For the longest time I've kept a notebook with business ideas in it. Most are complete nonsense, others get promoted to the lofty rank of “business plan” yet go no further. They march, chest out, straight from vaguely plausible scribble to failed start-up, without ever troubling the world with pesky details like customers, profit, or taxation. Others never see the light of day at all. They remain in the notebook, fermenting quietly like an under-ambitious cheese.

I was flicking through it the other day and came across an idea I still think is properly banging, except for one tiny flaw: it fails on capital. It needs a shop. An actual, physical shop. And it would cost a small fortune to stock, because the whole concept revolves around imported inventory. You can’t run it as a pop-up on Etsy because the purchase is, in a weird way, location-dependant.

Anyway, I present it to you here. Run it up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes. If you want to pick it up and sprint off with it, it’s all yours. I gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu. (Which are currently out of stock, but I can offer you a charmingly wrong substitute from Helsinki.)

The business is called: Anywhere But Here

A souvenir shop in your city that sells souvenirs for every tourist destination in the world except the one you’re standing in.

So for example, if you’re in Madrid, you can buy:

• Arc de Triomphe paperweights
• Moscow fridge magnets
• a “Greetings from Singapore” tea towel
• a miniature Statue of Liberty (that looks faintly embarrassed to be abroad at the moment)
• A fluffy kangaroo in an I ❤️ Sydney T-shirt

…but absolutely nothing Spanish. Not a flamenco doll. Not a bull. Not a “Madrid” keyring. Not even a postcard of a breakfast churro. If you ask, the staff look at you with the polite concern reserved for people who’ve tried to pay with a Blockbuster video card.

“Spain?” they say. “Is that near Belgium?”

The Mission Statement (printed in tasteful italics on the wall)

We believe travel is about disappointment, confusion, and buying objects you do not need.
We specialise in the disappointment and confusion, and we’re open seven days a week.

The Branding

The shopfront is beautiful. Warm lighting. Tasteful shelves. A little bell on the door. Everything says curated. A place for discerning travellers.

The sign says:

ANYWHERE BUT HERE Souvenirs for places you’re not in

Inside, a big world map with pins everywhere except your country, which is just… blank. A tasteful void. A cartographic snub.

How It Works

You walk in. You’re a tourist. You’ve got that “I’ve just paid €4.60 for a coffee” glaze in your eyes. You want something to take home. Something that says I was here.

We give you the opposite.

The categories are:

1) The Wrong City Wall

A whole display dedicated to the nearest famous landmark you are not visiting.

So for example, in Madrid you would see:

• Paris: Eiffel Tower keyrings, Arc de Triomphe paperweights, “I ❤️ Paris” berets (made in a factory in a country that has never heard of Paris).
• Rome: Colosseum snow globes (no snow, just small bits of dust that may or may not be historical).
• London: “Mind the Gap” mugs, tiny red buses, a Queen’s Guard figurine that looks like it’s been through a long day.

If you point out you’re not in those cities, the assistant nods sympathetically, as if you’ve just told them about a long illness.

2) The Deep Cut Shelf

This is where you earn your keep as a retailer of nonsense.

• “Greetings from Reykjavík” oven mitts
• Ulaanbaatar shot glasses
• A hand-carved wooden moose from “somewhere in Canada, probably”
• “I Survived The Hague” t-shirts (nobody survives The Hague, they simply endure it)

3) The Confusion Range

Souvenirs that are wrong in more than one way.

• A Stonehenge dinosaur diorama
• A Dubai rain poncho
• A Venice beach towel
• A Sahara lighthouse ornament
• “Welcome to Edinburgh” flip-flops

A customer will stare at these items like they’ve just seen a dog solve a Rubik cube.

4) The Ethical Luxury Corner

For people who want meaning, but also want it to be inconvenient.

• a recycled-glass ornament shaped like Mount Fuji
• artisanal “authentic” New York subway tokens (made yesterday)
• a candle called Eau de Glacier that smells like expensive melancholy

5) The Kids Section: “Where Are We?”

Little plush toys and sticker books, all themed around places you are not.

• Furry Aardvarks in a city where the only wildlife is pigeons with opinions
• a sticker sheet titled “My Trip to Antarctica”
• a cuddly toy gnu (sold out, again, obviously)

Staff Policy

This is the important bit. The shop only works if the staff commit.

