What's the Issue Everything is fine. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Everything is fine. Breathe in. Breathe out. Because the world, our spinning blue marble we call home, has never been in better shape. Truly. If you squint hard enough, ignore enough headlines, and consume sufficient quantities of your preferred anti-depressant, you might even believe that.

Let's start with the geopolitical masterclass currently being performed on the world stage. World leaders, those infallible towering intellects that we elected to steer our civilisation away from the rocks, are doing a spectacular job of steering us straight into them. Forever wars raging on multiple continents with all the casual permanence of a Netflix subscription nobody can figure out how to cancel. Diplomacy, that quaint old art of talking instead of bombing, has been largely replaced by strongly worded posts on social media platforms owned by men who appear to be in a prolonged childish competition to see who can most resemble a Bond villain. NATO's despicable plot to sneak a nuke into Ukraine to try and balance the power dynamic in the war, has to be criminal at the least. Diabolical by any standards and an indication of just how deranged these leaders are.

Europe is simultaneously navigating a land war on its eastern border while its political centre crumbles faster than a dry supermarket croissant, with far-right movements rising across the continent like a particularly enthusiastic sourdough. Macron, Mendelson, and that German chancellor guy with his attack-animal Fond-Of-Lying, all absolute gems in the crown of defunct governance.

The Middle East, perennially the world's favourite powder keg, continues to exceed expectations. Some newscasters still refer to a "Ceasefire Agreement" in Gaza, I kid you not. US envoy to Israel, Mike Huckabee, kicked the hornet's nest when he espoused his theological wisdom on Israel's biblical right to claim the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. The 22 member Arab League and 57 member Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned his divisive inflammatory remarks as they rightly should. My head is still shaking slowly from side to side. I think he believes his own bull schlaka. Trump and Bibi prepare to attack Iran and then we will see a real powder keg. The Zionists want it so bad they are going to get it.

Meanwhile, the United States of America, that beacon of democracy, land of opportunity, home of the, er whatever, has achieved the remarkable feat of making the rest of the world nostalgic for a time when America's dysfunction was just entertaining rather than life threatening. Trump under the direct supervision of Bibi made the whole country a patsy to a small state somewhere east of DC. The extent of the US' fall from grace is unimaginable, so grand a scale it has achieved. So defiling and despicable their antics have been.

China and the West continue their thrilling economic decoupling, which is going swimmingly for everyone except the billions of ordinary people caught in the middle. The corrupt United Nations holds meetings. Very important meetings. With excellent catering, I'm sure.

Climate change, that inconvenient subplot everyone agreed to take seriously and then largely didn't, continues apace. Even though the cat is out the bag and everybody now knows that C02 is an essential gas to life on earth and not a pollutant, Governments continue to announce ambitious targets for 2050, while they spray us like bugs with cloudseeding chemicals designed to blot out the sun while forcing green taxes to pay for solar panels. I couldn't make this stuff up even if I was goofed. The planet is running a fever and we've responded by arguing about whether the thermometer is biased.

And then, oh, then there is South Africa, a country of such breath-taking natural beauty, such extraordinary human resilience, such profound potential, governed with such magnificent, almost artistic incompetence that one can only assume it's deliberate. An elaborate performance piece. Governance as absurdist theatre. Just listen to any one of the many commissions covering up the obvious.