Tag: war

The Economic Decline of Germany

The suicidal decision to increase energy prices is now causing centuries-old German breweries to shut down:

The decline of the traditional German brewing industry shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, several breweries have filed for bankruptcy or closed permanently, resulting in the loss of centuries-old brewing traditions.

The latest victims are the Gambrinus Brewery in Weiden, Upper Palatinate, and the Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach, about 100 km southeast. Both are located in the Bavarian border region with the Czech Republic, an area often described as structurally weak. The nearly 100-year-old Gambrinus Brewery filed for insolvency on Friday at the Weiden District Court due to unpaid bills and outstanding wages. The brewery’s decline is attributed to rising costs, pandemic-related sales losses, and internal issues, with current production at around 15,000 hl, half its peak output.

On Thursday, it was announced that the insolvent Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach would close permanently after nearly 500 years, ceasing production. Despite intensive negotiations, no investors were willing to continue operations. Remaining employees have been let go, and the Viechtacher brand will continue to be produced at the nearby Hofmark Brewery in Loifling, located in the Cham district of the Upper Palatinate.

Last month, the 672-year-old Karmeliter-Bräu from Salz near Bad Neustadt an der Saale (about 75 km northeast of Würzburg) permanently closed its doors. The brand and distribution rights were acquired by Oettinger Brewery, one of Germany’s largest brewery groups, mainly active in the entry-level segment. It is speculated that the brand, named after a monastic order, will be used to establish the group in the higher-priced segment, similar to other well-known brands like Trappist, Augustiner, Paulaner, Franziskaner, Benediktiner, and Kapuziner.

In addition to various external and internal factors, the wave of brewery closures is also due to declining beer consumption in Germany. Recent figures show a significant drop in sales in June 2024 compared to June 2023, with a total decrease of 11.2% or nearly 1 million hl. The Federal Statistical Office reported that beer sales in June 2024, at 7.77 million hl, were the lowest for June since the Beer Tax Act was revised in 1993.

Prosperity is never a given. This decline, and in some cases, inevitable collapse of various societies is the direct result of the national elites being subverted and converted to false and foreign ideologies that promote dyscivilizational dysgenics. Diversity is not a strength, it is a fatal cancer to every society, as is readily observable in the histories of every fallen empire. The migrants are no better for the Germans than the Spaniards were for the Incas, or than the Arabs were for the Byzantines. In the end, it’s not the armies that eradicate a human society, but the women and children who normally follow them and eventually replace the native genetics with their own.

A Germany full of Germans is an economic powerhouse. An area of 357,022 square kilometers in the middle of Europe populated primarily by German-speaking Turks, Arabs, and Africans will be neither German nor an economic powerhouse. This is not rocket science.

The dirt is not magic. The ideas are not material. People will always live according to their own natural preferences. The transplantation of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to the New World is what made America what it was in the place of the American Indian societies that preceded it. Neither geography nor ideology nor language nor even religion are determinant in the end, as genetics ultimately and always dictates the destinies of nations.

As the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written, immigration is war. To be more specific, it is war on the native people and their culture.

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Pager Terror Attacks

It is generally accepted that Israel is to blame for a mass terrorist attack that injured more than 2900 people in Lebanon.

Israel carried out a pager bomb attack that left roughly 2,800 people injured and 12 dead in Lebanon and Syria yesterday fearing that Hezbollah was on the cusp of foiling their deadly plot, a new report has claimed.

Pager devices recently introduced by the group to beef up security exploded en masse yesterday, causing chaotic scenes and devastation in Lebanese hospitals. Israel is believed to have orchestrated the attack but has not claimed responsibility. Security sources believe Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, intercepted devices en route to Lebanon months ago and attached explosives to be used when needed to cripple the Iranian proxy group.

Still, questions remain as to why the attack was carried out on Tuesday. One American official told Axios it was ‘a use it or lose it moment’ as Hezbollah were understood to be getting close to uncovering Israeli espionage.

Three US officials told Axios that Israel decided to blow up the pager devices carried by Hezbollah members on Tuesday as they feared the group was close to uncovering their operation.

A security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.

One senior Lebanese security source told the news agency he believes the devices had been modified by Mossad ‘at the production level’ before arriving in Lebanon. ‘The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,’ the source said.

