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In the poem Dante’s Inferno, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the “realm […] of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen”:
I came across a chart I thought readers might find interesting. It’s from an excellent website called “The Visual Capitalist“. Ever week or so, the website publishes and emails out links to new charts depicting economic issues in strikingly visual ways. I highly recommend you subscribe to receiving their emails.
The latest chart shows different countries’ levels of debt set out in five circles. We could call these the “Five Circles of Debt Hell”
You’ll see that Britain with 104% of debt to GDP is in the third circle of debt hell along with countries like Spain, Senegal, France, Mozambique, Canada and others. Countries in the fourth circle of debt hell are countries like Italy, USA, Greece and, surprising to me, Singapore with debt levels of 130% to 150% to GDP. But I have checked and the Singapore figures are correct. I also find it odd that The Visual Capitalist has put Japan with debt level of 235% in the fourth circle of debt hell. I would have thought that, with a debt level of 235%, it belonged in the final circle of debt hell along with Sudan at 252%.
The main conclusion I draw from this is that few if any of the countries featured can ever actually pay off their debt. In fact, most of the countries are, as far as I understand, technically bankrupt. They can only ever afford to keep on paying the interest on their debt. But they will never be in a position to have a budget surplus which would allow them to start paying down their debt. Even worse, for many of these countries, such as the UK, their debt and thus interest payments, keep on increasing. After all, by giving our usually Labour-voting, often lazy, often unproductive and often incompetent UK public-sector employees repeated generous pay rises while our public services collapse and by encouraging tens of thousands of mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable, often criminal Third-Worlders to flood over our non-existent borders by giving them free 4-star hotel accommodation, free healthcare, free smartphones, free clothing, free money, free legal aid to avoid deportation, free everything, the UK is truly on the road to insolvency and debt hell.
I do realise that, when looking at this chart, you have to consider that some countries are in a much better position to service their debt than others in the same circle of debt hell. For example, I believe that most of Japan’s debt is held within Japanese financial institutions, is at very low interest rates and that Japan can easily service its debt whereas a hopeless typical African basket-case dump like Sudan is truly damned.
Another issue I noticed is that the UK has a much higher debt to GDP ratio than countries we tend to view as economic disasters like Argentina, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Egypt, Togo, Congo and others. Though, of course, again when comparing countries you have to take into account the level of interest they are paying and their ability to service their debt. So comparisons of countries in the same circle of debt hell are not quite as simple as the chart might suggest.
For copyright reasons, I cannot show the Visual Capitalist chart here. However, here’s the link to the chart. I hope you find it worth a look:
Let us all join together to congratulate our Iberian Peninsula friends. They seem to be leaping ahead of Starmer’s amd Miliband’s wonderful ambition to lead the world in becoming ‘clean energy superpowers’. In achieving this, they have showed us all what Mad Red Ed Miliband’s economically-suicidal plans will do for us:
Of course, those in power will give us all kinds of sophisticated explanations why there were massive power failures in Spain and Portugal – complex planetary movements, Venus going up Uranus, solar phenomena not seen for 100 years and of course, ‘climate change’. I’m no ‘scientist’ dependent on government grants for my luxury, globe-trotting, climate-conference-attending lifestyle. But there does seem to be an embarrassing (for our rulers) connection between the power failure and excessive use of useless, so-called ‘renewables’.
I look forward to hearing the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt and the Guardian’s George Monbiot trying to explain away this latest catastrophic failure of their much-loved ludicrous Net Zero policies..
On 24 and 25 April 2025, the IEA (International Energy Agency) and the UK government convened an international Summit on the Future of Energy Security in London. UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer amd Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband were among the keynote speakers.
The IEA informed us that: ‘The Summit will examine the geopolitical, technological and economic factors affecting energy security at the national and international level. It will provide leaders and decision makers from around the world with an opportunity to review the trends shaping global energy security – and reflect on the tools needed to address traditional and emerging energy security risks.’
At this important conference, our leader, Sir Keir, spouted:
“So our task is clear – To act – together… To seize the opportunity of the clean energy transition. Because homegrown clean energy is the only way. To take back control of our energy system. Deliver energy security. And bring down bills for the long term.“
“And I want to tell you we’re going all out – through our Plan for Change to make Britain a clean energy superpower to secure home grown energy and set a path to achieving clean power by 2030.“
And the hero of this momentous gathering of many of the world’s greatest jet-setting hypocrites, Lord Edward Miliband blethered:
“Abundant energy can raise living standards, economic growth and deliver for today’s and future generations of citizens. For the UK, just to talk about us for a moment, there is an exciting vision of energy security and abundance from cheap, homegrown, low carbon power. So our vision of low carbon power goes well beyond the climate imperative — important as that is. Homegrown low carbon power is our nationally chosen route to energy security.”