Rules:

1. If a customer asks for a souvenir of your city, you act genuinely confused.
2. If they insist, you offer them something nearby but wrong.
   • “Madrid? We’ve got Marseille?”
3. If they start getting angry, you guide them gently toward the Customer Support Penguin, a life-size cardboard penguin wearing a lanyard that says “I’m Listening.”

If someone demands to speak to the manager, the manager appears wearing a Clown costume and says, “We don’t carry local.”

The Loyalty Scheme

The Frequent Disappointer Card
Collect stamps. Redeem for rewards available only in:

• countries you have never visited
• cities you cannot pronounce
• places that may be fictional

After ten stamps you qualify for the Golden Wrongness tier, which gets you a free upgrade to “a bigger version of the same mistake”.

The Best Part: The Reviews (already written, because the internet is inevitable)

⭐☆☆☆☆
“Asked for a magnet that said Madrid. They sold me one that said Minsk. I don’t even know where Minsk is.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Absolutely brilliant. Bought an ‘I ❤️ Tokyo’ t-shirt while standing 50 metres from my Barcelona hotel. My wife hasn’t stopped laughing.”

⭐☆☆☆☆
“They told me Spain is ‘out of season’. This is ridiculous.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Came in angry. Left with a Chicago Cubs 47 Brand Wrigley Field Marque Fitted baseball cap. Couldn't be happier. I respect the commitment.”

Why It Would Work (in a parallel universe where I had money and serotonin)

Because tourists don’t buy souvenirs. They buy a story. They buy a prop. They buy the ability to say:
“Look at this. I don’t even know why this exists.”

Also, the shop becomes a destination in itself. People don’t come for the merch. They come to experience being gently gaslit by tasteful retail shelving.

The Fatal Flaw (and why you’re reading this instead of visiting my shop)

Capital. Rent. Stock. Shipping a thousand tiny monuments to a thousand wrong places. It’s a money bonfire, and not the warm cosy kind.

So instead, I’m doing what every failed entrepreneur eventually does: abandoning my dreams and blogging about them.

The Flagpole Bit

If this idea made you smile, here’s my offer:

Take it. Steal it. Launch it. Franchise it. Build it into a global empire of tasteful nonsense. I officially gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu.

(Still out of stock. Supply chain issues. Try again next week.)

And if you do open one, please do me just one small favour:
On the quiet, put a single, lonely postcard of the local city behind the counter, face-down, like contraband.

Because we’re not monsters. We’re just… curated.

 

I bought a new piece of kit this week, that really made me reflect on how far things have come. Long story short, I blogged about prepping for Armageddon earlier in the year, and one thing I realised needed a major overhaul was my 'home network' - the ever-growing collection of tablets, phones desktops and the ways they connect to the Internet. I've been looking for ways to make the whole thing more robust yet less power hungry.

When 'El apagón' - the big blackout happened here in Spain earlier in the year, I found out a lot about what would happen during an extended period without electricity. During those 17 hours, one of the things I noticed was that my local ISP failed before the Internet on my mobile phone. Not 100% sure why that is but my guess is the local ISP has less emergency power backup. So in the following months I mulled this over in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that I had underestimated my local Internet connection as a single point of failure. I live in quite an isolated little village in the 'Sierra de Cádiz'. I've long suspected much of the Internet coming into and out of the town comes through line-of-sight microwaves as the connectivity often gets worse in adverse weather, particularly storms and low lying cloud. The town's electricity supply is on a knife-edge at the best of times - I personally use two uninterruptible power supplies to keep the network up as I'm used to the electric tripping out mid-poker game. The chances of losing Internet due to an electricity outage is therefore always on the cards. Then there is flooding, terrorism, meteorites - OK and straw-clutching with that one, but you get my point, it became apparent that having a backup to connect my local network to the Internet made a lot of sense.

So I began to research solutions. I could have figured out away to make my smartphone a hotspot, but the phone assumes a higher level of importance during an emergency so I didn't want it occupied on network duty. After lots of research with my friends, Claude, Grok, and ChatGTP I arrived on a solution which was to buy a second Wifi router with a 'fallback' option. It works like this. My ISP router connects to the second router, so all my network traffic passes through it. I use the new router for both Wifi and wired connections. Should the ISP connection go offline, the new router makes a 4G connection through the phone network. Within 60 seconds, I'm back online. It's like magic. I had to get a new SIM card for the router, but I shopped around and found a pre-paid card with no contract. All I have to do is put 10 euros on it every six months to keep it 'alive'. During normal operation the SIM is inactive and only makes a connection during an emergency.

