The Cult of Convoluted Complication

Recently, like many Brits around the world now living as permanent expats from what we perceive to be the British septic isles, I was looking for a complete and simple guide to the kick-off time for the England v Netherlands soccer semi-final.

The was the answer I got using Firefox as the browser:

‘Germany is currently two hours ahead of Gambia, so the kick-off time in Dortmund will be 7 pm German time. If you were planning to have a meeting at that time, you would need a flight from the UK at 10 am BST [British Summer Time] which would get you (+ car hire) to Dortmund at around 4pm German time, and hour ahead of BST. All times quoted in the diagram below use GMT [Greenwich Mean Time] which is the same as EU time – that is, an hour ahead of GMT but the same as BST’.

The summary of this “answer” was that one left it having acquired nothing other than a sense of profound doubt. It was, in turn, wrong, irrelevant, and “illustrated” by a chart which introduced GMT – a time-band which won’t existence anywhere until late August.

The simple answer was, “You need to be at a screen in Gambia just before 6 pm local time to catch the kick-off at 7pm in Dortmund”.

I wonder if the wrinklies among you remember those scenes in the Phil Silvers Show when Sergent “Oinee” Bilko barked at his motor platoon, “Platoooon….hi…yahhherp, Platooon at eaaaze, left wheeel aaaaaaand rrrrrest!” at which point all the grunts were facing the wrong way on the wrong foot in two back rows rather three at the front. This is a perfect parallel for the deliberately confusing “instructions” available to the long-suffering 21^st century citizen in the West.

While scribbling away at the School newspaper I was editing in 1964, your correspondent wrote this pastiche of a Physics maths Law that, from sixty odd years distance, I remember running roughly as follows:

‘The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the views on the other two sides who would rather we used the angle of dangle to effectively strangle the outrageous fun to be had from the throb of the knob.’

Needless to say, it was censored.

Today, it would represent a standard example of “following the science”.

In fact, it was nothing of the sort. In 2024 as I write tonight, the unnecessarily complex nature of instructional information is as it is for two reasons:

1. To hoodwink citizens into believing that macro State issues are far too complex for us to question…so we should shut up.

2. To suggest that only very bright, unelected bureaucrats can understand the complexity, and therefore none of us can do without them.

Complication has become this century’s excuse for obscene wage levels and power being awarded to bankers, macro-economists, climate modellers, fiscal theorists, techies, bourse investment houses, the Military and blocist developers whose primary function is to convince us that this whole debate is way above our pay-grade.

As usual, it’s self-styled élite nonsense….just another BS narrative to gradually persuade us that the relationship here is that they tell us – the wee babbies – what to do in order to protect them from false futures being invented by conspiracy theorist nasties like me.

But their problem remains that I have no motive at all to invent genocidal and/or globalist World Government fantasies; whereas the 0.03% have a well-established track record of inventing climatic emergencies, health crises and deadly inhuman enemies that simply don’t add up to so much as a hill of Heinz baked beans, San Pelligrino water and associated wind.

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Contemporary macro economics is the biggest and most odious example of what I’m writing about here. It’s all ‘the technicals’ and jargonised fiscal/ bourse/central banking cod-science that would be our saviour if only it offered a solution.

But it doesn’t. Pulling apart all the counterfeit egg-head highbrow attempts to turn greed into some kind of metaphysical authenticity, we are left with this:

Almost all international trade is based on

* Credit the buyer can’t afford

* Replacement part deliveries that act as blackmail

* Huge debts that become a bank not a customer problem

* Power to the investment houses not the People

* The migration of power from elected legislature to gigawealth

* Immunity from Sovereign poverty based on currency clout

In turn, there are four extrapolations from that:

1. America’s suicidal neocon diplomacy tried and failed to hide the dire conequences of neoliberal economics

2. That same Gunboat diplomacy helped give rise to the Brics’ alternative currency

3. The brics’ currency has destroyed the possibility of unipolar US hegemony

4. Either Washington learns to live with open government and honest diplomacy, or we are all doomed.

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I think we need a return to reality intelligence [ie, + common sense] in banking and bourse policies, the survival of national identity, and a return to monetary value based on sovereign performance rather than the whimsical, meaningless directionalising of value to deliberately start a rush to buy – following which the saps will lose and the cynical manipulators will make profits of no socio-commercial purpose whatsoever.

