"Predicting the future is a hit-and-miss game.
That said, what will 2023 bring?
1. More war and a nuclear near miss
The biggest narrative shift of 2022 was “the war” knocking “the pandemic” off the front pages. However the Russian invasion of Ukraine hit the same stumbling block as Covid in the end – people stopped listening. Why exactly that is – if they lacked a “sense of personal threat” or some other aspect of the narrative – is for another at another time.
For whatever reason, the narrative’s energy burned out fairly fast. It has gone stale, which means a good portion of 2023 will be about bringing it back to life.
That could mean a couple of different things – wars getting wider or hotter.
The war getting wider would mean involving other countries – probably not directly in Ukraine. But some other conflict that NATO troops can get teeth into.
Writing in the Guardian just this morning, Simon Tisdall – the man with the itchiest trigger finger in Western journalism – gleefully rattles off all the many places NATO could start having a little bomb-related fun of its own, including the old favourites: Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.
His broader warning is about China, most especially the possibility it may seize Taiwan by force. China engaging in its own personal Ukraine would certainly reinvigorate the flagging war cheerleaders – on both sides.
That’s the war getting wider, the war getting hotter would mean a direct threat of nuclear conflict, a risk the press was routinely talking up in the closing stages of 2022. Not just from Russia, but now from North Korea too.
There won’t be a nuclear strike (almost certainly), but any near miss will be followed by a chorus of “that was too close” and “we need to change before it’s too late” from the media.
Whichever way the war “problem” evolves, the war “solution” is going one of two ways: Either the “new cold war” will divide us entirely into a false “multipolar world”, or we’ll start seeing journalists and pundits decrying the “old fashioned” conflicts which put “nationalism ahead of the global good”, and calling for an “empowered international organization” to “put an end to war”.
Pick your poison essentially, two near-identical hemispherical governments, or one global government.
2. Encouraging state dependence
Writing on Politics Home a few days ago, Baroness Bennett of the UK’s House of Lords headlined:
My New Year’s Wish….Universal Basic Income
It’s far from the only pro-UBI article doing the rounds recently. Mostly confined to slightly smaller outlets, but nevertheless, the current is there.
Many countries – including Germany, Finland and some US states – have either run UBI trials or plan on running them soon.
A universal basic income would essentially be a long-term replacement for the “lockdown subsidies” – The payments made to the self-employed and small business owners after “the pandemic” killed their businesses.
It’s another WEF-backed initiative, with the forum’s website hosting articles claiming “Covid means we need UBI” since as early as April 2020.
It’s not hard to see the appeal of UBI from a tyrant’s point of view, in that it’s a system where every single citizen is entirely dependent on the state for their livelihood.
The destruction of the self-employed and small business owners, combined with UBI would essentially create a system where you either work for a mega-corporation or you’re paid for by the state, completely wiping out the ability (and perhaps the desire) to be independent.
Combine a nationwide UBI scheme with programmable digital currency, “personal carbon footprints” and social credit systems, and you have a recipe for a truly dystopian society.
3. Pushing “meat alternatives” to kids
... All told, it looks like OffG is in for a busy year, and we didn’t even mention Pfizer’s planned “universal flu vaccine” (another mRNA shot), another wave of “domestic terror” crackdowns or the ever-present climate change agenda"
