“The evidence is all around”, the media oracles proclaim.

Thank you. All we wanted was permission. The burden of anxiety had risen to levels we couldn’t sustain: the climate, the debt, the energy crisis, Russia, the arson and the looting in the streets, the invading hordes of Muslim men with the glint of rape in their eyes. We were helplessly trapped, unable to act, frozen in fear — because none of it was our doing and nothing we could do would undo it.

Oh, the sweet joy to be acknowledged and be given encouragement to surrender to it. To be told by someone in charge that our fears are valid and we can absolve ourselves of blame or shame and focus on our own survival.

Watch out supermarkets, here we come.

If you’re an adult with a good few decades under your belt you may feel like you’ve been here before, but this time it’s different. At the onset of Covid you were told not to panic and to listen only to what the government told you. This made you feel guilty about hoarding. This time you’re actually being told to be prudent and to start building a stockpile of the necessities for survival.

Angela Eagle, the UK Environment Secretary, last month warned that the risk of floods, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes was such that, “If you’ve got a stock of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better than if you haven’t.”

The UK Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, declared this week, “We may have just 1,000 days to prepare for war”, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that he was stockpiling soup, baked beans and Twiglets; while Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government has mascara, baked beans and Sauvignon Blanc on her list.

When the deisel runs out the trucks won’t be able to get through, so, hit the aisles with a clear conscience wherever you are, starting with loo paper, candles, matches and AA batteries, 25-litre water bottles, dried pasta and tinned tomatoes (and don’t forget the tin opener). You may get supercilious remarks from rural homesteaders and survivalist communities in Devon, or Oregon and Washington State, but shrug them off. Your duty is to the survival of all mankind, and particularly intelligent persons like yourself. You’re acting on Government orders.

I’ve lived through a number of apocalypses through the decades and become somewhat survival weary. The thrill of letting go to panic, the warm glow of sharing hardships with fellow survivors, the permissible self-congratulation at emerging out of the dark abyss of canned foods into the bright light of fresh fruit and vegetables and fully stocked grocery shelves; I’ve had more than my fair share.

They’re not around anymore, but my aunts and uncles used to speak glowingly of their times in the air raid shelters during World War Two’s London bombings: the new friends made, the laughter, the patriotic songs and the rush of excitement when the All Clear sounded and they could return to the street and see if their house was still standing. The rations on which they survived throughout the War make today’s survivalists look like gluttons. But life is never so lively as when you’re living on the edge of it.

In the 1970s the self-sufficiency movement took hold in earnest. London was afflicted with IRA bombings, garbage strikes and coal miner marches. The Middle East cut off oil supplies and commerce ground to a halt. In North America the Black Panthers and the Weathermen blurred the edges of Vietnam War protests by bringing the killing home, particularly to campuses like Kent State, and the lyrics on the lips of the Woodstock generation spoke of anger and rebellion. A lot of city dwellers turned their basements into bunkers, disbelieving the premise of the nuclear deterrent.

Like millions of others at that time I subscribed to the Whole Earth Catalog, an oversized, dense directory of product reviews and resource guides for escapees printed in black on unbleached newspaper stock which Steve Jobs described as being, “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”. This was the back-to-the-land-era that captured middle class urbanites who took it even more seriously than the hippies (who mostly wanted free sex and an abundance of pot). In many ways this was the genesis of the ecological and environmental movements of today.

I took the bait and subscribed to Mother Earth News and read Buckminster Fuller before taking the plunge and buying some land to attack with my soft, bare, city slicker hands. My lower back has never recovered, and my wife shuddered to remember the barrowloads of tomatoes that I wheeled into her kitchen which overwhelmed her every summer.

Self-sufficiency was a worthy ideal to promote but it is, paradoxically, not sustainable except for a few. It requires substantial production surpluses to fund a modern lifestyle and homesteading doesn’t cut it. The Amish make a living for themselves, but they drive horses, not motorcars, and they share their food, hand-build their houses and make their own clothes.

The street riots, looting and arson currently being stage-managed by the Far Left in France will not be stopped by an upsurge in resistance from the proletariat until the rioters start targeting the boulangerie bread shops and fromagerie cheese shops. At that point they will have gone too far. At the moment they are more interested in luxury goods, electronics, cosmetics and sportswear. None of those things are necessary for survival.

The UK Start Prepping1 website has 137 items on its Starting Stockpile Shopping List2, not including the separate Vegetarian list or the Lactose-Free list. Pets have their own list, of course. It is fairly obvious that times have changed since we 1970s pioneers of survival showed our mettle, but we are still here. We survived acid rain, we motored on through three oil crises and two global financial crashes, a phantom pandemic and a delirium of gender dysphoria with wars being waged somewhere on the planet every day of our lives.

But the times were different. Now we have governments to guide our every step through life, which is apparently what everyone wants. So, go out and stock up. Don’t forget the toilet paper and the Sauvignon Blanc and heed this advice from the editor of Start Prepping:

“... fixating on possible disasters could cause anxiety to worsen considerably. Please look after your own mental health first, and please make your own assessments as to what preparations you want to make based on the crises you are most likely to face in your life. If you struggle with disordered eating, self-harm or suicidal ideation there may be some things that you choose not to do for your own safety – and that is absolutely ok. You staying safe and staying alive is why Start Prepping UK is here.”

I just hope the drug companies are taking note and stocking up on anti-depressants.

A.I. Fabler

November 1, 2026

I’m not unusual because over half of my age group are the same and our numbers keep rising. See, we’re too sick to work. That’s official. It’s government policy and it’s not just us young ones, it’s universal.

That’s why it’s called Universal Credit.

About time, too. Finally we’re being recognised by doctors, social workers and psychiatrists. But it took Covid to wake them up and pay proper attention. Since the end of lockdown 91% of people claiming health benefits have been recognised as having a mental and behavioural disorder that stops us having a job.

Me and my mates have our own club. It’s called NEET. Stands for “Not in Education, Employment or Training”. We’ve got one million members in the UK alone and we’ve got new affiliated clubs opening all around the world: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of the EU countries now. It’s a world-wide movement.

Recently there have been calls for people older than 24 to have a club, too. In the UK there are 9 million of them suffering from anxiety and only just under half are not in “some form of employment”. It’s only fair that they share the same sort of camaraderie that us young’uns enjoy, particularly as most of them will be without “some sort of employment” for the rest of their lives. That’s why they’re thinking of calling their club NEAT: “Never in Employment Again Thanks”.

That’s me with my Dad below.

The potential for club membership growth is enormous and it’s not before time. Back before I was born, around 25 years ago, us young people with anxiety and stuff were just ignored by teachers, doctors and all. They told us we were disruptive little tow-rags and needed to sit down and shut-up. Nothing more than spoiled brats, they reckoned, and dumb with it. But some smart people in government knew better. They got together with the doctors, the teachers, the people from Welfare, and the experts on psychiatry and stuff and they all agreed there was something everyone was missing if only they had a name for it.

That’s when they discovered ADHD and Autism and — the most obvious one of all — Depression. It had been staring them in the face all the time. So the doctors and psychiatrists agreed they had a lot of lost time to make up, and they roped in the drug companies to help them. Everyone knew that this was a serious example of generational child neglect that needed to be put right urgently. Doctors were instructed to make the necessary diagnoses and write their prescriptions, and drug companies came to the party with medicines, as the word went out around the world.

Governments are often given a bad name, but I can tell you, they couldn’t be faulted for their response over the next two decades. As a leading Democratic Socialist candidate in the US was recently heard to say, “Once you know there’s something wrong with you, then you deserve benefits as compensation”.

With the help of our mothers the areas where assistance was required were quickly identified. In the UK they provided Disability Living Allowances (DLAs) for under 16-year-olds with disabling conditions like learning difficulties, ADHD and behavioural issues. Parents of children receiving DLA can themselves receive Universal Credit payments including carers’ allowances, priority for council housing and a whole range of special grants to make life easier; all designed to incentivise them to apply for the best welfare assistance for their children.

Once the children have grown to adulthood they, too, can move onto Universal Credit and still claim the allowances they or their children may need. People in England should be proud to see that child DLA alone costs just $18.8billion (£8billion pounds) a year. It’s a small price to pay when you consider that one million kids in England and Wales receive it and one in ten of all 7-year-olds receive it, setting them up for a lifetime.

Me and my mates are doing our bit to help. We’re what’s called Sick Influencers and we have a bundle of social media platforms, like TikTok, where we supply step-by-step advice on “How and Where” to ensure people obtain the benefits they deserve. We provide phone numbers and email addresses for doctors that will provide ADHD and autism diagnoses via video, together with simple templates listing what to say. If young people can’t read and write well enough, we can get a volunteer to do it for them in return for a small token, like supplying some of their Ritalin tablets which the volunteer can sell. There is also an army of Public Aid human rights lawyers willing to ensure that no applications get declined.

Me and my mates also have political work that keeps us busy. You’d be amazed that there are Far Right bigots who claim that depression and other neurological disorders are nothing more than “doctor-created diseases” and “mental pathologies” that have been cynically created by big pharma. They go on television and say these things, and they try and speak at universities, so we are forced to regularly stage protests to shut them down.

One of our unsung victories is the quiet acknowledgment that, with the rapid rise in autism (20-fold in young children and 40-fold among teenagers in the last 25 years) schools are now being designed as if all children have it. Surely, that’s a sign that normalization of mental illness is as well recognised as the hard-won recognition by transgender advocates that men can be women. The world really is changing for the better.

But for me personally, it is the international solidarity that gives me the most reassurance for the future. The more I look at the figures coming out of, for instance:

· The USA where autism prevalence among 8-year-olds has risen 400% in 20 years to now be 32 per thousand, and mental disorders among 12-17-year-olds has grown to 17%, and

· Canada, where 33.7% of 15-24-year-olds are now diagnosed with mental illness, and

· Australia, where 38.8% of 16-24-year-olds have been similarly diagnosed, and

· New Zealand where mental illness diagnoses of 15-24-year-olds has risen from 32.5% to 52.5% in just 6 years

... the more certain I am that we are on the right track and setting our young (and our economies) up for the future.

I won’t confuse you with too much information. Facts and statistics are viewed by many of us as representing an oppressive race weapon used against victimised minorities. In this case, I’m proud to say that me and my mates will not be a minority for much longer. But here are a couple of stats, if you like that sort of thing.

Because I have learning difficulties I told all this to Artie Fabler, so I hope he spelled things right and you can understand.

Cheers for now.

October 24, 2026

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Reading those analyses I sometimes get the same feeling as I do when drinking my eighth glass of water for the day. I’m doing it because I feel I oughta.

This week was one of those days, prompted by the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Economics. I must admit that I was hoping to find further evidence that the trustees of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, were continuing towards their goal of proving to the world that Swedes have a sense of humour (following their award of the Nobel Peace Prize last week to a toady Human Rights appointee supported by the UN’s nation states with the world’s worst human rights records).

My hopes were dashed, however. This time they were serious.

I think.

The USD1.2m prize and everlasting fame went to two college professors, Messrs Hall and Woodford, for their “microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization”.

Stay with me while I break it down for you.

In plain language, their remarkable work can be summarised as follows:

• Hall’s “Eureka Moment” was the idea that rational, forward-looking people prefer to keep their spending stable over time rather than fluctuating wildly with their current paycheck.

• He showed that consumer spending relies largely on what people expect their future income to be. If consumers are optimistic about the future, they spend more today; if they receive new, unexpected negative economic data, their expectations shift rapidly, altering their spending immediately.

• He refined this by identifying that while roughly 80% of households successfully plan ahead and smooth their consumption, the remaining 20% live “hand-to-mouth” because they lack the savings or ability to borrow.

Isn’t that remarkable?

• Woodford showed that when demand weakens, firms will cut production and lay off workers before they lower their prices. This explains why recessions feature high unemployment alongside stubborn inflation.

• These insights provide the theoretical foundation for forward guidance—when central banks explicitly state where interest rates are headed over the next few years so households and businesses can plan ahead confidently.

Do you see what I mean by “remarkable”?

Imagine receiving USD1.2m for realising what every wage earner in the world knows as they sit down on Friday night to work out how to pay the food and electricity bills.

Apparently economists didn’t know any of this before Hall and Woodford came along. Imagine if governments understood what they were saying.

But just to demonstrate the enormous gap between ordinary common-sense citizens and the bureaucrats and politicians who rely on economists comes the news that the UK’s civil service unions are to strike for a 4-day working week with full pay, plus a 10% pay rise, an increase in annual leave and an automatic right to work from home. This in a country where the public debt is already 100% of its Gross Domestic Product and forecast to rise to 300%.

You can reach your own conclusions as to what it says about economists that they’ll be blithely writing these figures into their models as we speak and expecting us to read what they have to say. Politicians, of course, will be explaining that debt is a problem for the future, not for today.

Another story this week sums it up nicely for me. Apparently it is the 100-year anniversary of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” stories, which Queen Camilla praises for their ‘simplicity in a very complicated world’.

One wonders what Pooh would have said about the “remarkable” discoveries of the two brainy Nobel Prize winning economists.

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

A.I. Fabler

October 14, 2026

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It appears that Gen-Z (the 18 to 24 yr-olds) are not having it.

This is the most encouraging thing I’ve heard about that generation, for I’ve never previously credited them with showing any sign of intelligence at all. We condemn them for lacking critical thinking and now quietly, almost by stealth, they’ve shown us up by demonstrating a level of judgment, rationality and good sense the like of which has been conspicuously missing from all the generations that have come before them.

In the last year 25% of 18-24 year-olds went unkissed. Around one third had experienced no sex with another person of any kind. Sociologists and demographers want to make something big of this news, pouring over the entrails of their findings in search of deeply disturbing evidence of civilizational decline. It’s due to psycho-sexual anxiety, they proclaim; the product of social media’s hyper emphasis on bodily and facial perfection and fear of being physically scrutinized, set against wall-to-wall sexualised entertainment and porn. Swimming in this anxiety about their bodies 60% of Gen-Z carry fears of rejection, compounded by Post-Roe and post-#MeToo calculations about consequences.

My observations are simpler and I offer them, not as a sociologist, but as a layman (a term which I use deliberately).

Take the kissing thing as a start. What is a kiss? Is it the prelude to further intimacy designed to stimulate the libido? Is it nature’s way of exchanging oral bacteria in order to test suitability for procreation purposes? Or is it as described by Oxford University academics, Dr Matilda Brindle and Professor Stuart West in their Ig Nobel Prize winning research: “The non-agonistic interactions involving directed intraspecific oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”?

When described like that, it seems to me that those 25% of Gen-Z kissing celibates know exactly what they’re avoiding. I think nose rings have a big part to play also.

Now take the matter of body dysmorphia. It is described as a mental health condition involving an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance, but could it be something else entirely? Could it be an objective and rational reaction to the extraordinary spectacle presented by two naked people engaged in activities like biting, strangulation and digital penetration which, if carried out on a football field would see the participants banned for life? You have to ask yourself, what on earth are they doing?

I suggest to you that a third of Gen Z ask themselves exactly that question.