After I set this up, feeling very smug and pleased with myself, I noticed on the box that the router is capable of 300Mbps - over 4G? I thought this was a mistake, but apparently due to a thing called 'carrier aggregation', under ideal conditions the thing can weave together different mobile bands making 'one big one' (given there aren't too many other folk online). This is what triggered my reflection on my path as a user of the Internet in Spain.

Back in the late 1990's when I first considered moving to Europe, Spain was one of a number of countries I was considering. Internet connectivity was a key factor, since I would be working remotely for my company in England. During my research I stumbled across an article that wrote in glowing terms about the broadband rollout in the Iberian peninsula, and how the country was 'forging ahead' as a European leader in high speed Internet connectivity. This must have been a puff-piece for Movistar or something because when I finally arrived, the truth was rather different.

The house I bought in Murcia was less than three kilometers from town. The house had mains electricity and potable water, so getting an Internet connection would be just a question of running a phone line, no? Oh how wrong I was! I made overtures to the phone company who said they would be quite happy to help if I paid several thousand pounds to install telegraph poles! There was another problem in the form of a big hill at the back of my house that made line-of-sight connectivity impossible. I was so screwed. Caveat emptor. (Some years later, I met a smarter guy than me, who had his lawyer insert a clause in the compra-venta - the presales contract that determines the conditions of sale - that broadband internet connection would be available in the property before the sale would go ahead)

I was anxious to get connected because of work, so I had a word with the owner of a local Internet cafe and negotiated a preferential rate, given that I was spending five mornings a week in there with my laptop! There was a lady who did shifts looking after the place who was a chain-smoker. I used to go home reeking of tobacco smoke and coughing like a laboratory beagle, so I was keen to find a practical alternative.

There was a Vodafone shop in the town and, although mobile phones at the time were more geared towards calls, they were offering a new card with a data tariff. It was expensive so I'd have to ration my connectivity - a bit like the early days of Compuserve where we would use an off-line-reader program to login, download a bunch of messages and log off again to minimise connection fees! So I signed up for one of these cards and a condition was I had to have an ordinary phone SIM as well. This is where something happened to my disadvantage. The lady gave me the SIM card for my phone and said the data card would arrive in the following week. While muddling through with my schoolboy Spanish, I got the impression that I could use the SIM card she gave me to connect to the Internet until the proper data card arrived. So that weekend, I made a few sojourns in to Hotmail and Google, nothing too lengthy, then swapped over to the data card in the following week. At the end of the month I got a bill for 400 euros! I remonstrated with the girl in the shop arguing that she told me I could use the other card, but she just said 'you did - it worked'. I spent hours complaining writing to regional and national offices, sending faxes at their request etc, but never did manage to get a refund.

After about a year of struggling with the SIM solution - it did work when I had the right card, a Spanish neighbour helped me wade through the bureaucratic minefield of Telefonica's Sales Order Process to get a 'fixed line' telephone. Due to the poles issue, this was provided over radio, which capped the Internet connection to a ridiculously low speed, but at least I was on all the time without the same level of metering that I suffered with the SIM card. That did me for another year or two, until an enterprising couple of English chaps in the village put their heads together and, realise there were a lot of folk in the 'campo' like me with a need for broadband, started a wireless network company.

I'm a software guy rather than a hardware guy, so a lot of what they did remains a mystery, but it seems they figured out how to bundle together a bunch of consumer internet connections from the local cable company, then bounce these around the village and then on into the houses in the country side. If like me, line of sight was unavailable, they would angle dishes on other client sites to share the signal around. However they managed it, the system worked great and at last, after about four years I finally had a fast Internet connection in Spain.

When I moved to another little village in Andalucia, most folk were using a similar wireless systems because it was cheap - subsidised either by the townhall or the regional government or both. It was pretty terrible with speeds slowing to a crawl at that time of day when the kids came home from school. The support closed on Friday afternoon and if the line went down, which was often, there was nobody to help get it back until Monday morning. In time however a couple of new entrants to the market emerged offering fibre to the home. Considering we are fairly remote I'm very impressed by this.  A friend in Portland, Oregon with a holiday home here was telling me the Internet we get here is faster and cheaper than he has back home. I pay 20 euros per month and on a good day my fibre will test at 600Mbps. My ISP has a higher tariff - for a fiver a month extra I can get double that!