Hezbollah earlier this year ordered thousands of pagers to conduct communications after leader Hassan Nasrallah declared smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces. As many as 5,000 devices are believed to have affected, though not all went off on Tuesday, according to the Lebanese source. The source claimed Hezbollah ordered the pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, but executives there said the devices were actually manufactured and sold under licence by BAC Consulting in Budapest, Hungary.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, later said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. The pagers appeared to receive a coded error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate and beep for some 10 seconds. When the user pressed the pager’s button to cancel the alert, the explosives were detonated – a design that would ensure the pager was being held by the user at the time of the blast to inflict maximum damage.

The months-long operation by Mossad and the IDF represents an unprecedented security breach for Hezbollah, which vowed to exact revenge on Israel and continue its support for ally Hamas amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

First, this was obviously an own goal by Israel, which doesn’t seem to grasp that it is already considered to be a genocidal terrorist state by most of the world now due to the Gazacaust. The obvious probability of collateral damage, the trivial amount of military damage that could potentially be inflicted, and the indifference to civilian casualties make it a clear and obvious act of terrorism. There is no way this is going to improve the diplomatic crisis that Israel presently faces.

Second, there are three major implications in the Unintended Consequences department. One, who in their right minds is going to buy any Israeli technological product now or in the future? For all my opposition to anti-boycott laws and policies in the USA, I don’t follow the BDS movement and I’ve never had any issue with Israeli products in the past, but there is no chance I will ever buy or utilize any Israeli product that is capable of containing explosives in the future, and I very much doubt I am alone in this.

Two, Hezbollah’s leadership already wanted its fighters to stop using mobile phones. This mass attack on pagers has underlined the wisdom of the leadership’s position and will further reduce the likelihood that Hezbollah’s fighters will violate operational security.

And three, this should put a nail in the coffin of transhumanism. Only morons are going to put a chip in their hand, or in their head, in the knowledge that there is a genuine possibility that someone will have the ability to make it explode? It may even have a negative effect on device and smart phone sales over time, particularly if it is ever repeated.

These attacks were moderately successful. But they strike me as very ill-conceived and essentially non-military in conception. They are the sort of thing that Smart Boys in intelligence always concoct because they think it would be cool and clever, not the kind of operation that is conducive to actually winning wars.

UPDATE: Israel doubled down on its exploding device attacks:

Thousands of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah fighters have detonated across Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds of people including mourners at a funeral, witnesses and security sources have reported. The second wave of carnage comes a day after thousands of exploding pagers used by the group left almost 3,000 people injured and a dozen dead, including civilians and children. Lebanese media has also reported that home solar energy systems have blown up in several areas of Beirut. The latest explosions this afternoon have hit the country’s south and the capital Beirut, where dramatic time-lapse video shows multiple plumes of smoke rising above the skyline in different locations almost simultaneously.

This really doesn’t bode well for devices such as the iPhone that don’t permit users to change their own batteries. How can you trust that there isn’t an ounce or two of high-explosive attached to your battery if it’s in a sealed-off department?

It’s certainly an object lesson in “build your own communications equipment” for everyone around the world.

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Douhet Wept

There’s an amount of discussion of the potential ramifications for the Middle East of the Yemeni missile that was used to strike the Gezer power plant from 1,265 miles away.

The Israeli air defense failed to intercept the Yemeni missile primarily because it is capable of changing its course suddenly – Israeli Channel 12. The US Navy failed to intercept the missile in the Red Sea as well. Great possibility that this was hypersonic.

Yemen confirmed that they used a hypersonic ballistic missile in the attack on Tel Aviv Yemeni Armed Forces says it hit an Israeli military target in Yaffa (Tel Aviv) with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that traveled 2,040 kilometers. This is the first time that an Iranian-made hypersonic missile has been used in an attack on Israel.

No doubt this has some ominous implications for the prospective Israel-Iran war. But of far more concern to Americans should be the fact that the military force that just drove the US Navy from the Red Sea has just demonstrated the capacity to hit a target from long range. Which means that both Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of China and Russia, almost certainly possess the ability to sink the US Navy’s carriers at will from longer range than the carriers’ own air assets can reach.

We are rapidly entering the post-airpower age, which has considerable implications for the applicability of seapower. A considerable amount of strategic rethinking is now in order.

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Israel Invades the West Bank

Apparently the Gazacaust wasn’t enough, so the IDF has entered the West Bank in force now.

Having failed to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, Israel on August 28 began a war on the West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation Summer Camps’.

