggest portfolios in the world. They want accurate forecasting, and it has to be long-term – not day trading. They are not interested in the typical headlines of doom and gloom that the press love to print with every financial event simply to get readership. That is all they care about. It has been the financial version of the fake news.

When we step back and look at this favorite fundamental that people beat to death to predict the end of the world, the national debt, and the collapse of the dollar. Little did they know that the increase in National Debt during the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis was supposed to bring down the sky and end the existence of the dollar. We can see the sharp rise in debt simply made a double top with the Financial Crisis of 1985.

It was that previous 1985 Financial Crisis that set in motion the Plaza Accord which brought together the central banks creating what was then the G5 – now G20. Of course, like every government intervention, the side effect was the 1987 Crash and their attempt to reverse their directive at the Plaza Accord became the Louve Accord. When the traders saw that failed, the collapse in confidence led to the 1987 Crash.

It has always been a CONFIDENCE game as I pointed out with the 1933 Banking Holiday previously. In this case, the failure of the Louvre Accord which came out and said the dollar had fallen enough, once new lows in the dollar unfolded and the central banks could not stop the decline, led to financial panic by 1987 which manifested in the 1987 Crash.

This chart shows the quarterly change in the National Debt since 1966, Here you can see the 1985 and 2008 Financial Crises were on par. Neither one ended the dollar no less the world economy. So when I warned the share market would rally and make new highs and Barron’s laughed in 2010, I said the same thing after the 1987 Crash and people laughed.

In fact, on the very day of the low, I said this was it and that we would rally back to new highs by 1989. That was perfect and the market responded to the Economic Confidence Model (ECM) which has been published back in 1979. This was more than simply forecasting the 1987 Crash and the very day of the low. It clearly established that the ECM had revealed that there was a secret cycle behind the appearance of chaos even in economics.

Larry Edelson was actually a competitor at the time. But Larry respected that the forecast from the model was far beyond what people would ever expect. If we are ever going to advance as a society, we have to stop the bullshit and understand HOW markets trade and WHY. Larry did that. He understood that the model was something larger than just personal opinion.

Even those claiming to be using the K-Wave cannot make real forecasts. The basis of Kondratieff’s argument came from his empirical study of the economic performance of the USA, England, France, and Germany between 1790 and 1920. Kondratieff took the wholesale price levels, interest rates, and production and consumption of coal, pig iron, and lead for each economy. He then sought to smooth the data using an averaging mathematical approach of nine years to eliminate the trend as well as shorter waves. Kondratieff thus arrived at his long-wave theory suggesting that the economic process was a process of continuous waves of boom and bust.

Kondratieff’s work was compelling and contributed greatly to the Austrian School of Economics that first began to develop the concept of a Business Cycle. The general central principle of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is concerned with a period of sustained low-interest rates and excessive credit creation resulting in a volatile and unstable imbalance between saving and investment. Within this context, the theory supposes that the Business Cycle unfolds whereby low rates of interest tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking sector and thus then result in the expansion of the money supply that causes an unsustainable credit ­source boom which leads to a diminished opportunity for investment by competition.

Benner

Here is a chart of the business cycle that was created by a farmer named Samuel Benner. Benner based his work on Sunspots, which actually incorporated solar maximum and minimum that today’s Climate Change zealots refuse to consider. Nevertheless, someone manipulated Brenner’s work and created a chart to try to influence society handing it in with a wild story to the Wall Street Journal published this cycle on February 2nd, 1932, when the market bottomed in July 1932. Still, nobody knew who had investigated this phenomenon in 1932.

WSJ1933

When I was doing my own research reading all the newspapers to understand how events unfolded, I came across this chart. I found it interesting that during the Great Depression people were reaching out and some began to embrace cyclical ideas. The problem with both Kondratiff and Brenner was that the period they used to develop their cycles was the 19th century because the real Industrial Revolution was unfolding and in the 1850s, 70% of the civil workforce were all in agriculture. Consequently, if you constructed a model based entirely upon one sector, it would work only as long as that sector was the top dog.