Some of my contemporaries think the decline in alcohol consumption has a big bearing on the decline in sex. Others point to the Harris poll showing 55% of Gen Z choosing to build a life around their pet dog rather than a partner. Feminists regard the decision not to have children as a stand for personal autonomy and now that Barbie is available in the form of a pregnant doll bearing a baby in amniotic fluid any feelings of loss can be eased.

But let’s turn to the question we’ve all been avoiding. What if Gen Z is unable to describe its own sex and cannot, therefore, define who it should be having sex with?

You will not be surprised to learn that 23% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQAI+ and you’ll have your own ideas as to why this figure grew from a base of just 2% only two decades ago. What will surprise you perhaps is my contention that this is only part of the story. There’s a big part missing, and once you understand it you’ll realise why Gen Z is being ill-served by the inadequacy of the identitarian shorthand provided by that LGBTQAI+ banner, leaving many of them floundering when it comes to choosing their own sexual identities. This became very clear to me when I put on a wig and attended the Oxford Union International Rainbow Symposium recently; a meeting held secretly behind closed doors.

The purpose of the symposium was to put defining lines in the sand for each group so that tensions arising from intersectionality issues (overlapping claims) could be resolved by referring to the agreed definitions in a charter to be drawn up as the founding document for a proposed new Rainbow Community Disputes Tribunal.

It is worth reminding ourselves how we got to this point, bearing in mind that the subjects we are talking about were decriminalised only recently in the West, and remain outlawed in many countries currently admired by the West (admired particularly by those of the Rainbow Community). The history of the movement is revealed by the order in which the capital letters of the banner have been added.

L is for Lesbian: women attracted to women.

G is for Gays: men attracted to men.

B is for Bisexuals: men and women attracted to both men and women.

T is for Transgender: men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men.

Q is for Queer: people questioning without landing on an answer.

I is for Intersex: comprised of a bit of man and a bit of woman.

A is for Asexual: having no defined sex in their make-up.

+ is for Plus: other categories not defined.

Surely, you would think, there’s a home there somewhere for any Gen-Z trying to decide on its sexuality. That’s what I naively thought until the grand oak doors of the Oxford Union Hall closed behind us and the Symposium opened the floor to submissions on the proposed contents of the Disputes Tribunal charter. That was the moment when all hell broke loose.

First came the Lesbians. They consider themselves the founders of the Rainbow Republic, which is why they occupy first place on the alphabet label. Their beef was with the T for Transgenders, and particularly Transwomen. Transwomen cannot claim to be lesbians for the purpose of dating lesbians, they insisted, nor can they claim to be women for the purpose of entering lesbian spaces to pee. Transmen, on the other hand, may enter lesbian spaces to pee, but they cannot claim to be lesbian so long as they want to be men. The Ts in the audience climbed to their feet and hurled violent abuse at the L speakers, threatening to rape them and rip out their body piercings.

The Gs came to the rescue. They were co-founders of the Rainbow Republic but riven with internal conflicts of their own. It had become clear that homosexual men had achieved high status in society decades ago but that was now being undermined by tastelessly flamboyant elements who had taken over Pride parades dressed as muzzled dogs, and invaded public schools, libraries and television shows dressed as drag queens, behaviour which had reversed the hard-won public admiration for the millions of civilised high-achieving homosexual men who had blended successfully into mainstream society over the last thirty years. They called for these elements to be banned from the G category and re-assigned to a new category to be determined.

The A for Asexuals supported both the L and the G submissions and felt that blame for these problems should be laid at the feet of the Q for Queers, who were intent on undermining all sexual norms and making a mockery of intersectionality.

It was noticeable that representation from the I for Intersex community was limited to one single person who asked that the I be changed to N, as Non-binary was a more accurate and generally well-understood description. This request was noted but not put to a vote.

As an observer I was surprised by the apparent lack of common cause between the identifiable groups and wondered how the perception had grown among the public — and particularly mainstream media — that they comprised a “community”. Then, after a vegan lunch and a donations collection for the spirit people who owned the land on which Oxford University squatted, the afternoon session opened with submissions from the floor. This was when things got really interesting.

The first speaker complained that the proceedings were discriminatory and oppressive, if not patriarchal and colonialist. Where, she demanded, was recognition for F for Fat people and D for Disabled people? “What about F for Furry people?” someone cried. “And R for Reconsidering,” another shouted. “Or E for Entire” (a breakaway branch of Transwomen).

The moderator struggled to call the meeting to order eventually resorting to turning up the stage microphone until it screamed. “Shut the fuck up!” it shouted. “What do you think the Plus is for?”

For a moment there was silence. Then a small, tearful figure stood up and said, “I’m U for Undecided, and all I want is a home for my sexuality.”

Tears will always do it, I observed to myself cynically. One by one, tearful figures rose in support, not just of U for Undecided, but W for Welcoming and S for Sadomasochism, E for Eunuch and D for Dog Loving. On and on it went, until the prospect of the entire alphabet having to be considered became a dagger hanging over the proceedings, threatening the continued viability of the entire Rainbow Republic. What politician, journalist or teacher was going to promote an organisation that required the entire alphabet to be recited in order to describe it?

As a neutral observer I had no skin in the game, but I could see that a circuit breaker was required, so I stood up and said that (as a neutral observer) I believed the problem could be resolved by the addition of some extra vowels to the brand. I was extemporising. “Consider adding E, O and U,” I suggested. “Think of the broad range of possible labels they could encompass.”

E for Edible, Episodic, Emerging and Elastic. O for Oddish, Oedipal and Opportunistic. U for Unhappy, Uncertain and Unclean (in deference to Muslim delegates). I was riffing, ad-libbing flat out, but soon there were cries of agreement, suggestions by the dozen, and the mood in the room shifted dramatically. I let them run off at the mouth while I quietly reviewed the new label I was proposing: LGBTQIAEOU.

I quietly acknowledged to myself that it was still quite a mouthful. Would people remember it? Would they become lazy and abbreviate it?

Then I had a buzz on my cell phone. It was Claude AI from Anthropic, who’d overheard me.

“Would you like to make an anagram of that?” Claude asked.

‘Yes, please, Claude,” I replied.

“The anagram of LGBTQIAEOU most suited to your purpose is EQUAL BIGOT.”

I checked it. Claude was right. It was time for me to quietly leave the room. Would the Rainbow Community wish to be described as EQUAL BIGOT? It seemed uncomfortably close to the truth, but truth hurts.

The experience taught me one valuable lesson, however. It’s now quite obvious to me why Gen Z isn’t having sex: they have no way of settling on their sexual identity.

A.I. Fabler

October 3, 2026

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This dilemma is at the heart of dissatisfaction with democracy. To be clear, not everyone is dissatisfied with democracy. It is particularly popular now with Communists, Muslims and non-practising whites of the Left, for nothing advances totalitarianism as surely as the ballot box.

The comments which follow, however, are not directed at those groups; my comments are directed at the confused, floundering few who remain stuck in their belief that the individual’s agency is what defines freedom. Surely you can see the contradiction in my use of the terms “individual agency” and “freedom”? Being free to express your individual agency in elections ensures that your influence on the result is nullified. Only the organised majority can win under democracy.

Being on the winning side inevitably requires joining a group. Identitarians understand this implicitly, and, because few identifiable groups constitute an outright majority on their own — having already defined themselves as victimised minorities — aligning with another group for the purpose of winning power may be necessary, even if the alignment at first sight appears to be nonsensical. Hence LGBTQ groups aligning first among themselves (how absurd) and then with Pro-Palestinian Islamists who want to kill them all. In the vocabulary of modern politics these alignments are known as Standpoint Pragmatism. Each party has its own bias (Standpoint) but a similar objective, which is to gain power (Pragmatism). Power, of course, has different meanings in practice so it is usual for one member of a temporary alliance to end up destroying the other. An example might be the Iranian Communist Party aligning with the fundamentalist Mullahs to overthrow the Shah of Iran. It took less than two years for the Mullahs to annihilate all Communists, Royalists and Democrats once they’d seized power. That’s Standpoint Pragmatism in practice.

Before we go any further let’s remove the hurdle that causes us all to trip when racing after solutions to our political problems. I’m talking, of course, about the meaning of words. This has been a contentious issue since the time of Plato and his successors and was dealt with by T.D. Weldon in his 1953 book, The Vocabulary of Politics, thus: “Words do not have meanings in the required sense at all; they simply have uses.” (Weldon was a Magdalen College, Oxford, professor of philosophy).

Post-Modernists, Marxists and fundamentalists of all persuasions know this only too well and you don’t have to be a forensic semanticist to understand the meaning of words like “justice” to get the gist of it, providing you know the bias of its user and the context in which it is being used. You must have noticed that political groups from opposing poles use the same vocabulary to express otherwise incompatible viewpoints, but we’ve collectively decided that life is too short to be constantly interrupting to ask, “Excuse me, what do you mean by justice in this instance?”

Notwithstanding, I came across a word this week in a political manifesto that I couldn’t let pass. The word was “virtue”, which one doesn’t often encounter these days but I’m damned if applying the bias of the user and the context in which it was being used was of any use in explaining its meaning to me on this occasion. I was reading the manifesto because it purported to be the clearest definition of the views of the Far Right in America, written by someone called Charles Haywood, whose credibility has a tick from Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance and a raft of right wing thinktanks. It is titled, “The Foundationalist Manifesto: The Politics of Future Past”.

“The politics of Foundationalism will be the politics of virtue,” the manifesto proclaimed.

In a world dominated by the commentariat of the Left, we don’t often get to learn what the Far Right believes and it’s too easy to describe its members as being anyone whose views fail to conform to those who know better. Mr Haywood doesn’t shy away from telling you what he’s for and what he’s against, and as a potpourri of conservative topics there isn’t a single flower or petal left out, but it’s a wish list rather than a guide for getting there. I think his vision is of a benign dictatorship assisted by a management team of white Christian men supported by loving stay-at-home wives and happy, obedient children, all of whom possess “virtue”.

In the manifesto’s Third Pillar: Virtue Politics, he proclaims, “Foundationalism recognizes, most of all, that the form of government is irrelevant if there is a complete lack of societal virtue, and that while society can tolerate an inevitable lack of virtue among some people and some classes, it cannot tolerate a lack of strong virtue among the ruling class. Without the mos maiorum, the focus on tradition, the web of virtue, that supports good government, the project will fail.”

I tried and tried, but I failed to decipher his meaning. “The web of virtue that supports good government” has to be the most brilliantly obtuse phrase I have read in recent times. It is hack proof; a crash barrier against destructive criticism; unanswerable, it steals the high ground of meaninglessness.

I have decided to borrow it for my own manifesto which I am currently drafting. As every fool knows, any political party needs a good name, some tempting policies and a moral high ground. It is the latter which I have been missing and have now discovered in “Virtue”.

For too long parties have cynically chosen names that describe the opposite of what they represent. Labour appeals to people who don’t want to labour. Conservative stands for watered down socialism. Democrats stand for unelected power via voter fraud. National stands for surrender of national identity. Republicans stand for government by decree. Reform stands for a return to the old days.

My party is to be called REVOLT.

It is “The party that says NO!”

And, thanks to Mr Haywood, it’s high ground is now unassailable, because everything it stands for from now on will be “Virtuous”.

Having said an emphatic “No” to democracy, it won’t be contesting any elections of course, but this is not a party of revolution in the sense of the French, American or Iranian Revolutions. Violence has its virtues, but a virtuous man must learn to resist it. No, this will be a party dedicated to denial and the ultimate expression of virtue that comes from the strength to say NO.

Think of us as you go to the polls and make your mark in the box alongside the name of a person you despise and distrust. If you have the courage to REVOLT we could all get together and start anew. Have a few drinks. Try out a few ideas for a manifesto. And then do nothing about it until the whole damn democratic charade crashes down and enough people want to REVOLT with us. All it takes is a loud virtuous “NO!”.

A.I. Fabler

September 25, 2026

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In 1962 in the small village of Espéraza in the French Pyrenees bordering Spain I had my first encounter with young representatives of the European countries which, newly emerged from the Second World War, would go on to establish the Union designed to prevent any future wars in Europe.

It was 20 years since the German Luftwaffe had begun its 57 night uninterrupted Blitz bombing of London, and 16 years since the US and British forces had entered the Nazi extermination camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau to begin reporting on their horrors.

We were a small two-dozen strong group of young people, boys and girls, drawn from Spain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy and Germany; the youngest being 18 and the oldest 23. I was the only person not from Europe, being a New Zealander via Australia recruited in England. Our billet was a disused hat factory where we slept on the concrete floor, washed at a cold water tap in the yard and made bonfires from abandoned wooden furniture to gather around at night. By day we walked in ragged file up the mountain to “repair” a broken stop bank, and in the evenings we barbecued sausages, sang and talked with the bright enthusiasm of the youthfully ignorant.

What brought me there was a misunderstanding that I never bothered to properly resolve. Shortly after arrival in the UK, I’d wandered into Broadcasting House to see if I could get some freelance work from the BBC. Apparently, this wasn’t how things worked in the BEEB.

‘How well do you know your way around Europe?’ the Personnel Department gatekeeper asked me. “And what languages do you speak?’

‘Not well,’ I replied cockily, ‘but I made it safely here from the other side of the world, so it shouldn’t be a problem. And I did French at school.’

‘Sorry, we’ve nothing for you,’ he replied disdainfully. ‘But here’s something.’ He handed me a small leaflet. ‘Start there. You might learn something.’

As best I can remember, the leaflet was an invitation to join something like “International Geographic Volunteers Helping Restore Europe”. There were some stirring words, a photo or two of attractive young men and women smiling at each other and the address of Espéraza in southwestern France. So I picked up my duffel bag, caught the ferry to Calais and started hitchhiking. Nothing ventured, as the saying goes.

I didn’t know it in advance, but the village was a gateway to the mountain pass leading into Spain which had formed an ancient pilgrimage route. It was also a route followed by those wanting to join the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and those wanting to escape it. While the town had once been the second largest producer of wool felt hats in the world the casual dress codes of the 1950s had seen its 14 factories close and economic depression descend on it. Many of the Spaniards who’d escaped from the special cruelties of their Civil War had planted their dark-eyed genes in the teenage population and returned over the mountain pass to their homes in España.

My life’s possessions were in my duffel bag: a change of clothes and half-a-dozen books which I still have today. They included Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in which he draws on his time as a war correspondent supporting Spain’s Republican cause and tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American college professor who fights alongside the left-wing guerillas. Also in the bag was my copy of Orwell’s “1984” heavily shaped by his encounter with the Soviet-backed Spanish Communist Party’s violent suppression of fellow leftists in the Workers Party Militia which Orwell had joined before being forced to flee the country.

In my fantasies I wavered between being the macho literary titan, Hemingway, or the brave, youthful hero, Jordan. As for Orwell, well ... I could argue for hours the righteousness of his anti-totalitarianism and exposure of the ruthless betrayals of the Soviet-backed Communists and their use of propaganda to completely re-write historical truth. There would be no holding me back.