All of which makes me think, why on earth isn't everybody grabbing a digital nomad visa and coming to Spain to work. I often see posts on social media, especially TikTok from Americans who have moved, or are thinking of moving to Barcelona and are moaning about the price of property there. Well here's the thing, there are plenty of other places, many of which have amazing property deals. Whole villages are for sale for peanuts in some regions due to the phenomenon of rural depopulation, yet now, with Starlink in the mix providing broadband coverage through the whole of the country, there isn't a place where you can go in Spain where you would have to endure the same painful journey I did to get a good online connection.

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There's a war going on right now for the control of money. Its significance cannot be overstated. It will shape the future of everything to such an immense degree that I believe its impact will dwarf all the wars of the 20th century combined. Billions will die - untold billions will cease to exist, all because of a handful of laws that are being passed today, with hardly anyone batting an eyelid. I'm woefully inadequate as a writer to convey the magnitude of this change, especially in a short form such as this blog post. I just hope I can bring you a flavour of what is going on so that you can start thinking about it and doing your own research.

Back in 2022, I penned a somewhat gloomy blog about the future of freedom, power and money (Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We). It now turns out that not only was I on the right track, but the rate at which our freedom is coming to an end is massively accelerating. I'm late publishing this blog because every day since writing the initial draft, new relevant stories kept coming to light which I've had to research and include.

Anyway, getting back to the main story, the nature of freedom, power and money is intertwined. If you've acquainted yourself with the history of money, perhaps by reading The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson or Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, you can't help but see the analogy to a game of Monopoly. Every game ends the same way. One player buys all the houses and hotels, wins all the cash, then the other players get frustrated and throw the board up in the air. Then a new game starts with the wealth redistributed evenly again. The pendulum swing, where wealth moves from rich to poor and then back to rich, is essentially the history of economics, money, credit and debt, and ultimately power. This may be why the same redistribution myth appears across cultures, from Prometheus giving man the fire of the Gods, to Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. [Others include Zorro, Koschei the Russian folk hero, Song Jiang from the Chinese 'Water Margin' and to some extent Jesse James!]

There isn't room to fully summarise the story here, but I've always been impressed by the theme tune to the Big Bang Theory which somehow manages to compress the entire history of the universe into a song lyric. With the help of AI, I've had a go at doing a similar thing for economics:

A History of Debt (karaoke cut, Mont Pelerin edition to the tune of the Big Bang Theory theme)

Ten thousand years ago we started farming land,
And temples used their scribes to track the IOU demand.
The pharaohs taxed the people, while kings declared a slate,
Religions banned the usurers - they tore apart the state.
The Medici got clever, winked at God and made it pay,
The Brits built banks and empires, flags and debts along the way.
The French cut heads, the markets bled
Wars, New Deal, Bretton Woods, the dollar ruled instead.
The anti-red Chicago boys said freedom is the key
Thatcher, Reagan hatched a plan, cried "Markets wild and free!"
Math, cash, history, unravelling the mystery,
It all comes down to big debt (Debt)!

And so here we are today, with the Neoliberalism of the Chicago School economists, embraced by left and right wing governments in the US, UK and EU - collectively known as the West. In universities it is taught as political orthodoxy - as though there is no rational alternative, yet it's only working out well for the 1% of people. The widening gap between rich and poor at the heart of this theory is there for all to see.

At this point, given our Monopoly analogy, we would reasonably expect the millions of people who are saddled with debt, living from pay packet to pay packet, may soon reach that point again where they have had enough and the board gets thrown up in the air.

Here's the thing though: the 1% know this, and are making subtle yet fundamental changes to the law to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So pay close attention to the next bit because it really matters. Cash - the simple handing of value from one person to another, without permission, without oversight, has been the bedrock of human liberty. Take that away, and everything else, every right, privilege, every choice falls with it. If money ceases to be ours, our life ceases to be ours. Total financial control is not just tyranny - it is an apocalypse. It is the weapon that makes famine deliberate, war automated, pestilence engineered and death selective. Billions will never live because they will be smothered before birth by resource control systems that decide who may eat, who may travel and ultimately who may exist. The end of our personal financial sovereignty is worse than the Four Horsemen - it is the master that rides them all. Once it comes, there will be no going back.