Being a historian buff, it quickly hit me that NOTHING remains constant and that the economy will ALWAYS evolve, mature, and then crash and burn. Where agriculture was 70% of the workforce in 18590, it fell to 40% by 1900, and then down to 3% by 1980.

Just look at energy. The earliest lamps, dating to the Upper Paleolithic, were stones with depressions in which animal fats were burned as a source of light. In cultures closer to the sea, they began to use shells as lamps which they would burn at first animal fat. Clay lamps began to appear during the Bronze Age around the 16th century BC and the invention quickly spread throughout the Roman Empire. Initially, they took the form of a saucer with a floating wick.

We even find Roman oil lamps as luxury items crafted out of bronze. There are collectors of terracotta oil lamps for there is a vast variety of motifs. There is everything from dolphins, and various entities, to erotic oil lamps, which may have been used in brothels. The point is, if you constructed a model on oil, you would have surely accomplished similar results to Kondratief and Brenner.

Then of course, just as the energy moved from animal fats to vegetable oils, by the 19th century it returned to whale oil which was extracted from the blubber. Emerging industrial societies used whale oil in oil lamps and to make soap. However, during the 20th century, whale oil was even made into margarine.

Then the discovery of petroleum and the use of whale oils declined considerably from their peak in the 19th century into the 20th century. Ironically, it was fossil fuels that probably saved whales from extinction. Hence, now we are entering a period where they deliberately want to end fossil fuels and move to solar and wind power. Obviously, just a cursory review of energy reveals the problem of basing a model on the current energy source or major economic industry. Things change with time.

Mar 20 2023

The Silence of the Shams – Pay Attention to The Specific Silence, and What They Are Waiting For


Posted originally on the CTH on March 19, 2023 | Sundance

It is good that people are starting to realize the deception in the world of politics, specifically Republican politics, by watching what is not done, who does not speak, and what is not being said in the aftermath of a visible effort to indict President Trump by a politically motivated New York district attorney.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; however, the silence tells you something very specific when it comes to politics.  The corrupt and manipulative political system is designed to test opinion, that is what most professional politicians do before they take a position.  In essence, the ones who wait are the ones who manipulate.

The politicians who wait to express opinions on substantive issues, are the ones who are comfortable operating in the world where manipulation is the tool, and authenticity is something they do not carry.   In the biggest of big political pictures, this approach is what supports the maintenance of the professional political system.

Without manipulation as the primary agenda of focus, politicians do not need consultants, polling, managers or branding groups.  However, when the creation of an artificial premise, the manipulation itself, is the baseline for the character of the principal – all of these systems are needed.  This video by Vivek Ramaswamy has gained a lot of attention, because at the core of it – he is correct.  WATCH:

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However, the issue extends well beyond individual politicians; the issue goes all the way through the political apparatus into the systems and institutions itself.   This is one of the reasons why, when you fine tune your discernment, you can predict “what systems” are carrying “what motives.”

Remember, CTH outlining the Republican Governors Association (RGA) as one of the manipulative political institutions that was different this time around, for the 2024 race? {Go Deep}  It’s not just Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis that you should notice.  Pay attention to the specific silence, positioning and wind testing that is taking place from within that entire network of the Republican Governors Association.   There’s the *tell* that indicates I was correct.

The good news is that President Trump can also see it.  [LINK]

Why they wait….

The professional Republicans follow the instructions of the professional Republican control agents.  Those control officers are waiting to see if the predictions do come true, and if President Trump is actually indicted.   They want the opportunity for the dates to pass without action so they can use the absence of an indictment as a political tool to advance their narrative against Trump.

The publicity of the statements by Trump and the Mainstream Media, may actually influence the decision by Alvin Bragg and the New York City DA’s office.   However, for the purposes of the RGA and the characters intent on controlling the 2024 GOP nomination, that aspect will be ignored in favor of driving a bigger wedge between Ron DeSantis and President Trump in the absence of an indictment.

