What Are We Fighting For

Descendants of Revolutionaries,

  Well, we did get fooled again, ... again. The "Greatest Generation" got through the Depression and WW-2, and we "boomers" got out of Vietnam, though I missed the bullet, myself, as the draft ended a month before I turned 18 in 1976, our "bicentennial year". You can tell that this new boss is the same as the old boss...

C.j. Hopkins is trapped in Kafkaesque liberal Germany, designated as Thought Criminal 231Js1736/23, but he's not going softly into that good night.

You see his crime, COVID-denial with Nazi Sympathies (not a hint of irony). 

​ T​he Berlin State Prosecutor’s office is pursuing its criminal investigationof me for allegedly“disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,”which according to Germany’s Grundgesetzcould send me to prison for up to three years...​

..​I’m facing criminal charges, and being threatened with who knows how many years in prison, or thousands of Eurodollars in fines, for (a) stating what has now been widely acknowledged, and what was generally understood by every serious epidemiologist until the Spring of 2020, namely, that mask-mandates do not work, and thus are nothing but symbolic measures designed to generate and enforce mass obedience, and (b) insulting the Minister of Health of Germany, who happens to be a fanatical serial liar who is directly responsible for the serious injury and death of … well, we’ll never know how many people.
​  ​Neither of which are actual crimes. Not even in the Federal Republic of Germany.

​  ​The pretext for the charges I am facing is the swastika behind the mask, which, as I noted in a recent essay, is a play on the international bestseller, The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, by William Shirer, which you can buy in any bookshop in Berlin. Incidentally, my book has also been a bestseller, at least on Amazon (in countries where it’s not banned) and Barnes & Noble, but I’ve still got a little ways to go before I get to Shirer territory. https://consentfactory.org/2023/07/03/the-criminalization-of-dissent-revisited/

  On this day in history... Shanghai Cooperation Organization calls for multipolar world order as Iran joins grouping 

(Russia and Iran both have quite an interest in getting China, India and Pakistan to compromise and cooperate. -A typesetter's pun? It might mean "indicating")

 Indiating a lack of consensus, India stays out of statements on economic cooperation and on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, due to projects in PoK; SCO calls for cooperation on countering radicalisation and digital technology.

​  ​The grouping’s decision to induct Iran as its ninth and latest member was one of a number of agreements signed at the summit. However, India, who hosted the summit for the first time, refused to join other members on paragraphs relating to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)in the joint statement, and stayed out of a joint statement on SCO Economic Development Strategy 2030, indicating a lack of consensus in the grouping. Mr. Modi also took sharp aim at Pakistan for cross-border terrorism, and at China for connectivity projects that do not respect sovereign boundaries.​

​  ​The SCO grouping now comprises China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.​..

..In a reference to sanctions on Russia and Iran by the U.S. and European countries, SCO members jointly criticised non-UN sanctions as “incompatible with the principles of international law”, which have a “negative impact” on other countries. SCO members also agreed to explore the use of “national currencies” for payments within the grouping, which would circumvent international dollar-based payments...

..“Russia is confidently resisting and will continue to resist external pressure, sanctions and provocations,” Mr. Putin said, adding that Russian resolve was “clearly demonstrated by the Russian political circles and the whole of society in uniting against the attempted armed rebellion.”...
..Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, which expects to be inducted as an SCO member next year, hoped that the next summit due to be held in Kazakhstan would be an “in-person summit”...
​..​“[SCO] member States confirm their commitment to formation of a more representative, democratic, just and multipolar world order based on the universally recognized principles of international law, multilateralism, equal, joint, indivisible, comprehensive and sustainable security, cultural and civilizational diversity, mutually beneficial and equal cooperation of states with a central coordinating role of the UN,”it said... https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-supports-proposal-for-reform-modernisation-of-sco-pm-modi/article67040453.ece

​  ​MAJOR REVALUATION OF GOLD & PRECIOUS METALS IS IMMINENT​   ​So with a motley crew of weak leaders in Europe, things don’t look any better if we look west to the US. Sadly, the US hasn’t got a leader at all. It seems that Biden has got his strings pulled by an unelected and unaccountable team around him. This is an extremely vulnerable situation for what has been the mightiest country in the world. A major military power without a leader is very dangerous.
​  ​As President Eisenhower said in the 1950s:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
​  ​As empires die, weak leaders are the norm and seem a necessary condition to exacerbate  the inevitable collapse.
So we can all speculate about the outcome of the current crisis in the West and how it will all end. These situations seldom consist of individual events but are normally processes that take a number of years or even decades.
​  ​We must remember that we have already seen half a century of decline since 1971 so we are now likely to experience an acceleration of the process.​..

