Wishing you all a serene New Year. All is not lost. I’ll be posting my own observations here, in text and voice, as well as my gists of non-English news of significance, and Biblical content relevant to what Eastern Approaches covers as a sub-brand of UK Column: geopolitics, education and constitutional matters—for the English-speaking world, the European continent and the Near East.

My Armenian friend Gevorg has a Russian-language channel at t.me/GevorgVirats_org and cogitates on 2021 as follows (my excerpted translation):

It has been a busy, tough year. Together we have published several unique books; conducted dozens of lectures and lessons [in Russian] on a variety of topics, from music and poetry to geopolitics; and laid the groundwork for considered, highly compelling undertakings for the year ahead.
True, we do not know whether this next year will be ours to have; but we have had a year just past, and it was lived, as far as possible, meaningfully and purposefully.

In general, as I slide precipitously into what they call middle age, I understand more and more that peacemaking is the most important thing a person can do in his life. Not a false peace, not an imaginary one, but a lasting peace, based on the solid foundation of an awareness of the value of everything that the Almighty has created.

Note by Alex: A couple of these books mentioned by Gevorg will soon be available in English from Western-based vendors, God willing, through my always fruitful collaboration with him, which now stretches back nearly a quarter of a century.

Then I'll be the one to say it. Here's to an upset in 2022. Because why not have hope? Why shouldn't we? Why let them take away a crucial part of what makes us human? Our ability to dream and in this case, to dream of a better life for ourselves and a better and freer world for humanity. Here's to the kinds of miracles and unexpected acts of bravery and courage that define the most pivotal moments in the history of mankind. If 2022 is tougher than 2021 let it be tougher because we fought harder. Let it be the year that makes us stronger and more determined. We must see this struggle as like a physical fight, your opponent will become uncertain and demoralized by your stamina and sheer force of will to stay in the fight for as long as possible. All that is required of you is everything you have and when you have nothing left to give, with the power of God you can find another gear. Let the challenges ahead of you become opportunities to adapt and overcome. Here's to a spanner in the works of the New World Order. Here's to ten thousand sloppy and careless mistakes of the technocrats. Here's to their miscalculations and collective negligence. Here's to dissent in their ranks. Here's to all those future whistleblowers. Here's to the spectacular failure of globalist entities previously deemed too big to fail. Here's to the Great Reset falling at the last hurdle. Here's to us never giving up and spreading the truth no matter how difficult. Here's to a plot twist of our creation. Here's to the unexpected and spontaneous. Here's to the fearless and the plucky outsiders. Here's to the outside bet. Here's to 2022 and whatever it brings us. May you all be blessed and courageous. God bless and happy New Year.

The bravest judge in Portugal (recently featured on UK Column News) says:
"It's preferable to contend and die for our dignity than to live devoid of dignity."

It was always said by Royal Affairs commentators that Her Majesty was resolved never to make any former Prime Minister a Companion of the Order of the Garter who had damaged the institution of the monarchy by divulging confidences or by arrogating to Downing Street anything that the people had endowed the monarch with—and that this included Blair (for his presidential administration and usurpation of war powers), Brown and Cameron.
The Order of the Garter is neither a good nor a constitutional institution, but it is the most precious and exclusive award in the gift of the Sovereign.
That Her Majesty has now been prevailed upon to admit Blair to the Order, a decade and a half after the end of his premiership, can only portend that her will is slipping and/or that others are now fully using her as their agent.

For the best chance of being able to fall asleep soundly and with a quiet conscience all 365 nights this year, we would do well to live our lives in discrete days, even if we do have grand projects in mind. This approach to life was recently well enunciated by investor Melissa Ciummei, a Northern Irish equivalent of Catherine Austin Fitts and an excellent new commentator on the scene.
Mrs Ciummei said that each day, she did some physical work or exercise, some mental work, some financial work (one could broaden this, for those of other callings, to “paid work” and/or “getting personal administration done”) and some spiritual feeding. Those with significant parental or caring responsibilities will, of course, have a different division of their day. With that caveat in place, I think all of us can conceive of our days in these quarters (not necessarily of four equal durations), and ideally in that sequence each day, in the normal course of events.