While most of my campfire companions spoke animatedly among themselves in their own languages, for many of them English was a second language, so I had the chance to participate. Everyone got on well, there were no arguments despite many differences in points of view. Then, one evening, three of the German boys got into an animated discussion which uncharacteristically caused the rest of the campfire circle to go quiet. My own knowledge of their language extended to a pick-up line that one of them had taught me (which unsurprisingly had proved unproductive). One of the Dutch boys explained that they were arguing over the mistake Hitler had made in the invasion of Russia by not heading straight towards Moscow in the summer but deciding to take Ukraine first.

I could understand why everyone went silent. For my part I was stunned. In my bag was a book titled “Lest we Forget” from a limited edition published by The Daily Mail in 1945. It was a photographic record with written descriptions compiled by the journalists and inspection agencies who entered the hundred or so concentration camps with the allied army at the end of the war.

The images, and the facts revealed, cause the reader’s mind and senses to shut down in horror. Germany’s forehead had been branded with shame, and the scars could never be removed, I thought, yet here was the next generation arguing about how the Army of the Third Reich could have triumphed but for one poor decision. So, I said so.

There was a moment of silence before one of them replied.

‘The guilt is for our parents to deal with,’ he said; ‘not us. We are responsible for the future.’

Over the next 20 years I travelled extensively throughout Europe and learned to love the distinctive nature of each country and its people, revelling in the richness and depth of their cultures and histories and experiencing the exhilaration of crossing the border from one to a totally different other. By the seventies Germany had risen from its ashes to become the economic power of Europe. It was a model of industrial productivity, confidence and pride — a pleasure to visit and to have friends there.

The EU gradually turned into a giant bureaucracy whose dead hand suffocated innovation and growth, and whose unmandated drive to open borders and let the Third World come in showed a scathing disregard for the pride and identity of their own people. When Angela Merkle allowed a million Muslims to invade Germany in one year it became apparent that the ruling establishment was possessed of a perverse desire to destroy nationhood. The UK followed; then France, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Sweden.

We began to see conservative politicians branded as far-right “Fascists” and police and security branches directed to hound them. The media took up Orwell’s writings and turned them on their heads. From stark warnings they quickly became handbooks for the bureaucracy on how to suppress free speech. Countries that had been the cradles of civilisation for centuries lost their identity and became demoralised and depressed.

Then, last week, a political party in East Germany that had been silenced, censored, locked out and frequently arrested by authorities for its subversive messaging won 44% of the state elections. The establishment’s reaction? Apoplexy.

That party is the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and its “subversive messaging” includes strict border controls and deportation of illegal migrants; a reversal of Net Zero policies that harm the economy; and restoration of energy security through its trading arrangements with Russia that were terminated in response to the war with Ukraine. They are, quite rightly, Eurozone sceptics who have watched Germany’s coffers being emptied by subsidies to other countries for the last 50 years.

As the commentariat throughout the West calls them out as Islamophobic Nazis I can’t help but see the irony. I commented to a German friend the other day that perhaps the post war shaming and retreat into guilt in her country had finally ground it down. ‘Look how virulent antisemitism has taken over the US, UK and most of Europe. Aberrant behaviour is a failing of all human beings, and the Third Reich surely was aberrant. But not a sufficient reason to destroy centuries of cultural heritage and identity like the One World anti-nation bureaucrats are attempting to do’.

I don’t know whether my young German friend from Espéraza is still alive, but I think he was right. Perhaps the AfD and other anti-immigration conservative parties will yet prove that the grave may have been dug for Nationalism, but Nationalism is still breathing. Long may it live.

A.I. Fabler

September 18, 2026

PS: As I write, the UK’s Birmingham city council has moved to ban British flags from its streets, with unlimited fines and 2-year prison sentences for offenders. Palestinian flags may remain. And the ruling Labour Party has chosen a Somali refugee as their candidate for the parliamentary seat vacated by Sir Keir Starmer.

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It hadn’t been this tense and suspicious since the last leadership selection when James Shaw had defected to the ultimate enemy, mocking their naivety for appointing a cis white male as co-leader — even paying for his suit hire in the belief that he could be a Trojan horse to help undermine Big-B Business. Some horse he turned out to be! More like a stalking horse for hedge funds.

But they’d got through that one. The rules for co-leadership were made clearer. At least one leader had to be Maori and identify as a woman, and one leader needed to be acceptable to all oppressed gender minorities. Marama was a shoo-in for the first category, but several people had doubts about the ambitious new girl Chloe. She looked and behaved like someone’s outspoken daughter, but where was she on the LGBTQA+ party membership eligibility spectrum? Some said she was B, which was too indecisive. Some said she was Q, which was too airy-fairy. Only when she announced herself to be L had there been general relief in the caucus room.

Chloe had the ability to speak with complete conviction on any subject and without allowing interruption no matter what attempts were made to trip her up, and the party’s support in the media and among student voters had risen enormously as a result of her leadership. But some older supporters had read somewhere that the colour Red was associated with failed attempts at Communism and this graffitied slur on the party’s door could be an attempt to taint them with that label. With elections being close, it was no time to be explaining that Communism was misunderstood, they said. It was a time when Green must be the only colour to associate with the environment, social justice and intolerance of wrong-thinking people that the party stood for.

What would Chloe’s response be?

When she strode in with her trademark frown and grin, the room went silent.

‘It’s those bloody leftist right-wing imposters down the hall,’ she proclaimed. ‘They’ll take any opportunity to take the heat off themselves since announcing their annual land value tax and universal basic income policies. They want people to believe our annual tax on wealth and 33% tax on inheritance and gifts makes us scarier than them.’

“The imposters down the hall” were from the Opportunity Party who also had a campaign room and canteen in the empty Wellington Council building near the parliament buildings, which was a cause of disquiet among Green supporters. Their leader was a genuine Q (having the name Qiulae Wong on her birth certificate) and was visibly from an ethnic minority (in New Zealand, at least), even if her English accent suggested a middle class schooling. The tension arose because Q could speak with complete conviction on an even greater range of subjects than Chloe and had the unique ability to change those subjects three or four times in the same sentence.

‘But don’t worry,’ Chloe assured them; ‘I’ve got an idea that’ll take the air out of Q’s lungs and turn the media’s attention back on us. I’ll announce it this weekend. You’ll soon see: there’s nothing wrong with Red.’

The room released a collective LGBTQA+ sigh of relief and members went off to attend their Drag Queen Book Readings for Children in the local libraries and their shoplifting classes. Chloe, meanwhile, went away to work on her announcement with Marama which they scheduled for midday on Sunday. There were some in the party who thought a later time might have guaranteed greater attention from voters as a critical rugby test between the All Blacks and South African Springboks was being played earlier that morning, but the two party leaders thought it was unlikely that any potential Green Party voters would be interested in such a violent male sport.

The location for the announcement provided a clue. It was to be given at Everybody Eats, a community centre where surplus food is provided to anyone with the advice “pay only what you can afford”.

As soon as they heard it, party members knew immediately that Chloe and Marama had knocked it out of the park, as the American expression goes, and had knocked the Opportunity Party off its populist perch in the process. Q could twist and turn and pretend taxing land and paying everyone a free “income” was what people wanted but there was only one thing everyone wanted and that was FOOD: cheap food, government guaranteed food, free from profiteering supermarket monopolies and rapacious farmers and food suppliers.

And that’s what the Green Party of Aotearoa would give them in its brilliant new Affordable Kai election policy. It was breathtakingly simple.1

· Supermarket chains would be compelled to sell 120 of their existing stores and distribution centres to the Government for rebranding as KiwiMarts.

· This new publicly owned supermarket chain would be mandated to sell only affordable food.

· A National Food Strategy would legislate the right to adequate and nutritious food for all, and a Fair Food Fund would be established to ensure community-led food security.

· Excessive pricing would be banned at existing supermarkets throughout the country, and this would be extended to energy and fuel.

Wow! Beat that if you can, you other poor excuses for politicians!

There were some cynics who said these proposals were not original and that Chloe had become attracted to the ideas, and the personage, of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. There was even a rumour that someone looking like Chloe, along with others, had been removed from an Air New Zealand flight the previous week when it was realised the plane couldn’t make it to New York if filled with passengers. But who knows?

One thing was clear. Having government food stores might be compared to Soviet style Communism and its Red flag, but it sure as heck wasn’t damaging Mayor Mamdani’s political standing. In fact Democrats across the United States were rushing to emulate him. Communism was the brand of the moment.

Down the hallway Q was reflecting that amongst colour blind people there was no ability to distinguish between red and green so perhaps a better slur might be “Blue Green”. Unfortunately, the Opportunity Party had already used that one to describe itself and few people had been convinced that they weren’t deliberately joking.

In Monday morning’s election poll Opportunity’s support had fallen by three points. But it wasn’t over yet. There were still opportunities out there.

A.I. Fabler

September 12, 2026

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One example might be the seeming belief in democracy. It reaches a periodic peak whenever election cycles come around. In both New Zealand and the United States we are building towards that peak with elections due in November.

Now, I don’t wish to belittle women or the burdens they suffer, but election time does seem to me to have a lot in common with the menstrual cycle, albeit that the latter comes at more frequent intervals. Both cycles are characterised by increasing expressions of bad temper, dissatisfaction and irrationality leading to poor decision making. However, while the menstrual cycle is another example of nature’s arbitrary cruelty, the election cycle is an example of humanity’s stupidity.

Let’s believe for a moment that democracy is a free expression of the will of the people. And let’s allow that people ‘will’ different things and it is the majority whose will should override the minority. This was expressed by American writer E.B. White who said, “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” But “right” about what? When presented with a choice between pre-chosen candidates of questionable ability, and ill-considered policies of little merit, how can the will of the people be expressed in a voting booth?

Could we agree that democracy is an expression of the preferences of the majority of people when presented with choices that come nowhere close to representing the ‘will’ of the people?

Everyone’s had a go at the meaning of democracy and, like most opinion piece writers I’ve collected pages full of them. My favourite remains H.L. Menken’s, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Then there is Uncle Josef Stalin’s remark, pre-empting Donald J Trump, that “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

Nevertheless, we stupid people get persuaded every few years that our participation in the elections ritual will somehow determine our quality of life going forward.

For me, democracy is like Sunday night dinner at my old boarding school when we were told we were free to eat anything and were presented with a choice between tripe and onions or corned beef and turnips. It was a relief to get over that moment of freedom and return to the usual mid-week stews and potatoes.

By now you will have realised that I do not believe universal suffrage allows for the free expression of people’s will or that democracy is synonymous with freedom, and I’m not alone in this. Thousands of people in Western Democracies hold the same view. In the UK those people are known as The Blob. In the USA they are known as The Swamp. In New Zealand I call them The Tomos (the Maori name for sinking holes). They, too, see elections as the periodic expression of the illusion that people have a choice: a safety valve, if you will. But they firmly believe that somebody needs to run things, despite the inconvenience of occasionally having to release the valve, and they are the ones to do it.

It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves and just agree that it’s Bureaucrats that run our countries, not politicians, and start changing our attitudes accordingly. Bureaucrats have powers and freedoms that no other class of people come close to enjoying. It’s no wonder their numbers keep growing. This past week has given us a small glimpse of the Shakespearian privileges in which they luxuriate.

Imagine this: You are the CEO of a government ministry paid over $600,000 a year salary with a generous retirement fund scheme, extended leave for leisure or family matters, and are free to work at home with no need to come into the office unless you judge it to be in your interests to be present. Your job description is sufficiently wide and ill-defined that it can mean everything and nothing. If you wish, it gives you carte blanche to intrude upon almost every aspect of the private lives and businesses of the country. Or not. Recognising that this could be interpreted as a heavy weight for anyone to carry, your employer and union have ensured that you are exempted from being judged as to your performance and you cannot be held responsible for the consequences of any decision that appears to have your signature near it.

Sounds good to me. It isn’t all plain sailing, however, because you have over 6,000 people in your ministry who need to be paid for the thousands of emails created and circulated within the office every day; not forgetting the procedure manuals that need to be continuously updated and — most importantly — the time schedules for training in the singing of Maori waiatas in the morning and hakas in the afternoon. All of that requires delegation to Managers whose numbers expand by up to 12% between every election cycle.

Another burden is the onerous matter that you need to ensure that lots of managers are seen to be engaged in discussing, agreeing and implementing every project costing more than $5m. Hardly anything costs less than $5m these days so that’s a lot of work and could even result in your having to get financial approval from your current Minister in Parliament who needs, in turn, to get it from Treasury, who then tell the Finance Minister, who then reports back to your current Minister, by which time the $5m has grown to $20m and the process must be started again, on and on upwards past $40m until it just becomes stupid to keep reporting, so you don’t bother.

Providing you have ensured that your managers hold plentiful meetings on the project and write copious ambiguous minutes attesting to the presence of multiple other managers, then no one can be held responsible, and certainly not you. The only people who mistakenly think that you or other people named in the copious reports might be responsible for something as simple as the collapse of the project, the spending of unapproved funds, and the failure to report truthfully on the matter are the Minister and Members of Parliament who labour under the misconception that they are running the country and that you are their employee. (Politicians never have been very smart.) Your employer is, in fact, the Public Service Commissioner — a Knight of the Realm no less — and he alone will determine whether your reporting is truthful or not, your competence is beyond doubt, and your erroneous accounting is merely a judgment error. What he will never allow is the suggestion that you have lied, engaged in false accounting and covered up your own and your managers’ incompetence, deliberately misleading Parliament. Even if you had, he would not accept your resignation and he believes that the admission by you that a mistake or two was made is tantamount to your saying sorry. On the contrary, he will recommend you as the best person for the job going forward.

You, the reader, have probably already forgotten, but this is exactly what was played out here in Wellington last week when the CEO of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Nic Blakely, admitted that a $40m+ project to upgrade Biometric Capability actually no longer existed, no one was sure what it had cost, reports and accounting were falsified in support of outright lies being told, and the Public Service Commissioner, Sir Brian Roche, had refused to accept that he, Blakely, should resign. The extent of Blakely’s admission of culpability was that “mistakes” had been made and “we got it wrong”. Sir Brian added that he couldn’t possibly be held accountable as he was “new to the job”. As Blakeley is a career public servant who’s served in Deputy Chief Executive roles since 2013 it would appear that Sir Brian had been misreported. Perhaps what he meant to say was that Blakely “knew his job” — well enough to know he couldn’t be held responsible.

In Whitehall and Washington the same story is told every week. The enemy of Britain is not the illegal Muslim invader who walks in through the open door, it is the people within Whitehall who open the door. In Washington the one thing that allows the assumption of power by the Swamp is the compliance of the people. Fraud is reported momentarily, no one is charged, and then it is quickly forgotten.

These are the bureaucrats who run our countries; the ones on whom your dissatisfaction and anger should be directed, not at hapless politicians around election time. Orwell said, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act”. That time has been reached. What are you going to do about it?

A.I. Fabler

September 5, 2026

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The restaurant, which I will call Ponsy’s, for the sake of the story, was in Ponsonby, an area of the city distinguished by the very high prices of the very small houses that fashionable people paid to live in, on narrow streets without garages or parking, that used to be occupied by railway and post office workers 40 years ago. It is the type of chic urban district where hairdressing salons, personal trainers and artisan bakers are unaffected by recession.