..I have long argued that holding Western sovereign debt is financial suicide. Lately some big names agree with me whether it is Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan- “Don’t touch US bonds”- or Ray Dalio the very successful hedge fund investor – “It would take 500 years to get the money back”. Yes, but what money I​ ​wonder? 

...There has not been a major gold discovery  for 4 years...

​..​Not only do we have peak oil but also peak gold. So the world is facing a vicious  a cycle of increasing energy costs leading to higher costs of extracting precious metals and other commodities.
​  ​This confirms that high inflation is here to stay, leading to higher interest rates and very high risk of debt defaults within the private and sovereign sectors.
​   ​To hold US dollars is to hand your wealth to the state which is likely to either debase it, lose it, spend it, confiscate it or misappropriate it in any other way. https://goldswitzerland.com/major-revaluation-of-gold-precious-metals-is-imminent/

​  ​Economic analyst and financial writer David Morgan went against the majority of financial gurus and predicted at the end of 2022 that there was no way the Fed was going to cut interest rates.  He said on USAWatchdiog.com in December, “Cut Interest Rates & Dollar is Done, Toast, It’s Over.”  Fed Head Jay Powell said this past week the Fed was raising interest rates at least two more times to “fight inflation.”  This was a direct hit by Morgan.  

​  ​Morgan sees a coming currency crisis and a war crisis.  Morgan explains, “Yes, we have both a currency crisis and a war crisis.  Let’s start with the currency crisis.  My favorite phrase for what is going on is ‘All fiat currency fails.’ ...​ 

..Morgan also says, “The Great Reset is what the bankers want, but the Great Reject . . . will come from many who will not want to go down that way.  That’s what is going to be the most interesting because anyone who is awake, and there are more people waking up all the time, they will understand that you cannot go from one fiat phony currency, lie-based system into another one that is digital only.”
​  ​On the war crisis, the dark powers running the world want war.  Why?  Morgan says, “It covers up all the things that are wrong, and it also takes them off the hook.  It was the war.  The war did it.  All wars are bankers’ wars, and they are on both sides.  They make money regardless. . . . The main things are profit, but it also is mitigating their responsibilities.  They can get most people to think that it was the war that caused all this poverty, and, of course, the war will do that. . . . They don’t have a real conflict with Ukraine and Russia.  They just need a way out, and it is the most profitable way out.  They are going to default on all this debt, and this is how they are going to do it.” https://usawatchdog.com/nothing-can-stop-currency-crisis-war-crisis-david-morgan/#more-28448

​  ​NATO Might Use 'Nuclear Incident' to Enter Ukrainian Conflict, Russian Energy Official Warns

​  ​As Karchaa explained in an interview with a Russian media outlet, the much-hyped Ukrainian "counteroffensive" has already run out of steam and "Ukraine’s Western masters" now realize that Kiev cannot prevail on the battlefield even with all the military assistance provided by NATO.
And since the West has already raised the stakes to the point where Kiev’s defeat would mean its own defeat as well, "aggressive Western politicians" are now mulling drastic options, such as a black op at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant that would result in a "nuclear incident" and create a legal pretext for NATO to directly enter the Ukrainian conflict. https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/nato-might-use-nuclear-incident-to-enter-ukrainian-conflict-russian-energy-official-warns--1111632981.html

​  ​U.S. Moves "Constant Phoenix" Nuke-Sniffer Plane to Crete

​  ​The United States moved a specialized aircraft Designated "Constant Phoenix" to the island of Crete. This plane's job is to sniff the atmosphere for proof of nuclear materials in the air. With all the talk in Ukraine about an attack coming against the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, this plane's task is obvious - find reason to blame Russia. https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/u-s-moves-constant-phoenix-nuke-sniffer-plane-to-crete

​  Aleks at Black Mountain Analysis thinks Russia will move to surround Kiev in August, to force a settlement​. The Ukrainian army and western weapons systems, especially air defense, will be exhausted, and the firm ground will be optimum for tank warfare. 