This Israeli assault on West Bank areas is the largest since 2002, with thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by helicopters and drones, invading northern West Bank cities, particularly targeting the refugee camps of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem.

I don’t know how much longer the US media is going to be able to pretend this isn’t a long-planned ethnic cleansing. I suppose the Israeli government figures they’ve gotten as much as they can out of the “helpless victims” routine and so it’s time to switch to mask off mode.

But this primarily strikes me as an escalation meant to encourage Iranian action before the Palestinians can further attrit the IDF and its US supplier.

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How to Get Your Ship Sunk

US Navy officers were caught putting a contraband Starlink satellite dish on their ship so they could stream TV and movies:

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment. For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

It’s like the idiotic mercenaries in Ukraine who carry their cell phones around with them until Mr. Kaliber or Mr. Iskander comes to visit, only on a grand scale. I think we can definitely say that this officially marks the end of the Pax Americana and the US Navy ruling the oceans. This navy will be lucky if any of its ships survive contact with the enemy. I mean, it’s already lost one battle against the landlocked forces of Yemen.

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Clowns are Falling

Sweden’s Foreign Minister unexpectedly resigned on the same day that the Kiev regime fired what seems to be about half of its cabinet.

Tobias Billstrom, who oversaw Sweden’s accession to NATO, has announced his resignation as foreign minister and retirement from politics, offering no reason for the move. Billstrom, 50, was first elected to the Swedish parliament in 2002 and was appointed foreign minister in 2022… As his biggest achievement over the past two years, Billstrom listed Sweden’s abandonment of its 200-year neutrality to join NATO “after a long and sometimes challenging process.”

I suspect the reason for his sudden resignation is that more Swedish “instructors” were killed in the recent double-Iskander missile strike in Poltava than have been reported. The number of KIA is officially 41, but Ukrainian locals are reporting up to 760 bodies in the morgue. To go from 200 years of safe neutrality to losing dozens of military officers in a single Russian strike is a catastrophe that the leading advocate of abandoning neutrality would have to be held responsible.

One hopes that the utterly deluded Swiss politicians who are so desperate to follow Sweden’s lead will learn from Billstrom’s example and abandon their insane campaign to sign Switzerland up for the same sort of military and economic devastation that is facing the NATO slave-nations.

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The Lead Villain of WWII

It wasn’t Stalin. It wasn’t Roosevelt. It wasn’t even Hitler. It was Winston Churchill, whose actions during and after WWI not only helped lay the foundations for WWII, but who unnecessarily caused millions to lose their lives by his determination to force Germany into a war of attrition.

My intention here is not to defend the actions of the Third Reich or any of its leaders, but only to support a narrow claim: that of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation. Germany and Italy did not want it – in fact, before the conquest of Western Europe, German leaders including Hitler were skeptical that they’d be able to take on Britain in a fight. We can be skeptical of Hitler’s motives for offering peace again and again, and for holding back against British civilians despite months and months provocations, but the fact is that Germany was offering peace, and by all accounts sincerely wanted it. After the annexation of Poland, Hitler told other party members, “The Reich is now complete.” Would Germany have eventually attack the Soviet Union? Perhaps. But they would not have done so in June 1941 if England had agreed to end a war which had no hope of victory short of expanding it into a much larger conflict, by bringing in the USA, USSR, or both.

Like the Turkish massacre of Armenians, the atrocities that took place in the east – for which the German perpetrators are responsible, make no mistake – could not have happened except in the chaos of a world war in which millions were already being killed. Because its so central to our founding ideology, we speak of World War 2 as if it was the best possible outcome, or certainly the least bad outcome, but any objective look shows that it was the worst possible outcome, and that it could have been avoided if not for the warmongers – chief among them Winston Churchill.

I’ve read Churchill’s own history of WWII. And his own justifications for his actions don’t add up even in his own words. The most damning evidence is his waging of a unilateral, one-way air war against German civilians immediately after the German military forces spared the trapped British soldiery at Dunkirk.

There were no good men in command of the Axis or the Allies. But then, as now, Clown World was the greater evil, as the state of our present world suffices to prove.

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Reading the Economic Winds

Turkiye has asked to join BRICS.

Turkiye has formally requested to join the BRICS group of emerging economies, Bloomberg cited informed sources as saying on 2 September.