If that sounds complicated, it’s only because those working a rigged system want it to be so.

Indeed, as time passes and one equally puzzling distraction follows another, my view is increasingly that all the features of capitalism should be made primarily mutual, entrepreneurially focused, safer, based on Sovereign self-sufficiency rather that global trade competition and – above all – the abolition of the central banking system alongside and over-emphasis on risky intra-bank trading.

This isn’t going to be achieved by one Establishment nitwit walking about with a placard that says ‘CHANGE’: the old adage “show don’t tell” applies as always. Further, I doubt if it is even remotely possible that another Party called ‘REFORM’ is likely to do enough either.

The sort of ‘REVOLUTION’ required always attracts the pompous guffaws of the Treasuries, Reserves and Wall Street/Square Mile/La Défense bods on the grounds of being “simplistic”….between the lines (here we go again) “because the answer is very complicated, so don’t ruin it”.

But in truth, what’s required is SIMPLE, rather than simplistic

How hard are these goals to grasp?

1. Abolish the Bourse system of raising capital: it is used solely by BIG that wants to get BIGGER.

2. Replace it with [business + retail] banks with the fewest possible links between them based on either ownership or intra-trading. (The concept of 500 global banks where just one institution in Bayern catching a cold produces tertiary viral pneumonia in 186 banks from Asia to San Francisco is so daft, only a kamikaze mosqito would countenance the idea).

3. Devolve more and more telling power away from Sovereign capitals towards self-sufficient regional communities exporting only their excess output. This dramatically reduces the dangers of Hot Wars on Trade, and protects Sovereign respect as a whole.

Dyed in the wool monopolists once again dismiss such an idea, calling the systemics of it “siege economics”, “Little Englander” thinking and other brainless insults. In fact, the Old Normal word we once used for such an approach was INDEPENDENCE.

4. Abolish the whole idea of floating currencies based on nothing more than a fiat-finger-in-the-air fantasy, and ensure a stable currency valuation where the paper money is linked to something that directly reflects the social stability, resources – and economic success or otherwise – of the issuer.

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Do you find this simple or simplistic? If so, nihil desperandum – think of using this as a parallel:

A Spring [so-called] has sprung, it’s Saturday morning – you just got your pay-cheque and it seems that, perhaps, a little self delusion might be in order. You fancy splurging on a couple of recherché 1950’s deck-chairs, but you don’t want to go mad on this purchase….because not too deep down, you know that by the following Tuesday, Liquid Sunshine aka rain will have dampened your ardour.

This is what you’re after:

…/.but this is what you’re offered

Contemporary globalist monopolism ignores consumers, and persuades them to obey an agenda via which margins can be massaged skywards….if necessary, using the leg-spreading Goddess of Credit, Her Holiness Emma Chizzit..

This systemic is only ever heading in one direction – the wrong one. That is to say, the appalling reality nobody seems prepared to look in the eye is this:

i. Rising prices made affordable by credit lead to the twin evils of inflation and debt

ii. Whereas Big Business and Banking has 5,097 reasons [all spurious] why their greed should be bailed out by the Sovereign’s taxpayers, the very obvious result for the ordinary citizen is that every bailout is really a currency devaluation.

Check it out: the First World Blue Collar loss of spending power has been astonishingly consistent right across the USA, Canada, the UK, the EU and Australia: that is is to say, the average lower middle class citizen has lost 30 per cent of spending power since 2002.

There is nothing complex or simplistic or invented or conspiratorial about those numbers. What scares the Establishments is a reality that simply cannot be denied. Those in clover or on benefits enjoy the continuing situation of having everything and nothing respectively. Those out there grafting as cleaning ladies, taxi drivers, waitresses and security guards know the name of the game viz, playing out the final days of human labour before the robots render them obsolete.

Oh what fun there shall be once Starmer works all this out.

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