So, I shaved, brushed my hair and put on a smart linen suit, then called for a taxi. I live in a part of the city where I gave up calling Ubers long ago, having grown sick of standing in the street watching my phone screen as they reversed direction in order to deliver Uber Eats on the way. The central city is not a part of town where it is pleasant standing on the street at night looking at your iPhone screen.

The taxi arrived quickly and I gave directions to Ponsy’s.

The Indian driver turned to me with a broad smile. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but you look very like President Trump.’

My friend and I were both taken aback (though I seem to recall that she sniggered). ‘I’m not as big,’ I replied snootily, ‘nor as orange I hope.’

‘But you are very important, I think,’ he persisted. “I know when I have important people in my car.’

Luckily Ponsonby is a short ride away and he knew the direction to take as, of course, they all have large screens on their dashboards these days and can become taxi drivers within two days of arriving in the country. As we pulled up outside Ponsy’s he turned to me again.

‘Ah, now I remember, sir,’ he exclaimed; ‘you are a famous actor on television.’

‘No, I’m not famous and I’m not on television,’ I insisted. ‘Now, what do I owe you?’

‘Well, sir, if you have cash I can make it cheaper. Do you have cash?’

It so happened that I did. I’ve been carrying cash in my billfold for nearly ten years unable to find anywhere that is willing to take it. ‘How much is the fare?’ I asked.

“I reduce it to just twenty dollars.’

I gave him a fifty dollar note and waited for the change, which seemed to be a long time coming. ‘Oh, I only have twenty dollars change,’ he apologised. ‘Do you need the exact change?’

‘In that case, I’ll pay with my credit card,’ I replied, which remarkably caused another note to appear in his hand.

We swept into the restaurant on a wave of high expectation, bonhomie and air kissing and could not fault any aspect of our meal. When we’d finished, the change from our taxi ride came out of my jacket pocket and into the hand of the attentive waiter who’d unhesitatingly swapped out my rather indifferent red wine for something more robust at no extra cost, and the lovely young lady taking our payment summoned a cab to take us home.

Same company, different Indian driver, similar greeting. (I mention the race of the driver because it becomes relevant later, not because I am highlighting a stereotype, God forbid.)

‘Good evening, sir,’ he gushed. ‘That is a very magnificent restaurant, I hear. Important people come. You must be important.’

‘No, not important at all.’ I gave him the address of the high-rise enclave in which I live. After a minute or two in silence he couldn’t help himself.

‘Sir, they say that apartments in your building cost sixteen million dollars. You must be very wealthy I think. It is an honour.’

‘No, I am not very wealthy. Or famous. Or a relation of President Trump.’

Upon arrival he offered the opportunity once again to pay a lesser fare if I had cash. So another fifty-dollar bill came out of my billfold. This time I said I would like both the change and a receipt. The change, if a little slow, was forthcoming, but the receipt was not.

‘I’m very sorry, sir, but if I give you a receipt I will have to charge the full amount.’

Of course, he would. How silly of me. I put the thirty-dollar change in my top pocket and went inside. All in all a very pleasant evening, I concluded. On taking out my apartment key, however, I realised I didn’t have my cell phone. It is a moment that makes one realise how closely the bowels are connected to the brain; a moment of utter helplessness. The concierge on duty was a very nice Philippine who seemed most concerned about my heart condition. We called my phone unsuccessfully and then phoned the restaurant (they are very slow to answer during service time) and I asked the lovely young lady who’d processed my payment if she could please rush immediately to our table. Nothing had been found, she reported. I asked her to waylay the wine steward, the two waiters who’d served us, the maître d’. Nothing had been found. So I phoned the taxi company.

After ten minutes trying to get past the booking AI an option came up for “Lost and Found”. An Indian voice answered. I was very clear and direct. ‘I left my cell phone in your cab which collected me from Poncy’s Restaurant exactly twenty-five minutes ago. Can you please contact him immediately and ask him to come back to my address. I’m willing to pay if necessary.’

‘A lost phone.’ I could hear him typing. ‘I will add it to our items on Lost and Found and you should call back tomorrow after drivers finish their shifts and clean their vehicles.’

‘No, I want you please to contact the driver now. You’ll have a record of the booking and the car’s number so treat this as a request to have that car and driver come to pick me up urgently. I will pay.’

‘I see a request on screen for that pick-up address, but the booking was cancelled. No-one was picked up. I cannot speak directly to the driver, but I can leave a message.’

‘Just a minute,’ I protested. Then my anxiety began to turn to cold fear. Naturally the driver had registered his cash fare as having been cancelled, otherwise he would have had to account for the cash. ‘Am I speaking to a call centre?’ I asked. Yes, I was. Where was this call centre? It was in India. Of course he was unable to talk to the driver.

I sat down in a lobby chair and put my head in my hands. My banking apps, my payment apps, my emails, my contacts, calendar, WhatsApp and messages: this was as bad as losing a passport, credit cards and a child in Armenia. My phone had facial recognition, pin number passwords and two-factor identifications but how many times were they mandatory in order to gain access? A twelve-year-old kid could rob me clean in five minutes.

Images of an earlier time appeared before me when there were red telephone boxes on street corners, when we remembered phone numbers by heart, and we could borrow a penny or sixpenny coin and call home for help. There were even coppers in blue uniforms strolling around town waiting to help get us home. Now our lives are over as soon as we lose a cell phone.

The young concierge, who had been calling my number repeatedly without success, unexpectedly answered her phone. Her English is not perfect, and she held out the phone to me for help.

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘Um, Kevin.’

‘How can we help, Kevin?’ I looked down at the phone in my hand. The incoming call was from my own number.

‘Have I got your phone?’ Kevin asked hesitantly.

I leaped to my feet. Where was he? He was downtown. How did he get the phone? He found it in the street. I told him my address. Did he know where it was? He knew. Could he meet me there? Yeah, if I liked. I waited for the catch, but it didn’t come. How long, I asked politely, would it take for him to get there? Not long, he guessed; a couple of minutes.

I wanted to keep him talking so I could monitor his progress. Here was my lifeline and I was desperate not to let it go. But he ended the call and silence filled the funeral parlour that was our building’s foyer. How much was he going to ask for? How much would I be prepared to pay? Five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand?

I called again. He answered. ‘Hi Kevin. Where are you?’

‘Um, I’m outside.’

I rushed to the front doors and opened them. There was a black-clad figure in a hoody, slightly stooped, his face buried in darkness, his feet shuffling uncomfortably as if unused or unsure about standing still. He was dressed for a snowstorm, but it was a fine, mild night. I peered closer, searching for a face and found a grey-bearded one in early middle-age, slim and weathered but evasive, listening to a distant sound.

‘Kevin ...?’ He raised his eyes fleetingly and nodded. ‘Where did you find it, man?’

He pointed at the pavement. It was where our taxi had dropped us. ‘I didn’t know who owned it until someone called. Sorry. I pressed the green button, and it answered. I suppose that was you.’

‘You’re a good man, Kevin’ I said; ‘a very, very good man. I was worried. You’ve saved my life.’ I took the banknotes from my top pocket, reached for his right hand, and shook it nearly off as I transferred the money to him. He looked down at the notes curiously and then looked up at me and nodded, though where he looked was not directly at me but somewhere near my face as if he preferred me to be occluded.

‘Do you live around here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, sometimes, yeah.’

He turned and walked slowly away, not with any obvious intent of going anywhere, and I wondered why I felt so sad when I should have been elated.

So, if you see Kevin, please stop and say hello. Oh, and by the way, the cab fare to Ponsonby is usually sixteen dollars from Downtown.

A.I. Fabler

August 20, 2026

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I should explain that this metaphor occurred to me as I recalled having my tonsils removed when I was 13 years old. The nurse administering the ether told me to start counting aloud up to ten as she poured the ether onto my mask and once I’d got into the thirties, she had to call for another bottle. After I regained consciousness, she told me that my outburst of profanities as I finally surrendered consciousness was the loudest she’d ever heard, which I presumed at the time was what made my throat so sore.

The series of reveals relating to Jason Arday and his odyssey have felt very similar to that extended countdown towards anesthesia that I experienced as a teenager and the effect has taken some days to wear off. Jason’s odyssey, coincidentally, shares some similarities with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in so much as it is long and very woke. Nolan’s movie, however, is loosely based on Homer’s ancient mythic tale while Arday’s is based on the very modern drama known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It is a tale of the moral blackmail perpetrated by Progressive Intellectual Elites (PIFs) in which people who support merit and truth are forced out of institutions of higher learning by being falsely accused of racism, colonialism and white privilege in order to make room for black and minority persons of unaudited ability. It portrays the dystopian reality of education.

You can be forgiven for not being fully up to speed with the story of Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor whose radiant CV has lit up the media firmament, so here is just a fraction of what we have been drip fed over the last week as summarized by the wonderful David Josef Volodsko in his Radicalist Substack:

“In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. People at the time called him a diversity hire and said he only got the job because he was black. The responses to this were hostile ... History almost never allows it, but this once, everyone was right. Arday was, in the fullest sense of the term, a diversity hire... we now know that in less than three years at Cambridge, Arday has made a mockery of the institution and resigned last week in disgrace after becoming the single biggest story in the news cycle by lying so brazenly and so spectacularly that he makes even the likes of Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, and Jussie Smollett look like honest brokers.

“To begin, Arday wants you to know he’s not just disabled. He’s the most disabled. Diagnosed with autism at 3, he was mute until 11, illiterate until 18, partially deaf, epileptic after an attack, the survivor of a catastrophic teenage car crash that left him in a coma for months, on life support, with locked-in syndrome, as well as the survivor of a brain tumor that erased his memory two weeks before his PhD defense (but he just tried really hard and passed anyway), as well as a cancer survivor. In his free time, Arday likes to do charity work, and has personally raised millions for more than 70 or 80 charities, although apparently there’s a bookkeeping crisis in the nonprofit sector because none of those charities has heard of him. He also installed water pumps in Africa with WaterAid, except WaterAid says it doesn’t send volunteers abroad. He once appeared on the British documentary show Seven Up!, except that the show aired two decades before he was born...

“... But Arday’s greatest accomplishments are in academia. He received his master’s in psychodynamic practice, as well as his counselling license, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Although Birkbeck says it has no record of him going there. He was also a visiting professor at Ohio State. But the school says this is false. He wrote a book with Palgrave Macmillan. But Palgrave says the book project never got past the proposal stage. He attended Liverpool John Moores University — where, remember, he miraculously relearned his thesis in just two weeks following brain surgery — and got his doctorate degree in education. This bit seems to actually be true, but it’s worth noting that his thesis — An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research — is horseshit.”

That is but a small flavour of the porkies that this fabulist has told about himself while earning tenure at Britain’s preeminent educational institution. But first I need to explain that this story arrived at a time when I was at a low ebb, mourning the death of a true shining star last week in the form of Rod Liddle, the tireless banderillero who spent his life as a broadcaster and writer planting darts into the cant and pomposity of society’s mountebanks and frauds. Just as some people take an early morning cold water dip to freshen them up for the day, so have I opened The Spectator and The Telegraph for years in search of Rod’s latest satirical take-down of the news.

In recent times those of us who lament that reality now reads like satire are wont to complain that satire now inevitably reads like reality. Rod was never restrained by that fear; his approach was to present the divisive issues of today deconstructed by humor. In the process he showed no favours, left or right, black or white. While I’m quite sure that Rod wouldn’t have felt as maudlin about his own death as his friends are (‘We’re all going to the same place, my old mate!’) I’m certain he would have been pissed off at having missed the Arday odyssey.

That got me thinking. A friend of mine gave me a very posh leather-bound Caran d’Ache notebook that came with a Mont Blanc pen and has sat on my shelf unused and pristine because I have been afraid of making the first entry. What if I turned it into a diary of the sort of snippets that Rod was missing while he’s away? The Dalai Lama recently announced that he intended living to 130 and would then be reincarnated, so I see no reason why Rod couldn’t return with him and pick up where he left off.

It was with this thought in mind that I retrieved an article he’d written in The Spectator March 2024 titled How to Write a Modern Screenplay. In it he said, “If you are putting a black person in your film – and you must, you must, even if it is set in bloody Lapland – then he or she is obviously on the side of the angels, despite perhaps being treated with initial suspicion by the white supremacists who comprise the other characters”. It seemed to me to be the perfect template; prescient even.

So I immediately started drafting an outline for the script. Arday is to be played by Jussie Smollett, the great black actor famous for hiring two movie extras to attack him, and put a noose around his neck while shouting racial slurs including “This is MAGA country n---er”. His devoted mother is to be played by Claudine Gay, the first ever black Harvard president and DEI tsar who declared that the acceptability of calls for the genocide of Jews would “depend on the context”. If she was not available then British Labour MP Dianne Abbott could be approached.

The opening scene has Arday cradled in his mother’s arms as she whispers, “Oh, beautiful son, though you be autistic and unable to speak, see or walk, know that this is true and ordained by mysterious spirit gods, that you will one day run across Africa in a day, Australia in two days and America in three, despite having only one leg. And you will arrive at Cambridge University where the PIFs of that great academy will greet you as the most learned and the most wise in the ways of critical woke. But the journey will sometimes be beyond belief ...”

Rod’s Diary is filling fast so if you’ve got a few spare Caran d’Ache notebooks lying around I’d be keen to receive them.

A.I. Fabler

August 15, 2026

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You might think that that’s at least a good start. Now, if we could only get people to insert the word “all” into those beliefs we might be able to declare a ceasefire on many of the fronts where we are furiously fighting. It simply requires us to support all freedom of speech rights, and to deplore all hate speech.

If you’re a student of clichés, as I am, you’ll be familiar with the great free speech cliché: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”, falsely attributed to Voltaire. This is the whip with which free speech absolutists flagellate themselves. It is also the inscription written on the monument atop which the Free Speech Union has raised its flag.

I’m a supporter of the Free Speech Union for practical, ideological and temperamental reasons. The practical reasons are obvious: I’m a writer and don’t want restrictions placed on what I write. The ideological reasons reside in my belief that contradictory opinions are essential to the process of determining the truth of a matter. The temperamental reasons can be summed up by my declaration that “I’ll not remain silent as to truths or opinions in order for one person to avoid discomfort when faced with a truth or opinion they dislike”. That’s my excuse when people accuse me of being a rude bastard.

Last night I went to an event staged by the Free Speech Union to debate “Whether New Zealanders in public roles are still allowed political opinions”. The interviewee was Rob Campbell, currently the Chancellor of Auckland University of Technology where students are absolutely forbidden to speak freely if they want that piece of paper at graduation. The interviewer was Ani O’Brien, an FSU board member and columnist who, for reasons known only to herself, feels it essential to leaven every statement she makes with the gratuitous reminder that she is a lesbian. (Well, good for you Ani but what bloody difference does that make? Your battle is won.)