DeSantis branding is all about these types of consultant advisors.   This is why I said do not look for a statement from him.  It’s the same reason why the DeSantis managers kept him in a bunker for five days after the Mar-a-Lago raid.   This approach is all about manipulation and narrative creation.

World War Reddit and Ron DeSantis have something identical in common.  It’s the same playbook, the creation of an illusion.

Once you see how much planning goes into these types of operations, then you begin to realize the scope of the financial interests that are involved.  There are trillions at stake.

Mar 18 2023

MSNBC HOST USES THIS PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR GETTING COVID INFO SO WRONG | ROUNDTABLE | RUBIN REPORT


First published on BitChute at 21:11 UTC on March 17th, 2023.

channel image

Mar 8 2023

Fed Rates Up into 2024?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Interest Rates Re-Posted Mar 8, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has made it clear that he sees higher interest rates ahead in his battle against inflation and their unrealistic 2% target. Many traders are now scrambling talking about how Powell said the Fed will probably raise rates more and possibly faster than previously anticipated. They are now taking that as a warning he may do a 50-bp hike this month. Our computer projected a Directional Change in 2022 and everything is on schedule for the rise into 2024.

Powell also restated his warnings to US banks about the risks of getting involved in the crypto industry. He expressed very clearly that lenders must take “great care” when engaging with cryptocurrencies. He added that the central bank didn’t want to prevent innovation, but it is not bullish on this industry and views it more like the DOT.COM Bubble.

Mar 5 2023

Wolverine Bloodline – James O’Keefe Speaks at CPAC


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on March 4, 2023 | Sundance 

Probably the second most anticipated speech at CPAC was the attendance by James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas who came under attack from the DeSantis aligned manipulative dirtbags within his own board of directors.  {Direct Rumble Link}

Today Mr. O’Keefe was warmly greeted by the audience at CPAC and he brought with him a brave whistleblower from the Pfizer story.  WATCH:

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Mar 4 2023

Tucker Carlson Announces Next Week He Will Begin Broadcasting CCTV Footage from January 6th Capitol Hill Events


Posted originally on the CTH on March 3, 2023 | Sundance

Tucker Carlson producers were granted access to over 40,000 hours of CCTV footage from January 6, 2021, events on Capitol Hill. During his broadcast tonight the Fox News host announces he will begin sharing footage from the tapes next week.  {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH:

Kevin McCarthy giving Paul Ryan access to CCTV footage doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in transparency.  Just sayin’…

Feb 26 2023

Neil Oliver, “What the Hell – We’re Rationing Tomatoes”…


Posted originally on the CTH on February 25, 2023 | Sundance 

With around 4,000 miles separation, two friends of the Treehouse, Neil Oliver and Lee Smith, essentially asked me the same question this week, “how do we stop this madness?”

It should not be an option hearing this talk about the need to secede, fracture, isolate or form smaller defensive boundaries.  WE ARE IN THE MAJORITY, they just control the power structures and systems of communication. That’s why they spend so much time, effort and attention manipulating social media. My proposed solution is to draw from history, specifically from the Polish solidarity movement.  What we need is a general two-day workers strike, highlighting to the few that the many have had enough.

In his weekly monologue Neil Oliver takes the new issue of rationing vegetables in the U.K and overlays the surplus of lies that creates it.  Neil Oliver generally has exceptional insight and strong grasps on the obvious; however, this one is epic and one of his best. WATCH:

[Transcript] – They’re rationing tomatoes in the supermarkets. We’re told it’s about supply chains, bad weather and the price of heating, but right now, in terms of the messaging, I suspect it’s more about pushing the word – rationing. Less about any believable shortage of food and more about getting us used to hearing the word.

No doubt, if experience is anything to go by, the rest will come later. My money says the rationing app for our smartphones is already sitting on a hard drive somewhere, ready when we are.

For now, it’s more of a familiar process of psychological manipulation. Get us acquainted with the general idea of food scarcity so that we’re well-primed when the planned reality is unrolled.