Firstly, I hope you’ve noticed how our rulers have changed the narrative. Originally, they kept telling us that we needed Net Zero to save the planet from global boiling:
But now they hardly mention supposed climate change and instead claim they’re acting to provide energy security.
Let’s look at how Red Ed Miliband is giving us “energy security”:
closing down North Sea oil and gas production
banning coal mining
closing down and blowing up power stations long before their productive life is over
the UK’s last fracking wells are set to be closed and filled with cement despite warnings that Britain’s gas stockpiles are dwindling
deliberately delaying the approval of small modular nuclear reactors despite the fact that their production could provide thousands of highly-skilled, well-paid jobs
At the same time they are:
removing productive agricultural land from food production and covering it with next-to-useless solar panels which only produce energy for a couple of hours a day. In my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS I quote the head of one of Germany’s largest power companies warning that relying on solar power in Northern Europe was like growing pineapples in Alaska
erecting hideous wind turdbines which don’t work when the wind is too weak or too strong
Starmer and Miliband must realise they are lying when they claim they are giving us “energy security” when they’re actually actively destroying our energy system.
I know we all lie:
What astonishes me is that these two (IMHO) Davos-adoring, UK-hating scumbags can lie so brazenly.
There are some quite interesting (I think) things happening in China which don’t seem to get much mainstream media attention.
Last year, Evergrande, once a giant in China’s property market, collapsed due to mounting debt triggering a wider crisis in the Chinese real estate sector. A Hong Kong court ordered the company’s liquidation in January 2024. Evergrande’s debt surpassed an astonishing $300 billion. Moreover, there are many other Chinese property companies which are also over-indebted and on the brink of collapse. And several new Chinese cities which are just ghost cities:
There are an estimated 65 million Chinese homes which are unoccupied.
Many Chinese families have invested in property expecting a continual rise in property prices. But when a country with a falling population keeps building ever more properties, economic gravity will eventually win over uncontrolled speculation.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will inevitably claim that China’s economy grew by the planned 5% this year. But the truth is that in many cities, Chinese property prices have fallen by up to 50% and this is having a negative knock-on effect on consumer confidence, consumer spending and the Chinese economy.
And now that Trump has imposed massive tariffs on Chinese exports to America, many Chinese factories are closing as they can’t sell their now unwanted production in the Chinese home market and up to 20 million Chinese workers may lose their jobs. Moreover, around 12 million students graduate from Chinese universities each year and unemployment for new graduates is at around 55%.
Faced with this situation, after years of bullying its neighbours with its aggressive expansionist policies, Chinese mafia boss (sorry, I meant the head of the much-respected CCP) Xi PingPong has just been on a charm tour of South-East Asian countries to try to make friends and create a group of countries who will oppose the new US tariffs. Judging by the video linked below, Xi’s attempts to seduce China’s neighbours into an anti-US trading block are backfiring as most countries seem to prefer getting into bed with the US rather than China. South Korea has already finalised a new trade deal with the US and many other countries are expected to follow.
Much of this is explained in the video below. It’s rather long and the presenter is not (IMHO) the most stimulating speaker. But you only need to watch a few minutes to get the picture.
Why this situation might be important to us is the issue of how Chairman Xi will react if China goes into a serious recession and he feels his position is under threat. In such a situation, totalitarian leaders usually try to find a foreign enemy so they can use the cover of patriotism to rally their disaffected people. If Xi goes that route, an invasion of Taiwan might look extraordinarily convenient for Chairman Xi.
Anyway, here’s the video explaining why Xi might be becoming a ‘Norman No Friends’:
When historians look back at the first quarter of the 21st Century, what will be the over-riding theme of their conclusions? The first half of the 20th Century could be seen as The Age of Slaughter with several hundred million killed in wars, man-made famines and Communist terror campaigns. The second half of the 20th Century was The Age of Globalisation. But what about our times? I humbly suggest that we are living in what could be called “The Age of Insanity”.
Here are just a few pieces of evidence of “The Age of Insanity”:
The belief that men and women can change sex/gender: It took years of campaigning and no doubt millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the greatest legal minds in our country to produce 88 pages of legalise lawyer-speak to conclude that peope are born as either male and female and no amount of dressing up in the opposite sex’s clothing and no amount of cutting bits off or adding bits on to people’s bodies can change their sex:
But even though our most brilliant legal brains have managed to discover the bleeding obvious, thousands of enraged lunatics are still protesting and claiming that a man can become a woman and vice versa:
This whole issue is madness, insanity.
