How on earth did it get to be October? The temperature’s 33C, the birds are singing, and the massive quantities of work that I have to get finished within the next fortnight are absolutely terrifying [*].
Since all the headline news seems to involve either tedious rehashes of politics (in brief: no presidential debate or party conference speech has ever made a blind bit of difference to anything; they’re like pre-season friendlies for people who follow politics instead of sport) or horrible things happening to women and girls either now or in the past (in brief: it’s impressive how much difference both changing societal attitudes and modern surveillance techniques have made to abusers getting caught), I haven’t had a whole lot to say, beyond one-liners on Twitter.
The global economy? Well, that hasn’t really changed in 12 months. Austerity in Europe failed some more, as everyone who isn’t a raving far-right ideologue predicted. The half-austere USA did slightly better, as, etc. Australia continues to outperform by virtue of being a rock of gold and coal the size of the USA with the population of Florida. Meaningless statements are being made by the ECB, which might be of vague importance if you’re a day-trader or a Greek, but certainly not otherwise.
Assorted Middle East wars: the only one which really matters (unless you live there, in which case there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference in survival rates between the ones where we toppled evil dictators and the ones where we didn’t) is Israel/Iran. It seems unlikely that Benji will do anything before the US election. That’s The One To Watch – a significant Israel/Iran campaign would be the most significant geopolitical thing since at least Iraq 2003, if not the fall of the USSR.
Off to Oktoberfest in Brisbane in a week and a bit, by which point the news still won’t have changed, but hopefully I’ll have a bit less of a workpile. Meanwhile, roger and out.
[*] an interesting difference between being freelance and employed is the extent to which employed people love the weekends, whilst as a freelancer I dread them. “NO, IT’S FRIDAY ALREADY. THIS CANNOT BE!”.