We were given the same treatment with words like “lockdown” and “pandemic”, “mandate” and “denier”. Nudge, nudge. Rationing is a word from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, a bit like “War in Europe” and “Fascist” and now they’re back in fashion once more. Rationing, I ask you, while the landfills swell with fresh food dumped every day.

The manipulation is invariably about an iron hand in a velvet glove, softly, softly catchy monkey. Much of the messaging in the MSM is, and has been for years, redolent of World War II and the fabled Blitz Spirit, “We’re all in it together”, “making do”, “mustn’t grumble”, “doing our bit”, “standing up for democracy”, “defending the free world”, “sacrifice”, “keep calm and carry on”. Someone somewhere must think our heads zip up the back.

Since I’ve mentioned the “D” word, which is democracy, why not pause for a moment to consider whether any of us has had a chance to vote, voting being that part of democracy we’re invited to think matters most, on any of this.

Do you remember ever voting to give the government the power to lock us in our homes, to shut our children’s schools, our pubs and restaurants, shops and businesses, to tell us whom we could visit or have in our homes, whether we could go for a walk, travel within our own country, far less beyond these shores? Do you remember voting to empower employers to mandate medical procedures for their staff?

And while we’re on the subject of propaganda, who thought to convince us it was ok to demonize and exclude healthy fellow citizens on the grounds they might be carrying an invisible disease?

If you don’t remember whether or not you were invited to get involved in a conversation or a debate about all of this, perhaps it’s because you were, quite understandably, distracted most of the time by the bombardment of state-sanctioned messaging by politicians and the MSM.

Or maybe you were just afraid of the guaranteed ridicule or losing your job.

It’s not just us here in the UK either. I wonder how many US citizens ask themselves when they voted to have their government send well over 100 billion dollars to Ukraine at a time of critical hardship for millions of Americans unable to afford food or heating.

Rather than ask questions, or, in the case of the tax-paying citizens of East Palestine, Ohio, liberally dusted as they are with fallout from a vinyl chloride mushroom cloud ignited with the go-ahead of their own elected officials after a train derailment, perhaps querying why their predicament is not the stuff of a national emergency while fish die in their rivers and their pet and animals die in the fields, they are apparently expected to be reassured by the sight of Joe Biden posing for photos thousands of miles away in Ukraine, while air raid sirens provide sound effects and President Zelensky turns out once more in his freshly laundered combats.

So many times over the past few years, I have thought to myself: “Who do these people think they are”, all of them, once elected to office, herding us towards World War, taking away our natural freedoms? Who do these people think they are that feel empowered to disregard our liberty, our very existence as independent individuals, and spend their time posturing and politicking? Fiddling while Rome burns.

Who do these people think they are blatantly creating and then ignoring hardship, enacting policies to wreck livelihoods, economies and the wellbeing of millions and then standing by while real people suffer the consequences of their vainglorious, self-serving nonsense disguised by propaganda shaped only to distract? And by God do they need to distract us.

Let’s stop for a moment and think what the reality of the situation is – the undeniable reality – which is that we already have the potential for more than enough food, energy and everything else, courtesy of existing technology, and therefore any alleged shortages in the West are only fraudulent fiction.

I said at the top we were being familiarized with rationing and making do. There’s a glaring paradox in all this. At the same time as being nudged into thinking we must do without we are simultaneously drowning in surplus of every sort.

We have centuries of affordable energy under our feet and yet we are bullied into a false reality in which fewer and fewer people can afford to heat their homes or put fuel in their cars and vans. Every year we bulldoze billions of pounds worth of food into landfills while now being told to do without erstwhile familiar foodstuffs.

We do much the same with clothes made in sweatshops and worn once before discarding into those same landfills. We upgrade our phones and other tech and put last year’s offering in the bin, disregarding the lithium and cobalt and the rest of the precious metals mined by child slaves out of sight and out of mind. We will soon be ordered to junk our gas boilers and our petrol and diesel cars. Our governments siphon our taxes into subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels that will themselves be yet more toxic landfill in 20 years’ time.