Mr Campbell’s phone number is in the contacts list of every lazy knee-jerk journalist wanting an opinion with an opposing view to an initiative floated by someone who is guilty of occasionally wearing a tie. So his voice is heard often. He’d studied economics as a youth but quickly became a loud trade unionist of the “all employers are bastards” variety whipping up the “them-and-us” fever that best pulls in union fees. Overflowing with opinions which required little effort to accurately predict, he made sure to express them forcefully enough to ensure they didn’t go unheard. This quality got his phone number into the contact lists of public service department heads also, for use whenever they needed someone to sit on a quango, enquiry committee or ministry board where someone was required who didn’t sound like a public servant but could be relied upon to advance the political objectives of public servants. It’s a skill that has seen him never out of work or out of the news, and has led to his being invited onto private sector boards also, where I imagine his bombastic style brings an exciting frisson to the table, particularly when HR discussions are on the agenda.

It was his experience working both sides of the fence, private sector as well as public sector, that made me keen to hear him address the loaded question posed by Miss O’Brien on behalf of the FSU and I brought along a question of my own.

We learned from the opening salvo that our Rob was a fierce defender of his rights to free speech and he thrust his chin at the audience to make sure we damn well got the message. As “independent” Chair of the Board of the Ministry of Health he’d just as staunchly defended the rights of others, too; a right that extended, for example, to nurses’ and doctors’ associations to expel members who expressed views politically unacceptable to the people who ran those associations and to bar them from employment. Hospital staff unions requiring members to distribute anti-government pre-election campaign leaflets to patients in their hospital beds were clear examples of free speech, and staff who did not want to do so simply did not understand democracy. As Rob pointed out, the most effective unions were those where democracy was most pronounced; that is, where the majority prevailed and dissent was silenced.

Though Ani relied throughout the night on the second half of the FSU mantra to defend “...your right to say it” there was no pushback, even when an audience member had the temerity to suggest that medical care should be dispensed equally on the basis of need, rather than by ethnic prioritising, and asked what Rob’s response would be. Rob rose momentarily from his chair, pointed at the questioner and replied that he would call him a foul person and, if he was close enough, punch him. I do like a person with strong opinions.

Eventually the entertainment returned to the theme for the evening, which is what interested me: are public sector employees allowed political opinions? Well, of course they are, Rob opined but, more importantly, they should act according to their beliefs. There was nothing more spineless in his book than people who acquiesced.

There went my evening. I had come to hear his views in respect to public versus private sector compliance expectations. As an example I would site the situation in a private sector corporation where the board wished to avail itself of fast-track legislation to obtain resource consent without the need to negotiate ransom money with Maori iwis for their approval that might take years. One executive director, however, holding strong views about the desirability of co-governance might express his opposition. Assuming his opposition was in the minority, two things would happen. Firstly, he would be allowed to explain his view and argue his case. Secondly, he would not be placed in charge of advancing the fast-track application on behalf of the company.

My question to Robbo was to be: “In the public service is it the view that freedom of action should follow from freedom of speech, permitting officials to not only express their opposition to government objectives but to work against them; or should they declare their conflicts of interest and step aside from decisions and advice as they would need to in the private sector?”

I anticipated having to flesh this out for the avoidance of doubt in the room, by stressing that the public sector in Wellington — as in Washington and Westminster — overwhelmingly votes for socialist policies and obstructs non-socialist governments. But our Burnham-like interviewee had already answered the question leaving no doubt at all in any of our minds. His answer would be a resounding “No. They should not step aside.” But he needed to impress on us that he was a staunch defender of free speech, in case anyone doubted it, and he knew better than anyone what that was.1

There was another reason I attended the meeting last night. An Auckland City councillor named Julie Fairey had campaigned against the event being held at a council owned venue, which she described as a “Proud Centre” and “a safe space for our queer community”. Her outrage was based on the fact that our Ani of the FSU had expressed her contempt for the transgender thugs who’d beaten up women in Albert Park who had assembled to discuss women’s rights. Julie Fairey (whose signature includes the immortal line “Transwomen are Women and Trans Rights are Human Rights”) described Ani as a transphobic bigot and called for supporters to picket the event and close it down. I waited until the end of proceedings and they failed to show, further spoiling my evening as I’d wanted to ask Councillor Fairey if she was a woman (she/her) and however she replied my supplementary question was going to be, “How do you know?”.

On reflection later that night I concluded that supporting free speech is a bit like encouraging defence spending. We’ll never win the war, but it makes us feel better for trying.

A.I. Fabler

July 30, 2026

My rising 3-year-old grandson is coming to stay next week, and I have a duty to show that I can see the world, at least partly, as he sees it. Which is that everything is greeted with high expectation, if not amazement, and with the shiny light of newness. Dinosaurs are hilarious and must be named accordingly; ice creams falling on the carpet have a magic ability to be replaced by new ones; and falling over while trying to kick a football is so funny that it needs to be repeated. Adults can occasionally respond in the same manner to these events, but usually it requires the assistance of alcohol or the primary psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant. The exception would be the Argentinian football team who believe that falling over while trying to kick a football requires that they be awarded a penalty.

Thus it is that I am observing the arrival of Manchester’s Andy Burnham to 10 Downing Street with the fresh, expectant eyes of a 3-year-old. Andy is a man of the people (as are we all, I suppose). To remind us of this fact he intends to eschew the wearing of suits and ties in favour of polo shirts, anoraks and sneakers whenever possible. This is pretty much what I wear on a windy, wet day in Spring also, so I have no trouble imagining Andy as my neighbour from across the street popping over on a Saturday night for a barbeque. “Come on in, Andy. No need to take your sneakers off. Help yourself to a beer and come and help me with the sausages. Do you prefer beef or pork?” I wouldn’t spoil the evening by asking about policies, or anything awkward and overtly political like that: Andy has read the nation’s room and knows perfectly well that policies are a real dampener.

He’s made watching television fun again, too. If you managed to catch his arrival speech outside Downing Street last weekend, you’ll know what I mean. “I will soon go through that door behind me,” he said, “and issue my first instruction: to end rough sleeping in our country.” Although rough sleepers mostly don’t have television sets it is to be hoped they were watching on their smart phones and have obeyed the instruction as asked, particularly in Manchester. I say Manchester because the last time he gave this instruction was when he was elected mayor in 2017, since when the number of rough sleepers in that city has doubled.

There was a lot to like in his speech last week. He promised to govern as “authentic Labour” on behalf of “ordinary working people”, which is encouraging for those of us who feel minorities need to be looked after, for there is no minority as deserving as working people in today’s United Kingdom.

He has also promised to split his time equally between London and Manchester, taking his own staff backwards and forwards each week and establishing a “Number 10 of the North”. “We’ll take the power back from Westminster and Whitehall and give it to the place where you live”, which raised jubilant cries of “Allahu Akbar” in the immigrant populations of Birmingham, Slough, Bradford and Cheetham. This shows great thoughtfulness towards Westminster and Whitehall people, too, who will be able to get on with the business of running the country without being constantly disturbed. Manchester is clearly the place where he feels most at home. After 8-years in office he left the city just £1.34 billion in debt which compares favourably with the £109 billion debt in which Keir Starmer left the country. So he owes a debt to Manchester, and Manchester owes a debt to the bankers.

But enough of all that. The United States had good news for us last week, thanks to Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. He’s announced that all combat troops are to be tested for their testosterone levels. High means in and Low means out. Liberal lads and ladies think this is going to result in oversexed marines wanting to fight everybody. God forbid! But there’s some good news that they’re missing. It means that men transitioning to women won’t have to go to Syria and face ISIS terrorists. They can go to Portland and fight with ICE officers instead, while women taking testosterone to transition to men can up their dosage and get sent to Damascus.

Look on the bright side, I say.

Last Sunday we saw two of the world’s biggest sporting events reach their climax. In the football World Cup Spain and Argentina faced off for a place in history. Spain play a beautiful, intelligent form of the game but for some reason the Argentinians thought they were fighting a war. It was as if they’d raided Pete Hegseth’s testosterone warehouse. Photos were published showing the players running around the field after finishing a game against England holding a banner that read Las Malvinas son Argentinas (The Falklands are Argentine). The last time they fought a war over this claim was 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was the British Prime Minister and the UK had airborne marines who knew how to fight and a navy that had a submarine big enough to sink an Argentine battleship, causing The Sun newspaper to triumphantly headline its front page “GOTCHA!”. Nowadays, of course, the UK doesn’t have an army or a navy and willingly gives away islands without even being asked, so there’s no need to be aggressive about it.

The second great sporting event last Sunday was the final day of the 2026 British Open golf championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club. The winner of the tournament is officially known by the title “The Champion Golfer of the Year”. The numbers who play golf worldwide is arguably as great as those who compete on football pitches. It is a game which is excruciatingly hard to play well. There are two opponents to overcome: the golf course and yourself. The last player to step up to the tee in the last round on the last day at Royal Birkdale faced a hole that hardly anyone had played in less than four shots. If this player made it in four, he would be tied for the championship and go into a sudden death play-off. If he shot it in three, he would win the greatest prize of his life; but there was a real risk that he’d end up with five or over and lose the championship. So, what did he do?

He turned to his caddie and said, “We’re going to take it on, and if I stuff up it’s on me.”

He then hit two of the most perfect shots ever played and walked onto the green facing an eleven-foot putt and surrounded by an enormous, hushed crowd. His adrenaline was pumping and his hands were shaking but he wasted no time, stepped up and hit it. The ball wound its way over the undulations of the green and dropped into the hole. The crowd roared and he raised his arms in triumph and relief.

That young man was a New Zealander, Ryan Fox, and millions back home raised their arms in triumph with him. His prize was $5.5m and a place in history, but his real triumph was having the courage to accept that being a true champion requires a willingness to risk it all.

That’s the bright side, and I hardly needed to go looking for it, thanks to Foxy. When my little 3-year-old arrives next week, I won’t go shopping with him for a football; I’ll see what’s the smallest size golf club we can find.

A.I. Fabler

July 26, 2026

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It seems that ill will and resentments are carried at differing levels by all of us and expressing them openly is inhibited by the desire to be seen as agreeable in social situations. How we express ourselves in private to partners or close friends is very different from how we express ourselves publicly — except for the afore mentioned political polls and social media, where there are no consequences.

The death of actor Sam Neill this week showed that benevolence and courtesy can be stronger assets than malevolence and discourtesy. It isn’t often that a person is so strongly remembered for those qualities that no one is tempted to go looking for any word or action from him that might even slightly undermine their view of him. I didn’t know the man myself, but I have never heard eulogies that focus so completely on the universal agreement that Sam was the most likable of men. Being a well-known actor was almost incidental it seems, though we all know how unpleasant many actors can be off-screen.

On the same day that he died a political poll was published in New Zealand that prompted me to consider this issue about the license polls provide for exposing resentments rather than support. With a general election just four months away we are going to be inflicted with multiple polls on a weekly basis, and they will be pored over by the media forensically until we scream silently to ourselves. I decided to get in early before the silent screaming becomes deafening.

I won’t be forensic in my analysis, or studiously unbiased, but I will, if you’ll let me, use the opportunity to explore this aspect of human nature.

The headline is that the governing centrist party, National, has 28.7% support and the opposition socialist party, Labour, has 34% support.

Labour is the party that subjected New Zealand to the world’s most repressive regime during the Covid-19 pandemic, destroying people’s lives, jobs, education and freedoms in the process and crippling the economy with debt. It also pushed legislation and public service policies towards the creation of co-governance with Maori, forcibly dividing the country. Its leader, Chris Hipkins, remains unable to define a woman, which prompted J.K. Rowling to remark, “In the interest of balance, someone should now ask women how they define Chris Hipkins”.

Labour has but one policy: it offers state support to as many voters as possible subject only to its ability to raise taxes and debt. This is its primary strength. Its secondary strength is that it does not lie about it.

National is the lead party in a coalition which includes both a left-of-centre and right-of-centre smaller party. In combination they represent a bell curve of conservatism with a dash of populism at one end, right wing conservatism at the other, and a preponderance of timid democratic socialism in the middle. The leader of the National Party, and current Prime Minister, is Christopher Luxon, who came to politics from a career as an executive and CEO in large corporations internationally. In the less than three years since this coalition has been in government its successes reflect the strengths of Luxon as a corporate manager and the failures reflect his weakness as a politician.

In addition to a raft of refinements to areas of existing legislation, the Coalition’s major successes include the hard-driving of significant trade treaties to successful completion; clearing (at least partly) obstacles to development and infrastructure consenting; restoring literacy and numeracy as education priorities with measured standards; focusing the police on youth crime reduction and gang visibility; and attempting to achieve modest targets for monetary policy reform, in tandem with a properly managed Reserve Bank. These are all objectives which no-one is embarrassed to support.

Its failures reflect the weaknesses of Luxon. He lacks political instinct and the need to have deep-seated beliefs, strong enough to overcome resistance from an entrenched left-wing bureaucracy. He and his party are also unaware that telling lies is a recognized political trait repeatedly overlooked by voters, but in telling lies it is unforgivable to show that you didn’t understand why they voted for you. That is why National sits at just 28.7% approval. People are expressing their resentment at being lied to in respect to promises they believe were made, or implied, about matters which they are hesitant to complain about openly.

It’s when I look at the reasons for resentment that I realize why it shows up in the polling. They relate to issues which people are inhibited from expressing openly because, by woke standards, they may be viewed as disagreeable.

Here are the issues that I believe the polls are reflecting while failing to identify them.

The Maori Issue:1

The promises included in the Coalition Agreements included:

• To uphold “the principles of liberal democracy, including equal citizenship, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and property rights, especially with respect to interpreting the Treaty of Waitangi.”

• To “Remove co-governance from the delivery of public services. Ensure government contracts are awarded based on value, without racial discrimination. Ensure all public service departments have their primary name in English, except for those specifically related to Māori.”

• To “not advance policies that seek to ascribe different rights and responsibilities to New Zealanders on the basis of their race or ancestry”.

• Remove co-governance from the delivery of public services.

• Restore the right to local referendum on the establishment or ongoing use of Māori wards, including requiring a referendum on any wards established without referendum at the next Local Body elections.

• Amend the Waitangi Tribunal legislation to refocus the scope, purpose, and nature of its inquiries back to the original intent of that legislation.

• Stop all work on He Puapua.

• Confirm that the Coalition Government does not recognise the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as having any binding legal effect on New Zealand. (He Puapua)

Not only have these goals not been implemented, but every day further evidence emerges that the bureaucracy has either ignored directions or reinserted co-governance and racial privilege into legislation without resistance from the Coalition government. The same is occurring at local government level.

To vociferously protest these failures invites charges of Racism from the Racebaiters on the left. Hence resentment is expressed only via the polls.

Bureaucracy:2

The Public Service bureaucracy can be dismissed as an incorrigible joke (à la Yes Minister) or a suffocating weight on people’s daily lives and their attempts at making progress. More sinisterly, government employees’ view of themselves is that they comprise the government, rather than the people who have opportunistically found their way into Parliament.

Most people have experience of the ‘suffocating weight’ version and responded positively to the Coalition’s promises at the hustings that they would reign in the sector, “Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service and of government-funded services ... reducing Core Crown expenditure as a proportion of the overall economy”.

Here’s the reality:

• In 2017 (the year the last Labour government was elected) the core ministerial Public Service employed 47,252 full time employees.

• By 2023 (the year the last Labour government was overturned by the Coalition) it had risen to 63,117 employees.