The great scamdemic: We now know what most of us suspected all along:
the Covid-19 virus leaked from a dirty lab at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology
the ludicrously-misnamed World Health Organisation and leading scientists across the world conspired with the Chinese Communist Party to mislead us about the origin of the virus
the virus was only a danger to a small percentage of the population – the elderly and those with some serious existing health conditions
there was a cheap anti-viral drug available, Ivermectin, which was effective in treating the virus
But in spite of the virus being relatively harmless to most of the population, our economies were closed down, we allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in our homes, the Big Pharma companies pressed governments to ban Ivermectin for treating Covid-19 and instead pushed politicians into coercing us all to be repeatedly injected with a new, hastily-developed, hugely profitable, untested and often dangerous new medical product
This whole issue was madness, insanity.
The Great Replacement: For some reason, which a minuscule brain like mine fails to understand, our rulers are intent on destroying our societies and economies through mass, open-borders, Third-World immigration. According to the Irish Government’s “Project Ireland 2040” plan, around one million migrants from Africa and Asia will be brought into the country with the result that a third of the Irish population will be foreign-born:
By 2060 or 2070, Irish will be a minority in their own country. Similarly in Britain, we have over one million mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable and many criminal Third-Worlders flooding into our country each year. White British are already a minority in about 10 of England’s 55 cities. By 2050, White British will be a minority in most cities, By 2080, White British will be a minority in their own country. The only possible result of this invasion will be civil war as predicted in Christopher Priest’s 1972 dystopian novel – Fugue for a Darkening Island:
The whole issue is madness, insanity.
The climate catastrophist doom cult: We’ve now had about 40 years of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world prophecies of imminent extinction of humans due to supposed anthropogenic climate change. This end-of-times cult even has its own Saint Joan of Arc in the form of the (IMHO) ghastly Swedish school-skiving Swedish doom goblin:
Not a single one of the climate catastrophists’ predictions have actually happened: sea levels aren’t rising, polar bears are thriving, the Great Barrier Reef has never been so healthy, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing, the Arctic sea ice hasn’t melted yet, crop production is at an historic high, the Earth is greening due to increased atmospheric CO2, the number of deaths due to weather events has fallen by over 90% in the last hundred years in spite of a tripling of the human population and human life expectancy is at a record high. In fact, we’ve never had it so good:
Yet, in spite of all the evidence that there is no sign of man-made climate changse doing us any harm, many Western countries have decided to impoverish their citizens by committing economic and societal suicide by reducing the use of cheap, reliable fossil fuels and by replacing them with expensive, intermittent and unreliable supposed ‘renewables’.
This whole issue is madness, insanity.
I’m sure readers can think of many more examples that we are living in “The Age of Insanity”. Just click on the title of today’s blog if you wish to add your no doubt extensive wit and wisdom to my modest efforts.
Welcome to Pathocracy
There are lots of ‘ocracies’ – democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, kleptocracy, theocracy, aristocracy etc etc. But there’s one you may not be familiar with – pathocracy.
Pathocracy is a concept developed by Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski, referring to a system of government where individuals with personality disorders, particularly psychopathy, gain power and influence, potentially harming society. Is ‘The Age of Insanity’ a form of pathocracy?
Britain’s greatest intellect and towering colossus of international diplomacy, David ‘Lamebrain’ Lammy, is just one of many (IMHO) UK-hating idiots demanding reparations for Britain’s past involvement in slavery. He, of course, ignores the fact that many British sailors and soldiers lost their lives in abolishing slavery. But I agree with Lamebrain Lammy. I think reparations should be paid for our slave-owning past.
The average GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the slaves came from, is approximately $1,581. Now if we look at the countries where the slaves were taken, we can seen that leaving Africa was absolutely the best thing which could have happened for their descendants. The average GDP per capita of African Americans is around $23,000. The average GDP per capita for the Caribbean countries is around $18,000.
Moreover, the life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa is 62.6 years. For African Americans it is 77.4 years and for the Caribbean it is 73.7 years.
Admittedly, being moved to America and the Caribbean to work as slaves probably wasn’t particularly pleasant for the Africans who were originally enslaved. I guess their GDP per capita was pretty much non-existent and their life expectancy wasn’t too great either.
But getting out of the hopeless, rotten hell-hole that is Africa has been like winning the lottery for the living descendants of slaves both in terms of their incomes and life expectancy. So perhaps these descendants of slaves should be showing their gratitude by paying the descendants of slave-owners lots of money for giving them much improved life chances?
First: An apology if my “Not an Easter Bunny” Good Friday blog put you off your dinner. Having seen that thing, I can well understand why women and girls would not want a creature like that in their changing rooms, hospital wards, women’s refuges, prisons and other private spaces.