It’s not just about consumables that we can touch. Every moment of every day we are deluged with information as well, data, and so-called news, but made increasingly incapable of discerning how much, if any of it, is worth knowing in the first place. So much chaff in which to hide the wheat. We are drowning in words but struggling desperately to find so much as a sentence worth reading.

Instead of being educated at school, learning objectively and meaningfully about our shared history, heritage and culture, about how to understand the world and contributing to its betterment, our children are too often indoctrinated with propaganda, drilled with ideologies predicated upon obsession not with the content of people’s characters but with the colour of their skins and the nature of their sexual preferences real or imagined.

A television series that has been the work of hundreds, if not thousands of people spread over a year or more – an effort that was once the stuff of a shared experience keeping us engaged and talking together as communities for months on end – is binge-watched in a single night.

In every way imaginable our dopamine receptors – especially those of our children – are being bludgeoned into numbness.

An eight-year-old boy with a smartphone and an internet connection can help himself, in a week, to more naked women in more positions and predicaments than Genghis Khan saw in a lifetime of murderous conquest.

Sickening surplus and overload all around and, yet, here we are, rationing food in our supermarkets? Pardon my French, but What the Hell?

Rationing tomatoes is just a symptom of how corrupted and bent out of shape our food industry has become at the mercy of greedy corporations committed only to profit for the few at the expense of the health of the many. Let me stress, not one jot of this is the fault of farmers – those out there in a government-made maze of regulations and obstacles to the job of producing healthy food for healthy populations.

EU regulations make it legal to label as “milk” the white liquid obtained from processing almonds and oats. There are to be ground-up crickets in the bread and hundreds of other food products besides.

Industrially processed vegetables are labelled chicken, fish and mince. They make oil from sunflowers and rape seeds, process away its rancid, toxic nature, and sell it in food, and as salad dressing and as an ingredient in soap powder for getting stubborn stains out of clothes. It’s in baby food as well.

Tomatoes aren’t in season in the UK in February, as you might have noticed. Why should they be? Why aren’t we concentrating our attention on what food is in season, and local, and good for us, and teaching people how to cook it?

I travel a fair part of the length of this country every week between my home in Scotland and this studio in London. Aside from the odd moment or two of built-up area, the vast majority of the landscape is green fields. Why aren’t we making the most of the fertile land with which we are blessed instead of lofty talk of handing a third of it back to the beavers?

If food is at a premium, reaching a point where rationing might be required, why are we paying farmers to get out of the business altogether and sell off their hand to transnational corporations for God alone knows what purpose? Why are planes and ships burning fuel to transport avocados for thousands of miles around the world from places where the mass cultivation of the product causes catastrophic damage to local water supply?

What do you think is the answer to these questions? Are our leaders so inexperienced, so clueless about the practicalities of the world that they just don’t know how to run the country for the benefit of the people they’re supposed to serve?

Or are they knowingly in the service not of the people they are elected to represent but of transnational corporations, the markets and the Bank for International Settlements? Which of the two options do you think it might be?

Or is it simpler and more depressing still? Have our leaders, in fact, simply persuaded themselves that distraction is the only game they need to play?

Are we simply to be fed a diet of propaganda and downright lies about health, food, the climate, war, biology, and race … until we are so unwell, confused, exhausted and anxious we won’t notice when they pick the last penny out of our pockets and lock us down in a digital ghetto watched round the clock by cameras and listening devices we pay through the nose to carry in our own pockets? And they’re rationing tomatoes.

Here’s the thing: the world has been run off the rails. No wonder it’s all about distraction – because distraction is all they have. Greed and unrestrained power have brought us to the only destination that was ever in view. Which is right here, right now.

They won’t fix the mess because the mess suits them. I don’t have all the answers – but I do know the solution starts with ignoring any more of their nonsense. The problem is not with the tomatoes they’re rationing. The problem is the surplus of lies they keep selling. Stop buying them.

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