The war of which I speak then - the laws being changed are designed to move us away from cash towards a future of digital money. There is nothing wrong with digital money itself. We could have a form of digital money that can be exchanged between individuals with no other parties involved - in fact it exists already - it's called Bitcoin. However, that's not the form of digital money that we will be forced to use. They want us to use digital money that is centrally controlled - the CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currencies. The difference between these is huge. With money that transacts from person to person, we retain personal financial sovereignty - we are the masters of our own funds. It's this very Personal Financial Sovereignty that 'they' are planning to take away from us.

Of course, they're saying they're not. The US, UK and the most recent EU digital currency announcements don't claim to be doing away with cash altogether. In fact, the EU said they're considering a system of 'peer to peer' digital transactions with the digital Euro which won't require third party banking intervention, but I'm old enough and ugly enough not to believe a word of that nonsense. The stakes are too high, the power too great for them to allow that to happen.

When I speak to people about this they often fail to see the danger, and are seduced by the ease of use of apparently frictionless card purchases. I get it - it's easy. They want you to be comfortable with it. That's why the UK's Financial Conduct Authority announced on 10 September 2025 their intention to raise the limit on cashless card transactions. But this is to ignore what is going on behind the scenes. For all its flaws, Bitcoin has demonstrated that no banking intermediary is needed for value to be exchanged from one person to another. Despite what you may have read, Bitcoin has never been 'hacked'. The horror stories the press love to dwell on all refer to Bitcoin exchanges - essentially the interface between Bitcoin, which is perfect money, and the banking system, which is bent as the proverbial nine bob note. That 'they' are trying to ban anonymous crypto wallets and force everyone to use crypto via recognised exchanges says all you need to know about 'them', the folk who bought you the Wall Street and 2008 financial crashes - what could possibly go wrong?

Who, you may ask, is 'them', or the 'powers that be' as I referred to them in the previous blog? This question was eloquently answered by Critical Theory lecturer Louisa Toxværd Munch on TikTok recently. Conspiracy theorists love to apportion blame, even naming people like George Soros, Charles Schwab or Bill Gates as the arch villains in charge of it all. In reality the system is protecting itself. Rich people work to protect their own interests in all sorts of ways, and this leads to the creation of organisations that serve to protect those interests. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. There are just structures, many of which are unconnected and uncoordinated that appear to conspire against the interests of the less well off. 

There is no single figure to point at, just a blob, as I discovered myself a few years ago while trying to play low-stakes poker.

One day, the online gambling site 'Pokerstars' decided I wasn't allowed to play €1 sit-and-go tournaments unless I sent them shots of my passport, my face from multiple angles, my tax ID and my inside leg measurement. I failed the test (Spanish bureaucracy - enough said), so I tried other poker sites. Malta, Gibraltar, the other side of the world - didn't matter. They all demanded the same. Why? Because the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an unelected global body, had decided it should be so. They forced every online poker site in the world to introduce 'KYC' - know your customer. The G7 created the FATF back in 1989, and now, if FATF says jump, every government on Earth asks "how high?" No elections. No accountability. It seems on the face of it to be a one world government in all but name, but it's actually less well coordinated than that.

The reason I felt compelled to write this blog now is that 2025 is the year in which the 'powers that be' want to beef up online security, in the name of children's safety, by forcing people to provide KYC to access certain types of content (The Poker experiment clearly went well). While the UK government is most vocal about access to pornography, access to other sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia are similarly affected. Australia and Canada are following suit with similar legislation in the pipeline. Even America has The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill with bipartisan support which is currently grinding its way through congress.

The important point here is the direction of travel. We've had web access for 30 years, but all of a sudden we're supposed to believe it's right now we're taking action to protect children from porn? The UK government has seen that people are circumventing the identification process by using a VPN, so now they're talking about banning them too.

The relevance to child protection of these sorts of digital legislation has been shown elsewhere to be spurious at best. The real reason is to increase the control that governments have over the Internet. As I explained in the previous blog, I believe there to be a movement to restrict the software we are allowed to run on our devices. As if to confirm my suspicions, Google announced last week that from 2026 it will restrict the sideloading of apps to those of 'authorised' developers. (Sideloading basically means loading an app that comes from outside the Android appstore). I predict that moving forward, terrorism will increasingly be used as an excuse to introduce further restrictions on the software we're allowed to run. To ban software that could be useful to fight our subjugation: encrypted messaging, peer to peer file exchange, off-grid messaging apps like bitchat and many other tools will all have to become 'authorised'. Most of the open source software repositories for these sorts of apps are hosted on a source control website called Github. Github was bought by Microsoft in 2018, to gasps of horror in the open source community. Years later, Microsoft has been lauded for largely maintaining the site's independence and encouraging its continued growth. However, the cynical voice in my head says they would do that if there was a long term plan to capture and control the world's open source software.