My constitutional education project on this channel this year is to read one of the 286 principles of good government a day, six days a week, as a brief voice clip. The principles are taken from the mature work of W. Cleon Skousen: his monumental The Making of America. (Skousen earlier published The Naked Capitalist, the best dissection of the real meaning of Carroll Quigley’s deliberately turgid tome Tragedy and Hope, thereby laying bare the Anglo-American deep-state playbook in which Quigley tutored Bill Clinton at Georgetown.)
Why bother at all? Frankly, because we’re on our own from now on. Our government isn’t ours, no branch of it, and anarchy is even worse than tyranny, so serious dissidents are faced with no option but to reformulate government locally, otherwise known as reasserting the ancient principles of liberty under law.
Why am I promoting an American author’s study of the prerequisites that make earthly happiness and prosperity possible, and why one written by a Mormon, at that? Why not a British or a Continental author?
1. American dissidents actually do the hard work of researching such things as an exhaustive study of underlying principles. British (pseudo-)dissidents all too often content themselves with some wry observations in lecture format, or the written equivalent thereof.
2. European legal thinkers, almost to a man, rubbish the Biblical heritage and the Anglo-Saxon heritage which demonstrably gave Ancient Israel and the British Isles far more freedom and stability over many centuries than man’s law codes gave the Continentals. Skousen, almost uniquely, honours both, and acknowledges expressly that the US Constitution’s greatness proceeds from the Founding Fathers’ great learning of both streams, coupled with their thorough awareness of the shortcomings of the Greco-Roman constitutionalists and the Continental absolutists. Skousen is neither a Jew-basher nor an England-basher.
3. Britain never applied at home the lessons of the American Revolution, and (as a forthcoming major UK Column article will set out in great detail) we and our monarchs permitted the executive branch of government to take over our courts and our parliament. As expressed by Thomas Thacher of Massachusetts when the Founding Fathers were wondering (like us today) whether it really fell to poor old them to make all this unprecedented effort of reasserting liberty rather than trying to fix the government currently on offer, nominally approved by us via the Crown:
“In Britain, the government is said to consist of three forms—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy [N.B.: Thacher is referring to the Crown as executive, the Lords as judiciary and us in Parliament as legislature]; but, in fact, is but a few steps removed from absolute despotism. In the Crown is vested the power of adding at pleasure to the second branch [stuffing the Lords and judiciary with unsackable cronies]; of nominating to all the places of honour and emolument [making Blair a Knight of the Garter or printing unlimited money for wicked causes]; of purchasing, by its immense revenues [our taxes], the suffrages of the House of Commons [buying votes by party whipping, propaganda and electoral regulation]. The voice of the people [in Britain] is but an echo of the king; and their boasted privileges lie entirely at his mercy.”

Principle 1 of 286: The constitution is ordained and established by “We the People”.
Not actually a specifically American concept:

The English scholastic philosopher John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English so that it could be understood by the common man and woman. In the introduction, he said:
This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
This was half a millennium before a blood-soaked American politician stole those words [in the Gettysburg Address] to justify an unnecessary war that had killed three quarters of a million Americans.
Wycliffe saw that when we write the law of God in our hearts, then He governs us. When this happens, then we have no need of earthly rulers, nor their phoney regulations, nor their theft, nor their fear. He also saw that God’s law, as it requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves, prohibits all forms of slavery, including that imposed by a dictatorial state, for the dictator is bound to love the humblest of his people as himself and so cannot impose any tyranny.

— https://www.ukcolumn.org/blogs/fear-not

As we left the New Year’s Day service this morning, my wife wished happy new year to one of the families in our congregation and complimented the four-year-old on his bike. “You must be so proud of that Christmas present,” she said. “Yes,” he beamed, “but I’m wearing a white shirt, ma’am.”
His father grinned. “Do you know what he’s on about?”, he asked my wife. “His ambition is to preach the Gospel, and he reckons he’s halfway there with his crisp white shirt.”
What makes this all the more remarkable is that our congregation isn’t one of rugged hicks, nor of pseudo-intellectuals, though there’s no shortage of either kind of church in the Dutch Bible Belt. This is a lad whose father is a talented carpenter—one who reads serious books after work. The lad’s grandfather left school at twelve to be a bargeman’s hand, and has been an elder for 25 years, during which time he’s seen a generation rise that stays in education twice as long as he did and that can read half as well as him. But families like these carry on with quiet self-sufficiency, ready to survive and thrive in the post-national wasteland of tomorrow. Right in the heart of our workaday city between Rotterdam and Brussels, and in so many other places.
Read more about how this heritage arose here: https://www.ukcolumn.org/literacy-part-1-why-we-taught-ourselves-to-read

This year’s Lord’s Day readings will be a full audiobook (in instalments) of Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, a book widely acknowledged by Christians as being unequalled for its insights on how to “resist the devil and he will flee from you” (as the Epistle of James puts it).

Brooks—one of a whole crop of Puritans trained at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in the lead-up to the English Civil War—was kicked out of the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy, along with several thousand others of the best vicars, in the Great Ejection. He stayed in his parish after his banishment from the pulpit, and carried on spiritual warfare in writing.

Thomas Brooks was a particularly favourite author of the most successful Christian preacher of all time, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (a Baptist in Victorian London).

Satan’s device No. 1: to present the bait and hide the hook. (Thomas Brooks)