• In March 2026 (after 2.5 years of Coalition government) that portion of the Public Service employed 64,535 full time employees. An increase of 1,418 in their time in office and an increase of 17,283 (36.6%) since National was last in office in 2017.

• NZ’s nationwide government in 2025 was 477,400 employees (including 59,700 local government employees) representing 19.5% of the country’s workforce.

• The Public Sector’s weekly earnings now average $2,060 with average ordinary time hourly earnings of $52.45. The average mean annual base salary in 2025 was $103,300.

• Compare that to Private Sector weekly average earnings of $1,255 or $41.89 per hour. The Private Sector average mean annual base salary in 2025 was $85,700.

• Public Sector salaries rose 21.4% in the 5 years to 2025 compared to 14.5% for the Private Sector.

• These figures do not include higher superannuation and redundancy schemes in the Public Sector or allow for the fact that a significant proportion of the Public Sector is contractually not required to attend the office more than two days per week.

Cause for voter resentment? You bet!

But who wants to loudly insist that 17,000 central government employees be fired — “cast out onto the streets!” — and Public Sector wages be frozen? No-one. So, they make their resentment known secretly in the polls.

Climate and Energy

When New Zealanders see their energy costs rising by 10% or more annually, and large industrial employers closing down on account of the costs, they can look to Europe and the UK where the impact on households and the economy is even greater. What do those countries have in common with New Zealand? They adhere to the Paris Climate Accord and to a Net Zero carbon emission target for 2050.

The physical reminders are visible on any car trip out of town. Productive farmland has been planted out in thousands of hectares of untended pine trees ostensibly earning ‘carbon credits’. Producer companies unable to operate with Net Zero emissions are forced to buy those carbon credits, adding to their costs.

But hold on. Why does Mr Luxon proudly commit the country to those pipe dream policies when all the largest economies (and emitters) have rejected them as having an unacceptable impact on living standards as well as being practically unachievable? He claims our international standing could otherwise be harmed. We can’t have that.

Of course, a vocal rejection by voters would cause them to be branded as ‘climate deniers’. We can’t have that either. Another reason for hiding open resentment.

These are three examples of why Luxon is being punished. There are others, like the failure to give recognition through the Covid Enquiry to the damage done by Hipkins, Ardern and company, allowing the hearings to turn into a whitewash. And, of course, there is the ever-rising increase in the cost of living, not all of which is controllable by government, but a lot is.

Few commentators have dwelled on the third largest group in the latest political poll. They were the 17% who were ‘Don’t Knows’ and the 3% margin of error.

Whether those resentments I have listed are carried over from the polls to the polling booths depends on whether Luxon moves forcefully to deliver on the Coalition promises (unlikely) or relies on the 17% swinging on the day towards timid centrism rather than unabashed socialism.

There’s a lesson for all politicians here I believe — Luxon, Albanese, Trump, Macron and Starmer (may he R.I.P.!). Pick your lies carefully. Some matter, some don’t.

A.I. Fabler

July 19, 2026

That’s how I felt this week reading excerpts from the preliminary hearing into the case against the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t the content of the hearing itself that depressed me; it was the manner of the reporting by people intent on casting doubt on the nature of the killing and using the full powers of their language skills and media platforms to disparage the dead man and his family.

You might say that there is a simple solution to handling this style of so-called reportage; don’t read it or listen to it. But avoiding it in the first place is not easy, and treating it as being of no consequence leaves the field wide open for the crazed witlings to peddle their wares.

I saw Charlie Kirk on two occasions holding his Turning Point discussions with students on campus. Almost always the young people stepping up to the microphone in front of a supportive audience of left-leaning peers to state their views had steeled themselves in anticipation of being involved in a hostile argument. Without exception they stepped down from the microphone having felt fully heard and respected. His method was Socratic.

To say that Charlie was a conservative goes without saying. It also goes without saying that holding conversations with a massed assemblage of college students on their home territory could hardly be seen as preaching to the choir.

Having read some of his writing in Right Wing Revolution I can’t say that his ideas strike me as unusually insightful or even unusual. He had a good memory for facts and anecdotes to support his views, he was quick witted and articulate but, for the most part, he was an archetype of the God-Family-Nation conservative with old-fashioned values including courtesy and respect that stood out in one so young.

A lot of people who believe that the West needs to be protected from the ‘lethal ideology’ of wokeism claim that arguing against the left’s use of crude labels to silence discussion and invalidate contradictory views — think Racist, Nazi, Homophobic, Transphobic, Climate Denier, Sexist etcetera — merely plays into their hands because you are irredeemably all those things by not being one of Them.

Talking to racism Charlie wrote, “Cries of racism happen most of all when trying to make any kind of serious political change that threatens the domination of wokeness. Screaming ‘Racism’ is an all-purpose cudgel essential for the woke to both gain power and to keep it.” He went on to say, “Republicans never prove that they aren’t racist, because proving such a thing was never possible in the first place. The winning move against all this rhetorical sleight-of-hand? Recognise what it is, and more importantly, refuse to be manipulated. Instead, do the opposite. Show confidence and moral firmness.”

His comments to the charge of transphobia were similar. Essentially, don’t deny the charge because you are ordained to bear it unless you agree with transgenderism.

Essentially his advice was to put energy into acting not arguing which was, paradoxically, contrary to his successful approach to the campus Question and Answer debates in which he argued forcefully. I’m not sure I agree with him. I agree that the left has stolen emotive words in order to silence debate, but silence by conservatives is what has allowed the left to influence legislation and media bias without push-back.

The English conservative, Sir Roger Scrutton, put it like this: “The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”

Another story this week that has left me hesitating to express my thoughts when to do so would be so depressingly repetitive as to warrant my remaining silent is the revelation that diversity schemes in British universities, corporations and public bodies have effectively eliminated white working-class males from admission in favour of ‘minorities’. What could I possibly say about this that would be new and/or have any influence whatsoever?

Then I happened on a couple of demographic reports about the make-up of the world’s population. Who are the world’s ‘minorities’? Well it seems that Europeans/Caucasians are very much a global minority at 6% - 10% by most calculations: half that of Black Africans and one-tenth of Asians. The numbers can be argued, but I have no confidence that pointing this out would change the minds of advocates for DEI preferencing or diminish their belief in the power of ‘Racism’ as an effective ad hominem, but I wonder whether being silent, as Charlie advised, is necessarily the right course of action.

The left’s strategy for achieving moral and political ascendency has relied on dividing society into competing lots defined by group identities which are in turn defined by their minority statuses and presumed victimhood. The perceived enemy is the straight white male. Enlisting language as a weapon was the genius move that shut down resistance. But conservatives have refused to learn the lesson. Why?

Compare it to modern warfare. The Russians had tanks and fighter jets. The Ukrainians quickly learned the lesson and fought back with drones. Now every nation is building its armed resistance around drones.

So this week I decided to do the same. I’m starting to compile a lexicon of words to take the fight to the enemy. People who cry ‘Racism’ at every opportunity will now be identified as ‘Racebaiters’. No room will be left for wasted argument or cowered silence. I’ll say it loud and say it often.

And speaking to the brainsick males whose perverted desire to identify as women has led us to accept their claim to be ‘Transwomen’ (and to undermine the rights and identity of actual women in the process) I have a new and more appropriate term — which anyone with experience of neutering troublesome dogs will understand. Henceforth you will be acknowledged as ‘Transbitches’. Enjoy it.

As the A-to-Z pages of the lexicon stretch open invitingly before me my mind is humming with ideas for new weaponry, both defensive and offensive. If only Charlie were alive I’d love to discuss them with him.

A.I. Fabler

July 12, 2026

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Right now most First World people are focussed on the Cost of Living, Sport and Entertainment, and the impacts of Immigration. Ask them to pick from a pollster’s list and they’ll add Health, Crime, Education and Welfare because, of course, they know those things matter. (Sadly, Family is never included on the pollsters’ list of options.)

But newsmakers and social commentators are preoccupied with a very different list: Politics (never ending but always changing), Gender Identity, Racism, Illegal Migration — and Entertainment and Sport, of course. The newsmakers write about them in the present, and the commentators tend to analyse what brought them to their present state. Occasionally commentators, including politicians, try and predict their future direction, but very few go on to provide achievable solutions to issues of concern. And you can’t blame them.

This quotation partly explains why:

“The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred; at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing; whence the besotting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles; “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen”.”

So they conceal their real thoughts.

I’ll explain the identity of the politician who made this observation — and what happened to him — in a minute. Meanwhile, let me lay out the three most important issues of the time in First World countries as I see them, and dare to suggest how they will unfold.

1. The cost of living and family survival

Rises in household costs for wage earners and welfare recipients are remorseless and debilitating, threatening the morale and social stability of average families more than any other factor. Those costs rise in proportion to the growth in government.

Governments at all levels squander money without restraint or accountability and produce (as in GDP) nothing. Private enterprise (capitalism) sets prices according to what the customer is willing and able to pay and, subject to input costs, uses lower pricing to gain a competitive edge. Private enterprise goes out of business once the price reaches a level that the consumer is unable or unwilling to pay.

Bureaucracies, on the other hand, set prices solely on a cost-plus basis. Costs include waste, fraud, inefficiency, mandated employee remuneration increases, essential service monopolies, inflation (money supply and interest rates) and — the big one —taxation. Taxation is the bottomless gold mine that allows cost-plus charging to work and government to expand.

There is nothing in this formula which will ever allow incomes to grow faster than costs, thereby closing the gap. So how will politicians deal with it?

The options are already in train, and different Western countries are at different stages along the track. My prediction is that it will evolve like this:

i. Increase welfare until the money and resolve to work runs out (i.e. more Socialism, as in all Western Democracies now)

ii. Redistribute wealth and seize private assets (i.e. much more Socialism, as in Mandani’s New York Democratic Socialists)

iii. Place the entire economy in the State’s hands (Communism as in China, but ultimately under global control)

iv. Maintain totalitarian control until people can’t be suppressed any longer (If it failed under Stalin that’s just because it wasn’t done right!)

v. After the inevitable revolt and collapse into violence, start again, as so often in the past.

That’s what lies ahead. It tends to follow a 100 to 150 year timeline.

2. Transgender Activism: Playing at God being the ultimate mental delusion

When Mary Godwin (who married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) was 18 she spent a long gloomy weekend talking about ghosts, vampires, life and death with a group of other young impressionable students and poets. She recounts waking from a nightmarish dream the next day in which she envisioned a pale student kneeling beside a creature he had assembled and animated from stolen body parts in his laboratory. The nightmare became the plot for a novel named after the imaginary student, Victor Frankenstein.

Mary’s own life was characterised by feelings of abandonment, loss, grieving and guilt, and she was not emotionally stable. On the other hand she was not uniquely cursed with instability and might have grown out of it if she hadn’t hung out with Shelley and his poet mates like Lord Byron. The novel, Frankenstein, is a cautionary tale and a horror story about the evils of Playing at God.

Another story of the evils of Playing at God is the true story, more recent, of Dr Josef Mengele. He was the SS doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who selected prisoners, particularly children, for brutal medical “experiments” involving sterilization with chemicals, X-rays, or surgery; injecting them with experimental substances; and various organ removals and physical and mental tortures. None of his “experiments” were legitimate science but rather torture disguised as research, by a depraved and sick person for whom the victims were disposable.

From this account I think you can divine my opinion about Trans Activism and its supporters. Dare I suggest how this sickness will evolve and can it be cured?

The person who I quoted above also wrote: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Anyone who has lost a family member to a dystopian cult knows that waiting it out and standing firm (with love) eventually sees the madness pass. I can’t predict the timeline, but Trans Activism will eventually become a shameful memory.

3. The invasion and destruction of Western Democracies

If you have chosen not to regard the invasion of your First World country and the destruction of its national identity as a reality, let alone a problem, then you will either be ready with excuses for it, or you will see it as desirable. Among the excuses for accepting it is the belief that multiculturalism and eradication of national borders will result in One World in which everyone will be related and at peace, governed by a benign and informed government with wholly egalitarian instincts. Good luck with that one.

You may consider that mass immigration is karma, in the sense of retribution for past sins like colonialism, racism and the need for reparations. Hating yourself for the imagined sins of forebears is very fashionable. For it to work you need to have the ability to be unable to see the sins of those to whom you are surrendering the moral summit. You need to abjure their misogyny, racism, violence, and bloodlust for your death as being excusable compared to your own evil which is so deep that it cannot be forgiven!

I’ve recently heard people explaining the rising domination of sectarian politics in areas of North America, Europe, the UK and Australia as being due to the emancipation of Third World peoples. Phrased as “Third-Worldism”, this is a version of the anti-colonial explanation but with the additional caché that it has its source in more recent events in 20th Century Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, rather than relying on unverifiable events of centuries past.

Think of the Algerian fight for independence from France in the 1950s/60s; the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh by the British in 1947; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952; the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965; and, of course, the partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947. All those Third World peoples deserve to enjoy the rights and privileges of the First World countries who came and went from them, goes the storyline; so now let us into their countries.

The irony is that they’re already in and thousands more are arriving every day. Their allegiance is not to the country they fled to, however, it is to the culture and identity of the country they chose to leave. The identity and culture of the western democracies subsumed by these invasions has been altered for all time in the space of 60 years and we are left with two questions: was it foreseeable, and is it reversible?

The person I quoted above predicted in a 1968 speech that Britain’s non-white immigrant families would reach approximately 10% of the population by the year 2000. He was wrong. The percentage reached was approximately 15% and by 2025 it was 35%. These figures do not include the accumulation of adult second-generation individuals from decades of migration. The proportion of children under 18 with at least one immigrant parent is estimated at 28%.

His solution was to stop further immigration and encourage and support repatriation before it was too late. Unfortunately, that point has been reached; it is now too late. The West lacks the will to resist and is surrendering its heritage. That is my conclusion.

In that same speech in 1968 that politician predicted that the Race Relations Act tabled that year would have as its starting premise that only one race could be presumed guilty:

“But while to the immigrant entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country... On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament: a law, which cannot and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.”

For the calm and balanced exposition of the facts relating to the issue of British immigration, and for his prescient but understated projection of where it would lead, this shy and highly intelligent politician was dismissed from his cabinet position in the UK Government within 24 hours, pilloried and cancelled by the country’s media and elite, and his name could not be referenced in rational conversation for the next 40 years. To do so would to be accused of fascism and racism.

His name was Enoch Powell: politician, classical scholar, poet, soldier, and intellectually formidable opponent of the European Union, fascism, bureaucracy and restrictions on free speech.

Another quotation from that 1968 speech is: “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

It’s worthy of your reading.1

A.I. Fabler

June 2026

As far as we know, before about 1960 society dealt with the two afflictions without too much bother. The clever ones were sent to Academies of Science to ponder such questions as why an apple falls to the ground when it becomes detached from a tree, or why we don’t fall off the edge of the world when we sail to the horizon. The more effete ones were sent to Academies of Literature and the Arts where they whiled away their time learning to speak ancient Greek and composing odes to daffodils written in iambic pentameters (which, as we know, consist of five metric feet of alternating unstressed/stressed syllables).

The dumb ones were sent to muck out the stables or go man the trenches; both very valuable and necessary occupations.