My belief is that none of this is really about poker sites or porn filters. The endgame is cash. Cash, or as I explained earlier, Personal Financial Sovereignty, is the overarching goal.

When 'we the people' have our money fully digitally controlled, there are many upsides for the winner of the Monopoly game, but many downsides for us.

Once cash disappears, governments can literally program what you're allowed to spend money on. The classic example is "Fancy a sausage roll? Sorry citizen, your cholesterol's too high. Try a lettuce leaf." However, it goes much deeper than that. "Government deficit? We'll introduce negative interest rates - there won't be a bank run because you can't get cash out at the bank!" We're already seeing in America how Trump is using the threat of litigation to silence news media. Imagine how much easier that would be if the same man had the ability to control every penny everybody has to spend. The stranglehold an unscrupulous leader would have over our lives doesn't bear thinking about.

We tend to think of the end of civilisation as nuclear war, asteroid impact or a global pandemic, but this is far worse. I can see it happening in my head like a slow motion car crash. I feel like Nuñez in that H.G. Wells short story "The Country of The Blind". If I talk to people about what I think is going on they treat me like I'm mad.

And maybe I am mad - mad because I can see what most refuse to see. Once our money itself is captured, resistance dies with it. You can't organise, you can't fund a movement, you can't even buy bread without permission. Rebellions require resources, but all the resources will be controlled by them, so the fight will be over before it starts. That's why to me, this feels so apocalyptic: not because it ends in fire, but because it ends in absolute submission, forever.

 

In the quiet pueblo blanco of Olvera, where I’ve lived for fifteen years, a war has erupted.  Not over healthcare, jobs, or the creeping cost of living, but over something far more mundane: rubbish.

The town hall has hiked refuse collection fees and doubled down on a door-to-door recycling scheme, complete with barcode-tagged bins linking every scrap to your name.  Non-compliance, though unspoken, carries the threat of fines.  This isn’t just about sorting plastic from paper - it’s about control, surveillance, and the theft of our time.

The town hall is saying “it’s not our fault, we’re just following orders” citing an EU directive that seeks to make citizens more responsible for their rubbish, however there is nothing in the EU law that conflates recycling with refuse collection.  This seems to be a decision made nearer home.

While door to door recycling collection may at first seem innocuous enough, it has inconevienced many people. The closing of most of the public recyling bins means smelly organic waste has to remain in the house until being put out on the correct day. Folk with limited space find it intolerable to be expected to keep separate bins in their house for paper, plastics, organics, and “resto” the catch all-category that has many inexplicable exceptions from batteries to jam jars. In the absence of public bins, many frustrated citizens are just leaving their rubbish in the street as a dirty protest. So far, the town hall isn’t listening.

However I believe Olvera’s bins are a microcosm of a larger betrayal.  The traditional left, who are in charge here, has lost its way, having become wedded to neoliberalism’s altar of individual responsibility and managerial disdain. By dismissing the legitimate anger of ordinary people, they’ve left a void - one that populists, with their placards and promises, are all too eager to fill. This is not just a local squabble; it’s a warning of democracy’s fragility across the West.

The Recycling Dogma: A False Salvation

Recycling is a modern sacrament.  To question it is to invite scorn, as if you’ve denied a universal truth.  Yet the reality is far less divine. A ‘New Scientist’ article from decades ago pointed out a brutal truth: burning a piece of paper can be kinder to the environment than driving it to a recycling center, where it’s sorted, shredded, pulped, bleached, and reformed - each step guzzling more fossil fuel than the last.  In a world still hooked on oil and gas, recycling often costs more carbon than it saves.

I don’t hate recycling. I hate the lie it’s built on: that individual acts can offset a system addicted to overproduction and waste. Corporations churn out plastic, reaping profits while paying nothing for its disposal. Meanwhile, we’re guilt-tripped for not rinsing a yoghurt pot. This is called ‘Agency Fallacy’: the myth that our small choices can fix a large system that is structurally broken.

