Once again I am indebted to Butch the Bollocks Impaler for pointing me at some stuff over the last few days….of which, more first thing tomorrow. But this piece at the site Acting Man we found at the same time and without collusion: and it’s very good. My one observation above and beyond the excellent technicals in there is that I see the repatriation of German gold as the precursor to the beginning of the end of globalism…the ‘end of the beginning’ as Churchill would’ve said. There’s not a lot to fear from that, frankly: a return to sovereign self-sufficiency (with some trade in surpluses) is an infinitely safer and more steady route for the development of human civilisation than bonkers neocon mercantilism where the most likely outcome is nuclear obliteration.

However, like it or not the latter ‘model’ currently holds sway…..and its effects continue to be obvious to those not suffering from catatonic delusion disorder.

Npower, the Cooperative Society, Age UK and Barnardos are all trying to point out to the UK Government that the skewed age demographic we live with now dictates the certainty of older people dying of cold during the winter. Nothing Camerlot is doing at the moment, they say, goes anywhere near far enough towards avoiding this potential disgrace.

Not surprisingly, relative laymen like me read about such things (while fainting after opening energy bills) and wonder why fuel costs are so high in a global economy currently sinking to its knees: surely supply and demand apply, we ask. Hahahahaha.

Further down the age scale, the cost of childcare has inflated by a massive 6% in just three months. One in four mothers at home would return to work, but the nursery costs make a nonsense of the idea. Once again we see the ‘free market’ deciding, but rather badly – and entirely in favour of greed. The childcare sector has cottoned on to the fact that babyboomers’ kids are currently sprogging bigtime as their egg quality declines…..so the nursery prices have been racked up. Doubtless Dan Hannan would approve, but the reality is that this is going to cost UKplc a great deal of entirely dead money.

While they may look at first sight like two more examples of capitalism’s failure, they are not. Examples like these are airily written off by the MSM as ‘the squeezed middle syndrome’ – as if the middle might be a tiny fraction of the much bigger social franchise. The truth is, ‘the middle’ is that vast majority left over when the bottom 10% and the top 5% have been subtracted. Instances like these are symptoms of monopolistic opportunism feeding on daft feminist expectations and brainless medical intervention. They aren’t capitalism as I know it, Jim.

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Misidentification of what’s really going on is in fact the media’s forte now, and has been for some twenty-five years or more. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the reporting of African developments in the last year. The Algerian massacre, for example, has been written up as yet more barmy ‘Al Qeida’ religionists taking the piss, but folks like Mokhtar Belmokhtar are kidnappers – and smugglers of cigarettes and hard drugs – waging a war for survival, and access to resources, on a continent they see being invaded by Chinese and Western infidels scrabbling for the last vestiges of fuel for the globalist fire.

Belmokhtar is an Al Qeida affiliate in the same sense that the President of the Huddersfield Town Supporters Club is a Manchester United fan. The only thing those two have in common is football: most of the time, they hate each other and barely meet to discuss anything.

The same media drivel applied to the branding of 2012’s north African anti-tyrant movements ‘the Arab Spring’ – imagining for some reason that Abdul in Cairo might be even remotely on the same socio-political wavelength as Dean in Brooklyn. This too is the direct descendant of Ted Levitt’s globalist crap about Parisian intellectuals being closer to Princeton intellectuals than Toulousienne or New York administrators respectively. The denial of culture is quite one of the silliest conceits of Twentieth Century Man.

No: the African bloodbath we are witnessing today represents an undignified and desperate attempt by the West to keep the production output/volume/multinational show on the road – by accessing vital minerals and what remains of fossil energy. It reflects the ultimate failure of Friedmanism: the unwillingness of cultural short-term greed to cede ground to rational investment into research that would render current energy modes redundant. Thus the French action in Mali is no more a defence against terrorism than Cameron’s interference in Libya was the guiding light of British democracy lending a hand: rather, they are opportunist moves to put French and British business and energy interests first.

The examples of this media-blindness hypothesis are myriad: the national press and the BBC incapable of looking beyond eurozone debt as the main factor lying behind the austerity being meted out to Greece. The inability to grasp that Cyprus is the Mediterranean Cuba. The unwillingness to interrogate the Erdogan regime in Turkey. The utter lack of any discerning analysis of this crazy Nazi-Soviet pact between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood. Whichever way you cut it, Geopolitics really isn’t the MSM’s strong suit.

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Wherever one looks, the Business as Usual syndrome continues to dominate. The Centre for Economic & Business Research says that house prices in the UK will hit a new peak over the next eighteen months, on the back of low interest rates, economic recovery, and a lack of quality housing stock for potential buyers. The CEBR seems not to have factored in other realities such as rock-bottom confidence, cash-strapped and paranoid banks, falling full-time employment, flatlining gdp, and the collapse of the global financial system.

But the Times too thinks housing will be our saviour: Economics Correspondent Kathryn Hopkins says that building 100,000 UK homes this year will create 150,000 new jobs, and thus ‘boost the economy by 1%’. Sadly, what it won’t do is export anything – or find 100,000 people with the confidence to buy the bloody things. Here yet again the media set is in awe of the building sector’s ‘cheering results’ of last week. But as The Slog showed a few days ago, the housing boom is a myth created by the smoke and mirrors that always accompany seedy deals between business and politics.

If this kind of thing ranks as ‘analysis’, then God help us all.