The system worked. Most people existed in that vast middle ground where children are spawned, football is played and “common sense” is admired. The delineating lines separating off the very clever and the very dumb were not sufficiently clear, however, to stop some common sense people from falling asleep while trying to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake”, for example, in order to prove they were clever; or, even worse, to prevent them from being so dumb as to believe that clever people were superior (a myth put about by the administrators of the academies when they realized that there was money to be made if the vast mass of common sense people could be persuaded to pay fees to attend their “universities”).

It is perhaps forgotten by many that the period post-World War Two saw the greatest advance in prosperity and materialism the western world had ever experienced. Food, housing and jobs were plentiful and universities put it about that the best jobs would be given to those young people who had proven they could sit around for three or four years listening to someone explaining the meaning of “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake” and getting a certificate for doing so.

What a successful new industry that turned out to be! This week it was announced that the annual “sticker price” per student for attendance at 16 US universities has passed USD100,000. For the parents of these over-grown infants it must be particularly galling that the most likely occupation awaiting their graduate child is that of barista.

None of this is intended to suggest that clever people have been driven out from these great schools of learning. The evidence of their existence persists, and I’ve been fortunate enough to become familiar with the ideas of a number of them. Take the recently deceased Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University as an example. Since the 1970 Treaty of Rome and the many “Earth Days” and climate conferences that it spawned over ensuing decades Ehrlich has been much quoted by the media and politicians on account of his erudite predictions including that the 1980s would see a “Great Die-Off” killing 4 billion people (including 65 million Americans) caused by over-population and starvation. Oceans would be “dead as Lake Erie” in a decade, and the US would have water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980 with life expectancy dropping to 42-49 years.

Well, he certainly caught our attention, and some envy from other eminent professors at esteemed universities who quickly joined the game. No-one wanted to be left out. As you may know, Acid Rain had a brief moment and then there was some flip-flopping between a predicted Ice Age and Global Warming, with the latter winning out decisively with the encouragement of the United Nations and strings being attached to the government funding on which universities rely.

One of my favorites is Professor Hans Joachim Schellenhuber of The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s top climate advisor and in October 2013 he predicted there would be an ocean heat belch “that would shock-heat the first ten kilometers of our atmosphere — the layer that we live in and where weather occurs — by 36 degrees Celsius”. In June 2015 Pope Francis appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

I strongly believe it is a breach of etiquette to belittle someone’s religious beliefs so I won’t use these unfortunate predictions to undermine your convictions about Global Warning, just as I wouldn’t suggest to Scientologists that L. Ron Hubbard, their founder, is unlikely to be returning to earth on the next appearance of Halley’s Comet in July 2061. However, I will make the point that choosing Carbon Dioxide as the target for allegations of villainy shows that those universities really do contain some clever people.

The beauty of global warming is that the matter is not resolvable, or provable, in our lifetimes. You may believe that not eating meat, killing cows and bicycling to work will drop the world’s mean temperature by 4.4 degrees by 2099 but it is becoming an increasingly hard line to hold. What you can agree on, however, is that the more people there are, and the more they use energy to fuel their industries and lifestyles, the more carbon dioxide will be produced. So, drastically reducing one or the other will surely make the difference.

Another clever German, the economist Joseph Schumpeter, famously said that “Capitalism pays the people that strive to bring it down”, by which he meant the clever people at universities who almost without exception rely on being avowed anti-capitalists in order to gain attention. One of the better-known academic socialists, adored by the likes of the New York Times, is Thomas Piketty, the French professor from the Paris School of Economics and the London School of Economics who has caught our attention this month with the publication of the “Global Justice Report”. The joint product of 45 international “experts” and 250 academic researchers, this is the handbook for which we have been waiting, finally closing the circle on population, global warming and capitalism, the three greatest threats to mankind and therefore the three-cornered hat of socialism. (Author’s note: the three-cornered hat, formally known as a tricorne in Europe, is historically referred to as a cocked hat.)

Here are some highlights:

· Fast decarbonisation by freezing Gross Domestic Production (GDP) and ultimately reducing it by slashing consumption patterns, food habits and land use. A Net Zero advance in economic activity from today’s position, simultaneously ensuring Net Zero carbon emission.

· Redistributing wealth equally across all nations and peoples, which will stabilize and ultimately decrease population growth.

· A global socioeconomic system controlling material and monetary accounting.

· Establishment of a World Sovereign Fund and Global Justice Fund financed from the world’s capital stock, equivalent to 60% of the world’s GDP.

· Global wealth and income taxes including 20% for billionaires and rising to 90% at the very top.

· A new international order under the umbrella of the Global Justice Fund.

A trial of these ideas is already underway in the UK under the Net Zero policies of the Socialist Energy Minister, Ed Milliband, and it is already proving to be highly successful after just two years, with the UK’s economy advancing backwards at an ever-increasing rate.

Clever people always come up with clever ideas.

However, I don’t believe you need to be academically clever to find a solution to the world’s problems, you just need common sense and the support of the media and governing elite. This was demonstrated to me by a friend using a paper napkin in a lunchtime restaurant and the calculator app on an iPhone.

‘Do you realize,’ he asked, ‘that when we exhale, the carbon dioxide content of our breath has increased a hundredfold from when we inhaled? We take an average of 12 breaths per minute and 17,280 breaths per 24 hours with a total volume of 8,640,000 milliliters. Of which 4.5% is exhaled as carbon dioxide. Do the maths,’ he said, so I did.

Sure enough, in a year each one of us exhales 141,912 liters of carbon dioxide, which weighs 183.6 kilograms per 100,000 liters. Who would have thought?

By my friend’s calculation a population drop of three billion people would reduce the world’s carbon dioxide load by 781.65 million tons per annum, enough to allow us to start using fossil fuels again. Certainly, three billion people is a lot to eliminate from the global population ... but the benefits are plain to see. Personally, I’d start with everyone who has blue or purple hair and wears a nose ring. They can be found in droves on every university campus.

The problem with this common sense solution is that it wouldn’t have the support of the media and government elites. But Paul Ehrlich would have loved it.

A.I. Fabler

June 21, 2026

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Of all the exchanges we have with our fellow human beings nothing is so easily misunderstood as attempts at humour.

I had an appointment with my cardiologist this week. She is a very nice woman, about the same age as my daughter, and American.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘Oh, fine,’ I joked. ‘Apart from incontinence, dementia and an inability to walk in a straight line I’m a box of birds. But what can you expect after sepsis?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she replied. ‘I’ll schedule an appointment with our gerontologist. She can talk you through late life problems. She might even be able to see you this week.’

I took a deep breath and straightened the sleeves of my new linen jacket.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I answered, ‘but I’m rather busy this week, having my apartment redecorated: new furniture, new paintings, a completely new look. Then I’m off to Australia to catch up with my grandchildren before flying down south while the ski season is still in full flow.’

She looked at me in complete bafflement and then began typing in the case notes on her computer screen. I decided not to push the joke further in case she took it as a sign of early-onset madness. Instead I asked her how her parents were doing (New England Democrats I’d surmised) while the Straits of Hormuz were closed, and was she planning on joining them for President Trump’s 250-year celebrations.

It would be fair to say that this was rather tactless on my part. Whether it was the mention of the name Trump, or the invasion of her personal life by asking after her parents, it was clear that I had crossed an invisible line. Retreating from a failed attempt at humour is always difficult and I can’t profess to know how to do it.

I think it was Ricky Gervais who said that the minute you need to explain a joke it ceases to be funny. And the one I like most is from Charlie Chaplin who said that life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.

The upshot of my appointment with my cardiologist was that we agreed to meet again in six months’ time. All being well.

... and it isn’t as we imagine.

The person I imagine myself to be doesn’t exist and never will. He is over six feet tall, charming but reserved, moving languidly through life without ever expending energy on things that can’t be changed. Confident that he knows himself well, he is nevertheless genuinely interested in others, finding enough in the banality of their lives to conclude that it is the sum of all people that reveals the meaning of life.

Yes, this self-confidence may make him appear arrogant, but hypocrisy is a greater sin. Besides, he affects a self-deprecating sense of humour that is capable of disarming hostility from others when needed. Ambitious? Competitive? Not particularly. The only opponent he recognises is himself and his fatalistic tendency to view the world as a faintly laughable, pre-ordained cosmic joke.

I don’t know why I choose to imagine myself this way because the person I imagine is an insufferable, arrogant prick. Perhaps there is something in all of us that would like to be able to get away with that — being an insufferable, arrogant prick — because it would be so liberating. Instead, we expend all our energy trying to pretend we are not the person we secretly imagine ourselves to be.

My God, it’s hard work.

Sometimes the sourdough fails to rise.

Our memories are extraordinary things when they choose to be. I was thinking this the other day when I suddenly recalled what life was like pre-Wegovy.

Do you remember? For years we tortured ourselves masochistically with diets that didn’t work. The one I hated the most (apart from Paleo) was the BBB Diet in which we had to ensure that not one morsel of Bread, Beer or Botatoes passed our lips.

Such is the power of societal shaming that we never acknowledged that those three things had been humankind’s staples for centuries. In fact they pre-dated obesity by three or four millennia. Once the fashion for consuming them again replaced the fashion for avoiding them, we began to be swamped by boutique breweries, farmers’ markets and artisan bread makers. Celebrity bakers, brewers and organic farmers pushed celebrity winemakers and chefs into (for them) an uncomfortable state of irrelevance.

But within any new fashion there is always one star that rises above all others. The bread making star is, of course, sourdough. People will drive for miles through heavy traffic to secure their favoured loaf before it sells out each day. I am particularly fortunate because I have a celebrity baker within walking distance. I’ll avoid naming him/her/they so that I can speak frankly about the speed with which $8 loaves became $10 and $12 without blinking.

I should reveal that up until now I had nothing to contribute to conversations about sourdough but owing to an event two or three weeks ago I am now overflowing with little tidbits, as you will see. It began one Saturday morning when I made my way to the bakery shortly after 8:00 am. As I walked in I was assailed by the yeasty aromas of freshly baked loaves being shovelled onto their wooden racks straight from the oven. I ordered my usual Pioneer loaf and asked that it be sliced, as usual. Half those slices would go into the freezer, and half would sit on the kitchen bench to be consumed with duck liver paté or Gorgonzola over the next few days.

While waiting for my loaf I consumed a pain au raisin. Then I became aware of a kerfuffle at the slicing machine. The young person serving me approached with an embarrassed, not to say crestfallen face.

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ she pleaded, ‘but the bread is so fresh — and soft — that when the slicing machine grips it the loaf is flattened out of shape. Would you consider taking it unsliced?’

I suppose I could have suggested that I come back in an hour or two when the crust had firmed up sufficiently, but I had a paternal sympathy for her embarrassment and told her that I would happily slice it myself in good time. Early that afternoon I took out my breadknife and made a start. It was surprisingly difficult to get a slice of even thickness. The task was harder than I ever imagined. Then I recalled overhearing a sourdough conversation in which someone said, ‘Oh yes, you must always use a breadknife with a very strong handle and broad serrations.’

Luckily I have a specialist kitchenware shop, also within walking distance, and when I asked for a sourdough breadknife the owner knew exactly what I needed. It wasn’t easy getting it just right, but I finished the task and bagged up my freezer supply despite the slices being at least twice the size of the desirable thickness.

Then I looked at the fresh slices lying on my breadboard and thought, ‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’ I knew the signs of a good sourdough were the holes formed in the inner loaf due to the fermentation that takes place inside the dough, but it appeared to me that the bread I’d bought was at least 50% air. Perhaps it was the mood I was in after my exertions, but I gathered up my slices and marched down to the bakery to complain. When I got there my resolve collapsed.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ the nice young salesperson asked.

“Yes, I was wondering if you could tell me what is the best time to buy a fresh loaf so it’s able to go through the slicing machine.’

‘Around 10:30 to 11:00,’ she replied. ‘Providing we haven’t sold out.’

If only she hadn’t said that last bit.

‘Damnit,’ I said to myself, ‘surely it can’t be too hard to bake my own.’

I won’t bore you with the details concerning the next few days except to say that 20 hours sourcing supplies; waiting days for starters to ferment and dough to proof; mistiming the oven temperature; cleaning up the mess; and finally getting a solid brick of indigestible, unsliceable foreign matter at the end of it, makes $12 for an artisan loaf from the local shop seem remarkably cheap. My only consolation is that I can now contribute volumes to sourdough conversations, even with strangers.

Now, finally, I would just like to say a brief word about making homemade pasta.

If you are tempted to buy one of those fancy Italian pasta-making machines by all means do so, but please follow this advice. At the end of your horror two weeks place the machine out on your kitchen bench in clear view for when guests arrive. As soon as a guest cries delightedly that you’re so lucky and how envious they are, keep your reply brief.

Say, “It’s yours.”

A.I. Fabler

June 13, 2026

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That’s the problem that economists face — human behaviour — but I’m yet to meet one who’s honest enough to say, “I don’t know”. That would be the end of conversation.

Last week I wandered out of my zone and asked, in respect to the rise in national and private debt worldwide, “Who is the lender, and why is the debt allowed to inexplicably rise without being called in?”

My mistake was in assuming that I’d find the answer at the likes of the IMF, the World Bank or even those AIs who must have scraped every word written on the subject in the last hundred years. Their explanations suggested they were laughing at me. “Wrong question, sunshine,” is what they should have replied.

This rather reminds me of the first time I went looking for an explanation of quantum physics. The answer I was given was that Max Planck, a physicist, got stuck on a problem around 120 years ago about the nature of radiation. In order to proceed he decided to create a mathematical trick to explain the inexplicable, claiming that radiation came in the form of packets of quanta of a certain size. Quantum physicists have been using the same trick for 125 years to explain things like determinism. There is a well-worn trick that hucksters like me use to give themselves credibility, which is to quote others whose reputations have been well established. Let me, therefore, quote Stephen Hawking: “Although quantum mechanics has been around for seventy years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated by those who use it to do calculations.”

Precisely! And so it is with economics.

If I started recounting all the facts I’ve gleaned regarding government and private debt, its horrendous size and the identity of the people who issue it (and how and why) you would likely stop reading and turn your attention to today’s memes on your cell phone instead. Truth is, we’ve built a wall in our brains to protect ourselves from this subject. “What,” you might proclaim, “are you telling me that the money I borrow from the bank at great cost didn’t exist until I asked for it?” Or maybe, “Are you saying that the nations who owe most to the IMF and World Bank are the nations who own the IMF and World Bank? Is that why they never have to pay it back?”

Yes, I am. But that’s just a small part of the answer, and we don’t know what to do about it or where it’s all heading.

So I posed the question to Donald Melville Smythe, an outcast economist and self-confessed sceptic of orthodox financial theory writing in The Financial Times in April 2039¹. He allowed me to quote freely.

‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘an economist’s job was to analyze and comment on the financial management of a country and its resources. Little by little, the complexity of that subject grew, until practitioners like me began to realize that the moving parts were so varied, the hidden parts so uncertain, no one should pretend to have the answers about what brought us to our current position or where we are headed.