“If the planet burns, it’s not because you used the wrong bin. It’s because the system was designed to burn it.”

The Minute Snatch: Your Time as Their Resource

Every day, we lose fragments of our lives to tasks we never signed up for.  Take the EU’s new water bottles, with caps tethered to the neck to “aid recycling.” Sounds noble, but try screwing one back on. It’s fiddly, awkward, and steals seconds each time. Ten sips a day, and that’s five minutes gone. Multiply that by millions, and you’ve got a mass heist of human time. I call it the ‘Minute Snatch’.

Banks are the masters of this theft.  Not too long ago, bank tellers handled your transactions. Now, you’re the teller, fumbling through online banking or over-engineered ATMs. A UK bank once bragged, “We’re all bank managers now!”  No, we’re not. We’re unpaid clerks. Self-checkouts at supermarkets?  You’re the unpaid cashier.  Website CAPTCHAs that make you identify traffic lights? You’re training AI for free. Each task chips away at your day, your dignity, your autonomy.

This isn’t empowerment - it’s exploitation dressed up as convenience. And it’s not accidental. It’s the logical endpoint of a system that sees your time as a resource to be mined.

Neoliberalism’s Long Shadow

The roots of this lie in neoliberalism, a philosophy that recast society as a collection of individuals, each responsible for their own fate. As Grace Blakeley argues in ‘Stolen’, Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “there is no such thing as society” wasn’t just rhetoric - it was a blueprint. Public services were gutted, collective bargaining weakened, and responsibility was shifted onto the individual.

“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

 - Margaret Thatcher, 1987

This mindset - responsibilisation, as sociologists call it - makes us feel guilty for systemic failures. If recycling doesn’t work, it’s your fault. If the economy tanks, you didn’t upskill enough. If the climate collapses, you didn’t cycle to work. The Agency Fallacy thrives here, convincing us that our tiny acts matter while corporations and governments dodge accountability.

Olvera’s Bins: A Local Betrayal

In Olvera, the PSOE, a party with “socialist” in its name, should be the voice of the people. Instead, they’ve embraced neoliberalism’s playbook: enforce compliance, monitor citizens, and dismiss dissent. Their social media posts about the recycling scheme have been curt, even rude, brushing off concerns about cost, privacy, and practicality.  Residents aren’t just angry about bins - they’re angry about being ignored.

The scheme itself is a case study in overreach. Bar codes track your waste, raising questions about GDPR compliance and proportionality under Spanish consumer law. Fines, though not yet explicit, loom as a threat. For many, especially the elderly or those in rural areas, the system is impractical. Yet the town hall presses on, blaming individuals for systemic flaws.

This isn’t socialism. It’s managerialism - a top-down imposition that treats citizens as cogs, not partners. And it’s failing the people it claims to serve.

The Populist Void

This is the macrocosm you see across the West. From Brexit to Trump to the rise of far-right parties in Europe, the pattern is clear: when progressive parties wed themselves to neoliberalism’s cold logic, they lose the trust of the people. Populists, with their simple answers and emotional resonance, rush in. They don’t win because people love their ideology - they win because no one else is listening.

“When the left stops listening, the right starts shouting. And the people, desperate, follow the noise.”

The Threat to Democracy

David Graeber once wrote that bureaucratic systems punish the powerless while absolving the powerful.  Byung-Chul Han described our “achievement society,” where we internalize our own exploitation, proud of our “agency” even as it enslaves us. In Olvera, you see both: a system that fines you for a mis-sorted bottle, while the corporations who made the bottle pay nothing.

But the deeper danger is political. When the left fails to offer a real alternative - when it swaps solidarity for spreadsheets - it cedes the field to those who thrive on division and fear. Democracy doesn’t die in a single blow; it erodes when trust is broken, when people feel abandoned, when the only voices left are the ones promising order over justice.

It’s Not Your Fault - But It’s Our Fight

Let’s be clear: it’s not your fault. You didn’t design a world that runs on fossil fuels. You didn’t choose to spend your days as an unpaid bank teller, cashier, or AI trainer. You didn’t ask to be a bin inspector, scrutinized by Bar codes & RFID chips (yes, Olvera’s bins also have the same radio frequency chips that supermarkets use to stop us running off with a bottle of whisky). The Agency Fallacy wants you to believe you’re the problem. You’re not.

But this fight is ours. Recycling won’t save us. Compliance won’t save us. Only collective action - real, messy, human action - can.