  So far, Russia has been winning a war of attrition through patience and military production, and sparing Russian lives, while weakening NATO as an alliance, as well as depleting their war equipment and weakening their resolve.

  I personally think Russia will continue to move incrementally. Russian leaders are widely acknowledging that this war against the western globalist imperial system will last for a decade, in one form or another. This form is working well for them at the moment. Additionally, the world is more impressed with Russian restraint, while prevailing, and notes that Russia is growing stronger, while NATO grows more fragile.

War Analysis [i]

​  Gilbert Doctorow has insightful analysis of how Vladimir Putin sees Russian history, and how he can avoid another Russian tragedy.​

Documentary film “Death of an Empire”​  The key to Vladimir Putin’s remarks in his televised address following the suppression of the Prigozhin mutiny on avoidance of civil strife as the highest state priority

​  ​This past Sunday the Kultura channel of Russian state television re-launched a documentary film that it first broadcast a year ago, probably with little fanfare then, because it had completely escaped my attention.  And over the last year, the film, entitled “Death of an Empire: the Russian Lesson,” was hiding in plain view: it had been posted on youtube.com, where it is still accessible. 
However, this time state television went to great lengths to ensure the widest possible audience on air.​..​ ..It is beyond doubt that that the Russian president has taken on board the “lesson” of this film.  Or, if we may go beyond the title to the substance, he has taken on board the several lessons. And what may these lessons be? They come from the logical structure of the film, which does not just focus on causality within the February 1917 Revolution but gives us an overview of Russian society, its standard of living at all levels in 1913, before the distortions introduced by the strains of World War...

​..The deep culpability of precisely the Anglophile, or more broadly speaking, the liberal elements of Russian society in all spheres of life for the coup d’état of February 1917 is, of course, highly relevant to any discussion today of post-Communist Russia, where these same elements took power and stood behind the presidency of Boris Yeltsin from the earliest days following the dissolution of the USSR.. It is relevant to the ongoing purge of “fifth column” personalities that has gathered speed from the start of the Special Military Operation. These “cockroaches coming out of the woodwork,” as Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko described them in a televised speech this past week, came particularly under the spotlights following the Prigozhin armed insurrection. There is also a necessary connection in all this with the identification on Russian state television of “Anglo-Saxons” as the national enemy number one...

..From my perspective, the most astonishing and valuable contribution of this documentary film is in the initial third or so of running time when the narrator offers an excellent, I would sayunparalleled survey of Russian society, economy, medical care, the educational system, science and innovation, among other themes.  All that he says is backed up by very impressive memoir literature of outstanding Russians and foreign visitors, as well as by state statistics from tsarist and Soviet times...

..Tikhon offers a vision of Russia under Nicholas II that turns upside down every generalization about Russian society before WWI that you are likely to have heard. Russia as we all “know” was always primitive, poor, illiterate and oppressed...

..Khrushchev wrote that in his childhood before the Revolution workers lived much better than they did under Soviet rule. Moreover, in 1932 when he was already a rising star among Communist Party functionaries he acknowledged that his income was less than that of pre-1917 workers.

​  ​The memo from the archive of Alexei Kosygin, who was Head of Government in the USSR alongside Party Secretary Brezhnev, was prepared in the 1960s upon his orders​... The memo he received back explained how his father, newly married at age 20, took a job in one of the many metalworking factories in Petrograd and was able to afford to rent a three room apartment in a repectable building of a nearby residential neighborhood and could as his family grew hire a domestic helper and take the family to the theater on Sundays. And his place of work was not as highly paid as the Putilov Works, where workers’ wages were on a par with their peers in Germany or France.​

​  Tikhon overturns the falsehoods by introducing a factual record which you won’t find reflected in the histories of Russia in your bookstore or library. He is careful also to explain that much of the amazing progress that he found in the reign of Nicholas II followed the Revolution of 1905 when the government sought to prevent any repetitions by introducing social reforms that put Russia on a par or above European standards in terms of public health, education and other critical measures of the good life. As a result of these reforms, the percent of cultivated land held as private property by the peasantry was well over 90% in European Russia, and it was 100% in Asiatic Russia. By comparison, Tikhon tells us, zero percent of cultivated land in England was owned by those farming the land; it was all the property of wealthy landowners who rented it out to farmers.​..