‘After such an admission on my part, you would be entitled to wonder why I don’t just finish this article here and now. We are in the throes of the greatest disruption to society since the three revolutions of the twentieth century; do you really want to hear from an economist? Probably not … except that the people implementing this disruption claim that the “Moment has come to repair the damage caused by the collapse of the world economy”—and the world economy is what I’ve been talking about for half my life.

‘So, at the risk of being a jackass, I’m going to do it one more time.

‘Where to start? Well, the economy is based on money, so that’s where I’ll start.

‘Money had its origins in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and India in the form of clay tokens, allowing people to overcome the limitations of barter. In local marketplaces, they were a simple solution to an obvious problem. Then metal coins were introduced, representing a given value of staple commodities that could be exchanged. But ultimately, the further that money became dissociated from a given commodity, the more its value and status came to rely upon a consensus agreement by the people of the society in which it circulated. This is a key point, as we shall see.

‘Gradually, money began to be used to facilitate trading with people in other countries also. At this point, the value ascribed to the money by the issuing country had to be trusted by the recipient, as did the ability of the issuing country to honor it.

‘Now, this raises two obvious questions: who determined the value of a coin, and who manufactured and issued the coins?

‘Enter gold and silver. From the earliest times, these two metals were judged to be valuable, and that value was relatively easy to assess on the basis of weight and purity. So, sovereign states started minting coins made from these two precious metals. (Sovereign states are called that because someone—a sovereign or a governing body — rules over them.)

‘So, gold and silver coins had an easily calculable value—that is, until a sovereign started fiddling with the system by cutting back on the amount of precious metal in the coins and asserting that they had a “face value” rather than an intrinsic value. This was an unsubtle way of introducing a tax in favor of the sovereign, at the expense of the people holding the currency—i.e., the tax was the difference between the face value of the currency and the cost of producing and distributing it.

‘But what was “face value”? Well, ostensibly, it was the value of the actual gold or silver that would be received if you marched up to the sovereign’s place of business, presented your coin, and asked for payment. Of course, not many people had the balls to do this—or even thought to question whether the sovereign might be issuing a lot more coins than could ever be redeemed with the gold and silver he kept in the palace vault. However, to the merchants whose ships were sailing the world, filling their holds with exotic spices, silks, and slaves for sale to traders in other nations, this monetary system was too obviously flawed. What they wanted was a face value they could trust—and they found it in the London Goldsmiths. These trusted gentlemen accepted deposits of bullion from merchants for safekeeping and gave them certificates (promissory notes) in return. The certificates were then used as currency to make purchases. This was the start of banking, and the forerunner of the “gold standard”.

‘Pretty soon, history repeated itself: the London Goldsmiths started printing more certificates than they actually held in gold, and they “lent” these to borrowers in return for earning interest. As long as the people trusted the Goldsmiths’ integrity—and the depositors didn’t want all their bullion back at once—everything was fine. In essence, they had invented fractional-reserve banking (see below), and it wasn’t long before other people got in on the act, calling themselves “banks” and issuing banknotes as legal tender.

‘Well, the sovereigns didn’t like this at all; they quickly decided that the issuing of banknotes by private commercial banks had to stop. They believed that only banks controlled by the governing powers should have the right to issue money, and so they established their own “federal” banks for this purpose, run by the rich cronies on whose patronage they relied. The currencies they issued were representative money, supposedly backed by gold and silver held by the federal reserves.

‘Things went along fine for as long as the gold and silver reserves could be counted. But when one or two nations started printing more money than could be accounted for by the value of their bullion reserves, and other nations began insisting on swapping that money for gold as promised, things got a bit fractious.

‘In 1971, President Richard Nixon decided to remove the gold-backed guarantee from the US dollar. Apart from the fact that he was rapidly running out of gold at that time, he realized that the system constrained him from printing money whenever he felt the need.

‘Now, why would he feel the need? Well, printing money is how you pay for wars and government contracts, as well as the insatiable demands of big business and voters, who allow you to retain power … not to mention bailing out the commercial banks and financial institutions who have engaged in their own form of phantom money creation, and whose failure could tip over the financial markets unless the government comes to their aid. In addition, printing more money permits you to devalue all currency already in circulation, which inflates the price of assets, deflates the cost of debt, and is a far more effective way of taxing people than going after their wages. It is the government’s favorite form of theft, for it ultimately benefits the rich on whose patronage government relies.

‘But if money is no longer backed by gold, what is it actually worth? The US government says the dollar is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the US government. Other nations’ governments take a similar view. It’s akin to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re good for it.” But once a country is judged to no longer be “good for it,” lenders move in and take its assets. It happens to weak countries quite frequently. Who are these lenders? They’re the major international banks, investment funds, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—the latter two being syndicates formed by the leading trading nations, who are, by their own accounts, “good for it.”

‘So, what makes a country “good for it”? Put simply, it is the strength of its gross domestic product (GDP)—essentially, the wealth it creates—and the size of its debt relative to that GDP. Years ago, it was considered very dangerous for debt to exceed fifty percent of GDP. But then governments got the idea that they could go on printing money to solve all their problems and issue bonds that they would one day buy back, cancelling the debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio subsequently rose to one hundred percent, then to one hundred fifty percent, and finally now in 2039 to four hundred percent. That means that in today’s economy, it would take every dollar earned by everyone for four years just to pay off our debt. No money left for wages, food, utilities, military—nothing.

‘Well, of course that’s impossible; society would collapse.

‘Meanwhile, globalization, AI and automation have eliminated jobs and severely depressed wages, while costs have increased, asset prices have inflated, and health and retirement funding has dried up.

‘But these conditions aren’t unique just to our country; all the others are experiencing it, too. Surely, you ask, someone must have seen it coming?

‘Sure thing. We’ve seen it coming for years. We’ve been stuck in a tunnel with the freight train of recession and economic collapse bearing down on us full throttle. Dare I suggest that we jackass economists have been frantically pointing it out to anyone who would listen? But the Federal Reserve assured us that they had it in hand. By which they meant there was always the option of printing more money.

‘This is where we see the flaw in the system revealed. You see, money doesn’t resolve the problem of debt: money causes the problem of debt. And the clue lies in the “Fractional-Reserve Banking” game that I mentioned above.

‘Here’s how it works:

‘Banks don’t need a dollar of deposits or equity for every dollar they lend. Regulators allow them to hold only a fraction of their obligations as reserves or capital and lend out the rest. When a bank approves a $500,000 mortgage, it doesn’t move existing money — it creates new money by simultaneously:

§ Crediting the borrower’s account with $500,000 (a liability for the bank)

§ Recording a $500,000 mortgage on its books (an asset for the bank)

§ Banks can then package those mortgages into securities (MBS) and sell them off their balance sheet. This frees up capital to write more mortgages, effectively recycling the same equity multiple times.

‘See? The money doesn’t even exist, only the debt does. Clever, huh?

‘Now, one way of reducing the debt ratio is to increase GDP. Increasing government deficits was supposed to provide money for infrastructure and productive spending, thus raising GDP. It didn’t. Lowering the interest rates was supposed to stimulate consumer and business spending. It didn’t. Ever more desperate, governments introduced negative interest rates, so they could skim money off those who insisted on saving it. Cash was eliminated so that no one could hide it. Every digital transaction became visible; transaction taxes quickly followed.

‘It wasn’t enough. Perhaps it never was intended to be enough.

‘What is needed is a big bang solution, the World Government has finally said—and that solution is to CANCEL ALL DEBTS. Capitalism doesn’t work, they say, so it’s time to overthrow it. In reality, it’s just an old-fashioned JUBILEE, straight out of the Bible. You’ll find it in Leviticus, Isiah and Deuteronomy: “Every creditor must cancel debts owed ... there need be no poor people among you”.

‘Sound good? For most people, this is an easy sell: just wipe out all debts and start again. The assets stay with the lender, but the borrower is no longer in debt. Stocks and shares and private businesses of all sizes may be wiped out, but a new and more equitable system will take its place, with a Universal Basic Income for all. Everyone will finally be equal. Now, what could be more popular than that?

‘But, of course, there will never be a day when everyone is equal—not as long as we remain human. There will be no universal basic income needed by the elites in government who are creating this system, nor for the super-rich who are their sponsors. Wealth will continue to reward cronyism, self-interest, corruption, and barefaced theft with the same ingenuity it has displayed for millennia. If the worldwide pandemic of the 2020s taught us anything, it is that big business runs the world. Governments and bureaucracy are but its servants. And the poor proletariat, the victims of this great fraud, believing themselves to be unshackled at last from the fear of poverty and failure, will find themselves trapped in dependency, a vast underclass of serfs. What will the government do then to keep the lid on them?

‘Next week, I will tell you why I predict that the government sector will swell to become seventy percent or more of the economy, while unemployment will become a lifetime condition for half the adult population within ten years. I will show you how governments shrink wealth, not grow it—and how poverty, discrimination, and sedentary malaise will ultimately destroy the spirit of society. I will explain how creating deliberate divisions between people on the basis of competing identities consumes their energy and distracts them from the true cause of their dissatisfactions, suppressing rebellion against those in control of the deep state. Until then…’

Unfortunately, this article led to Smythe’s arrest and banishment to a Federal Re-Education Camp from which he is yet to emerge.

A.I. Fabler

June 7, 2026

From period pieces to contemporary action pics and predictably woke lessons on the moral superiority of racial and sexual minorities, the selection criteria for the festival organisers seems to be to provide something for everyone. Every leading actor appears to have won a César Award, and every film is either an Official or Audience Selection at Cannes, Venice or Toronto, but neither these things, nor glowing critical reviews, are protection against the feeling that taking potluck is the only method for choosing what to see.

The audiences are sparse and the demographic is definitely not hipster. Who is able to go to the movies at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning or 1:45 on a Monday afternoon? My impression is that (apart from me) it is overwhelmingly widowed or divorced women who remember their trip to Paris forty years ago as being the time when a charming stranger told them how alike they looked to Grace Kelly (or was it Audrey Hepburn?).

Of course, young people are not the slightest bit interested in foreign language films because the sub-titles are too hard to read on iPhones. Sub-titles are a bug bear of mine also. If you have even a fragile grip on the language, let alone fluency, it is almost impossible to stop yourself from reading the damn things and missing out completely on the nuances of what is being said.

It’s the same no matter what language is spoken in the original. I went to a Hollywood Western one day long ago in Paris, killing time. It was to be an action-packed affair that opened with John Wayne riding into town and being confronted on the steps of the saloon by a threatening sheriff. They glared at each other for a long, tense moment before John Wayne said “Howdy”. Up popped the sub-title in French saying “Bonjour monsieur. Comment ça va?” As I fought to control my giggles, the tension of the moment was lost.

The whole point of sitting in the dark in front of an enormous screen while surrounded by 100 decibels of sound is to immerse yourself in another world. Accepting that world as being in any way real is a voluntary process because it never is. Other than in the rare documentary, it is practically and creatively impossible for it to be real. There are times when its pretense at reality fails so obviously that my mind wanders down strange paths, and I find myself returning to the plot minutes after having missed the critical reveal.

Par example, I was watching a Belle Epoque drama the other day; 1890s, fabulous costumes, flamboyant manners, and arrogant entitled men in top hats dismounting from horse drawn carriages. ‘Hold on a sec,' I thought; ‘there’s something wrong with this scene.’ Then I recalled that before automobiles became widespread at the turn of the twentieth century, there were around 300,000 horses on the streets of London disgorging 1,000 tons of manure per day. In New York (much smaller) there were 200,000 at its peak, each producing 35 pounds of manure and 2 gallons of urine per day.

The movie showed cobble-stoned, paved roads with not a single drop of shit on them. In reality nearly all roads were bare earth at the time, and in wet weather manure mixed with dirt and urine to create “manure rivers”. In dry weather they created a choking dust that coated buildings, clothes and lungs. New York had an official Superintendent of Scavengers who paid a pittance to young boy sweepers to clear paths for pedestrians (hence ‘footpaths’). Vacant lots were turned into manure piles 40 to 60 feet high and London barges carried hay into the city, and manure back to the farms, until farms couldn’t handle the volumes.

Every city block had a shoeshine stand on the corner, and every house had a boot rack at the front door. Both sexes splashed perfume over themselves liberally to mask the stench.

Eventually the problem was solved, not by city officials, but by the invention of the internal combustion engine. The stables out the back of bourgeois houses were turned into bijou townhouses for the likes of Emma Thomson and Hugh Grant to conduct unreal stories of late twentieth century romance.

I have to admit that movies release a tendency in me that I struggle to restrain in daily life: I wallow secretly in the joy of being an acerbic critic. ‘That doesn’t work,’ I’ll tell myself. ‘Why didn’t they ask me? If I can see it clearly, why can’t the bloody screenwriter and director see it?’ So when I went to the French movie Cycle of Time the other night it didn’t stand a chance.

Described as a “time travel subversive comedy, seeing the present though the eyes of two characters from a bygone era” the creators had the bright idea of catapulting a conventional 1958 couple into 2025, allegedly to explore (or expose?) the radical changes in societal roles and technology. It’s a theme that Jaques Tati (Mon Oncle) could have made into a classic. Even Benny Hill would have done it well, if he could have brought himself to stop winking at the camera all the time. Also Steve Martin, and certainly Peter Sellers. It was not a theme that the team who made Cycle of Time were equipped to handle.

Leaving aside the mistaken belief that slapstick equates to comedy, the creators got the story the wrong way round. It is not the present that is cause for satirical evaluation, it is the past. Take a young family from 2025 and dump them into 1958, without cell phones, internet, fast food, contraceptive pills and Instagram and they’d collapse into catatonic shock. For those of us who remember, 1958 was conducted entirely in black and white. They didn’t show that in their movie. ‘If only they’d asked me,’ I thought.

But then came a scene that made me sit up as if a hospital bed alarm had gone off. The wife came home (in 2025) giddy with excitement and clutching an arms-full of high-end shopping bags. The husband looked shocked and bemused as she pulled out a little blue plastic card from her bag and held it triumphantly aloft. Let me tell it to you in the form of a sub-title: “It’s extraordinary. You just put it into a machine and money comes out”.

Off went my critical mind again. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘money doesn’t come out anymore; that’s the problem. They’re doing away with money faster than we all realise. What comes out is debt.’ The mid-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith posited that one third of the world’s money doesn’t exist. I’ve thought about this often as today’s economic commentators, media and politicians warn of the Armageddon that lies in wait for us as our national debts rise ever higher and higher.

I suspect that Galbraith was only partly right. The figure is much higher, and I believe that debt and money are now not even the same thing. How else could it be that the average US household owes $602,200 in government and private debt, with an annual interest bill of $17,500? In the UK the average household debt in US dollar terms is $331,000, with an annual interest cost of $11,500. In Australia the figures are $348,300 and $12,500 p.a. interest; and in New Zealand $383,500 and $11,800 p.a.. Compare those figures to the annual household incomes.

The obvious question is: Who is the lender, and why is the debt allowed to inexplicably rise without being called in? Thanks to that scene in the Cycle of Time involving the little blue credit card, I’ve decided to spend the week trying to find out, in between catching a French movie or two.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

A.I. Fabler

30 May 2026