We need a left that listens, that rejects neoliberalism’s hollow promises, that fights for systems where responsibility is shared, not dumped on the individual.

Olvera’s bins are a small story, but they’re a warning. Across the West, the failure to heed that warning is giving populists the keys to the future. If we don’t reclaim our agency - not the false kind, but the kind rooted in solidarity - then the next war won’t be about rubbish. It’ll be about democracy itself.

Things to keep in mind

• You don’t owe the system your spare minutes.
• You don’t owe your soul to a recycling bin.
• And you definitely don’t owe your free labour to the companies that created the problem.
• It’s not your fault.
• It never was.

[This blog was researched and drafted with help from ChatGTP and Grok]

I loathe Trump, and pretty much anyone else who thinks dripping themselves in gold is a good look. However, I saw the recent meeting where he and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy, and my 'take' on what went down seems very different from most commentators on the left. I thought I'd share my opinion and take the brickbats as they come.

Trump is a performative president. What you see isn't a logical person behaving in a predictable manner. It's arguable that all people in power, to some degree or another, have to do this because politics can be like poker—you’ve gotta hide your cards. Trump takes this to the nth degree. His modus operandi was exposed to me in the book Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi, which is an excellent read explaining in detail the dynamics of digital media.

Matt followed Trump around on the first campaign trail and describes how he and other journalists were dumbfounded by the things that came out of Trump's mouth. He goes on to explain how he came to realise that Trump was taking his cues from sports—particularly professional wrestling—and the way that really basic human emotion is leveraged to co-opt and polarise opinion.

Trump knows that in order to get things done, hate works. He knows that to get a crowd to unite behind a cause, you get more reaction from being Captain Hook than Peter Pan. When I saw Trump and Vance gang up on Zelenskyy, my hackles went up, and I thought back to Hate Inc..

Pro wrestling pivots on the relationship between two polar opposites: the bad guy or "heel," and the good guy or "face." The heel comes out jeering at the crowd, getting as big a rise out of them as possible. As the heel’s jeers rile up the crowd, their support for the face erupts like a volcano. In our meeting, Zelenskyy played the face while Trump and his tag partner Vance were the heels. By the end, the global hatred of Trump and Vance was visceral, but look at how advantageous that has since been for Zelenskyy and US interests.

Hours after the meeting ended, social media was filled with posts from European leaders pledging their united support for Ukraine. They waved their cheque books, vowing to increase their own defence spending and to extend more military assistance. Also, I think this is more than a knee-jerk reaction. My guess is that this will inform European policymaking for a generation. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we see the election of another politician like Merkel, who argued there was more peace to be gained by trading with Russia, buying their oil and resources. US interests are being served by the likely further severing of EU/Russian commerce. This is probably why we've heard so few words of protest from the Bush/Clinton/Obama/Biden axis.

While Trump obviously took a lot of flak, what does he care? He’s not running for re-election. So am I saying he's a good guy? No, of course not. What I am saying is that while Trump's primary driver is his own wealth and power, he does this while maintaining an alignment with 'US interests' far closer than his rogue persona suggests.

If we accept this tenet, what do we make of Trump's relationship with Israel? We've seen in British politics that anyone who aligns with Palestine and criticises Israel gets cancelled. The most high-profile example is how Jeremy Corbyn was tried and convicted of anti-Semitism by the British press, demolishing his chances of winning an election. Trump knows the fallout of criticising Israel is far too dangerous, so he would never pull a trick on Netanyahu like he did on Zelenskyy. However, perhaps his over-the-top claims about building a Gaza Riviera and the reposting of that stomach-churning AI video with the gold Trump statue were deliberately meant to have the polarising effect that they did.

Now that the demolition of Gaza has been achieved, perhaps US interests are best served by deposing the Netanyahu government and returning the country to a more human-friendly, liberal administration. Maybe by embracing Netanyahu—making him and Trump the heels—we're anticipating the appearance of a new face who will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Zionist destruction, enabling the smooth passage of US corporations into Gaza to realise the long-term plan: the exploitation of the offshore Gaza Marine gas fields and the execution of the Ben Gurion canal project. Call me cynical, but I don't think anything happens by accident, even an apparent car crash like the Trump administration!

I wanna job in Spain and basically need to know if there is work out there for me, I’d do anything I just wanna move for the sun.  Please help!!