I don’t know if you saw a BBC report about a project we suckers are paying millions for to extract CO2 from seawater to supposedly save the planet. I was useless at chemistry. But from what little I understand seawater is to be siphoned off and treated with some kind of acid to release CO2. Then the acidic seawater will be treated with an alkali to hopefully reduce its acidity before it is pumped back into the world’s oceans where, being lower in CO2 than the surrounding water, it will then supposedly absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
There are so many things wrong with this exercise in utter futility that it’s difficult to know where to start:
I wonder if adding acid to seawater will be good for or harmful to all the micro-organisms which are at the base of the whole of the Earth’s marine ecosystem?
How much energy will be required to produce all the acid and alkali for this idiocy?
How will that energy be produced? From CO2 emitting fossil fuels?
Don’t a lot of the things which thrive in the sea need CO2 to survive?
It seems this briliant idea will expensively remove in one year about as much CO2 as China produces in a couple of minutes or less
And then of course, there is the whole issue that rising CO2 is good for the planet as it causes increased plant growth and a greening of the planet:
The inverse is also true. At the start of the 20th Century, atmospheric CO2 levels (the black line on the image below) were at around 300 ppm (parts per million). This was an historic low:
It is estimated that were CO2 levels to fall towards 250 ppm, then plant life would start to wither and we’d all starve. It would actually be rather amusing if some green grifter ‘scientists’ did find a way to reduce atmospheric CO2 to below 250 ppm and thus wipe out all life on Earth. I wonder how the increasingly climate-bothering Mr Attenborough would make any ‘Life on Earth’ programmes when there wasn’t any life on Earth any more thanks to the climate catastrophist idiots cutting the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 levels?
And. of course, there is no ‘climate crisis’:
I could go on. But instead I recommend you look at the readers’ comments on this insanity below an article about this on THE DAILY SCEPTIC. Clearly DAILY SCEPTIC readers are a lot more intelligent that Britain’s supposed ‘scientists’ and useless politicians: (click on link below)
Great celebration for our useless government. Apparently UK inflation is down from 2.8% last month to 2.6% in March 2025 compared to March 2024.
But I suspect that very few people actually know what the inflation (CPI – Consumer Price Index) figures include and what they don’t include.
Here’s the structure of the main items in the CPI inflation index:
Looking at the different inflation rates, I struggle to see how they all add up to only a 2.6% rise in the CPI. I guess it must have something to do with the weighting of the various items.
But the real issue for me is that these CPI figures give little idea of the real cost of living increases which are crushing many UK households and businesses. For example, the CPI doesn’t include:
Council Tax – up by a minimum of 5%. For 2025-26, the government is letting six areas introduce bigger rises. Bradford Council increased bills by 10% and they rose by 9% in Newham, and Windsor and Maidenhead. Birmingham, Somerset and Trafford put bills up by 7.5%
Water bills – up 26% on average, but up to 47% in some areas
Electricity and gas – For a typical household paying by Direct Debit for dual fuel, the energy price cap will increase by 6.4% to £1,849 per year
Rents – In 2024, UK private rents saw an increase of 9.0% in the 12 months to December 2024, with London experiencing the highest rent inflation at 11.5%
House prices – In 2024, UK house prices experienced a rise of 4.7%. However, this growth wasn’t uniform across all regions. Northern Ireland saw the highest increase at 7.1%, while England’s overall increase was 3.1%. Scotland experienced a 4.4% rise, and Wales saw a 2.7% increase
Private education – up by 10% to 20%
Cost of employing someone – National Insurance rates up by 8.7% from 13.6% of salary to 15% of salary and the threshold that employers start paying National Insurance on an employee’s earnings fell from £9,100 to £5,000 a year.
Business rates – 75% relief on business rates, charged on most non-domestic properties, will continue at a lower rate of 40%.
So, if you’ve got a feeling that your cost of living and your employer’s costs are really rocketing up well above the 2.6% suggested by the latest CPI figures, then you’re right.
As per usual, don’t believe anything our worthless mainstream media tells you.
Can anyone see that there’s a slight practical problem with this means of transport? If you can, you’re a lot smarter than 99% of our political leaders.
Our brilliant government is trying to save the Scunthorpe steelworks. Starmer’s idiots don’t want to nationalise the company. Instead they claim to be looking for a private-sector partner. But what private-sector company would invest in the uninvestible?
Here are industrial energy prices from a few countries:
Hooray, as you can see, thanks to our scientifically-challenged political elites, Britain is truly leading the world with its ludicrously high electricity prices.
Electricity makes up around a third of the cost of blast furnace steel:
So, how can a blast furnace in a country with the world’s highest energy prices compete with steel from countries with much lower energy prices?
This brings us back to the utter absurdity of our government’s (lack of) industrial policies:
If you and I can see this, why can’t the political elites?
David Craig, on May 2nd, 2025