​..He tells us that the length of the working day in Russia was mostly nine and a half hours during WWI, whereas it was eleven or more in Western Europe. The surpluses of grain harvests were so great that even in wartime Russia had no rationing, whereas in Western Europe food rationing cards were nearly ubiquitous due to scarcity.
​  ​In the final decade of the Empire, there was a vast expansion of health care which was provided free to two thirds of the population. This led to a dramatic fall in childhood and infant deaths, in turn raising the population by 50 million in the years of Nicholas’ reign.  Literacy rates, which were researched by Soviet officials at the start of the 1920’s, showed that 90% or more of adolescents in towns and villages across Russia were able to read thanks to universal primary education that was introduced after 1905.
​  ​There was amazing growth in manufacturing across all industrial sectors. In 1913 the Russian Empire already accounted for 10% of global GNP.​..

​..I am not aware of anyone who collected and set out the overview of Russian society and sources of its prosperity in 1913 as this documentary film put on air yesterday has done. https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/03/documentary-film-death-of-an-empire/

​  I could not bring myself to read all of this. I experienced waves of emotion several times. 80 Years Ago: The 1943 Battle of Kursk: Largest Tank Battle in History https://www.globalresearch.ca/80-years-ago-battle-kursk-largest-tank-battle-history/5824206

  Nigel Farage was bank-blacklisted. For months he just can’t get an account anywhere after being dropped by his bank without any reason being given.

​  ​Days after Brexiteer Nigel Farage told the world about his experience of having his bank accounts abruptly closed by a major banking group, without a valid reason provided, The FT reports that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said the government will take action over banks blacklisting customers who hold controversial views.
As we detailed at the time, Farage claimed that:
​  ​“The establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts,” adding, "this is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system.” ...
​..​"The banking industry in the UK has become politicised. We are going down a road where anybody in Britain could say something on Facebook or Twitter that a bank doesn’t like and lose their accounts."
​  ​In response, Chancellor Hunt has asked City minister Andrew Griffith to investigate the practice of lenders closing down the accounts of individuals or companies whose views they disagree with.
​  ​“Banks and payment providers occupy a privileged place in society and it would be a concern if financial services were being denied to those exercising the right to lawful free speech,” https://www.zerohedge.com/political/farage-bank-ban-sparks-uk-govt-probe-blacklisting-accounts-over-political-views

​  ​Reason editor at large Nick Gillespie told RFK Jr “One of the critiques of your candidacy or even your public profile is that you traffic routinely in conspiracies and that kind of conspiracist mindset where almost everything that we take for granted is bad.”
​  ​“So it’s, you know, the Covid vaccines, you know, not only don’t work, but they’re more dangerous than Covid itself,” Gillespie continued, going on to reel off a list of ‘conspiracies’ that RFK has endorsed.
​  ​5G and Wi-Fi are controlling, you know, controlling our mind. The government, you know, aspects of the government that are supposed to be in favor of trying to help people, actually hurting them. AIDS is not, you know, primarily caused by HIV or HIV is not involved in AIDS. Atrazine is changing frog sexuality and by implication, human sexuality. Your cousin is not, your cousin Michael Skakel is not guilty of the murder of Martha Moxley that he was found guilty of.
​  ​You know, the 2004 election in Ohio was stolen. It kind of goes on and on. Do you how do you answer people who say, you know, like this is the sign of somebody whose thinking is fundamentally conspiracy-minded rather than kind of dealing with brute reality? You know, that is difficult and, you know, and terrible, but is not what you seem to be making of it.
​  ​However, when Kennedy asked Gillespie to “show me where I get it wrong,”  and offered to go through each example point by point, the host didn’t seem too keen.
​  ​“You did something that is very unfair. Which is, you made a series of characterizations of my beliefs that you read in the newspapers. Many of which are just wrong,” Kennedy stated. https://summit.news/2023/07/04/video-rfk-jr-pushes-back-when-accused-of-being-a-candidate-who-traffics-routinely-in-conspiracies/

Are Humans Really Causing Climate Change?​  (er, how much?)

Are Humans Really Causing Climate Change?

​CO2 and Methane Producer (pictured starting a bike ride this morning​ in Yoakum)