Ankara “seeks to bolster its global influence and forge new ties beyond its traditional Western allies,” the sources said. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes “that the geopolitical center of gravity is shifting away from developed economies” and that the push to join BRICS “reflects its aspirations to cultivate ties with all sides in a multipolar world, while still fulfilling its obligations as a key member of NATO.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in early June that BRICS serves as a good alternative to the EU. Later that month, he confirmed that dialogue between Ankara and BRICS nations was ongoing – coming as Turkish frustration continued to grow due to stalled efforts to join the EU.

It wouldn’t be surprising if China and Russia inform Turkiye that before it can join BRICS, it has to leave NATO. With both the leading powers at de facto war with the USA, I don’t see how they can permit a country with an Article 5 obligation – however flimsy and easily-evaded – to go to war with them to join the organization. Of course, this may be part of the process that Erdogan anticipates; since BRICS is clearly of far more value to Turkiye than NATO, he might simply want the excuse of reacting to a BRICSian demand rather than proactively leaving NATO of his own accord.

But one way or another, I expect Turkiye to join BRICS and leave NATO. I also suspect that Macron’s brief and bizarre expression of interest in having France join BRICS was a test to see if BRICS would potentially consider accepting a NATO member, in order to see if it would be necessary to try forestalling Turkiye’s application.

And considering that Switzerland is still foolishly wandering down the path toward taking sides with NATO and the EU, Turkiye may well find themselves in an optimal geopolitical position, filling the very profitable space between BRICS and Clown World that Switzerland played in the 20th century during both World Wars and the Cold War.

UPDATE: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accepted the Kremlin’s invitation to attend the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan next month, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said on Tuesday.

It looks like the Turks are changing sides. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ll know the total collapse of Clown World is upon us when Japan does the same.

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William Lind Wept

I have read The Maneuver Warfare Handbook. I know what maneuver warfare is. And Simplicius is correct, what we’re seeing in the disastrous invasion of Russia by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not maneuver warfare:

Ukraine choosing a lightly guarded, strategically trivial rural border area to send a shock fist of their most elite brigades through against a bunch of unarmed conscripts is not the highpoint of “maneuver warfare”, and in no conceivable way heralds its return. Anyone can send a couple light cavalry battalions to go romping through an undefended countryside to temporary effect—but that is not at the heart of maneuver warfare’s basest definition.

The primary importance behind maneuver warfare in operational art revolves around defeating enemy armies. When you’re maneuvering around a place where no army even exists, you’re not really accomplishing much. If Ukraine had truly revived the art then it would have been able to effect this discipline against Russian reserves which subsequently arrived to dig in. But what happened? Ukrainian forces hit a wall and became quickly stalled by the slightest resistance from actual professional troops.

Anyone can “maneuver” around a small token complement of conscripts when they’re outnumbered five to one. The reason maneuver warfare was deemed dead on the main contact lines was because there, both sides are of comparable strength and armament—albeit sometimes asymmetrically.

The Kursk invasion was a move born of political desperation, there was no military justification for it nor was there even the most remote chance of somehow achieving either a tactical or a strategic advantage from it. And now that it has obviously failed, all that is left is attempting to provoke Russia into an escalation that will necessitate the entrance of the USA into a hot war against Russia.

But Russia already knows that, which is why neither Russia nor Iran has been responding in kind to Ukrainian and Israeli provocations.

Ukraine and Israel are trying to spark major regional wars which they believe will solve their own problems at the expense of others, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

When attrition, industrial capacity, and demographics are all on your side, there is no need for escalation.

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Weimar Britain

And no, this isn’t a result of Brexit. Germany is in even worse shape. But regardless, it is clear that the decision to back Ukraine has been a fatal one for the British economy, the coming collapse of which is becoming increasingly obvious in the wake of Ukraine’s recent defaulting on its massive debt:

22 July 2024: we have a deal!
Almost as soon as Zelensky’s visit in London concluded, the Government of Ukraine announced that a deal was reached with its main bondholders to restructure the country’s near-$20 billion worth of bonds, including a 37% reduction of the amounts owed. But this was only “an agreement, in principle,” reached with an “ad-hoc creditor committee,” and it wasn’t binding on all the bondholders. Instead, it imposed on Ukraine’s government “the Restructuring as soon as practicable,” to be implemented through a “consent solicitation.” In other words, Ukraine was expected to chase after its creditors and beg them to accept the deal, even offering them a 1.25% “consent fee.” Well, things were about to take a sharp turn for the worse…

24 July 2024: Ukraine strikes the Fitch iceberg
Only two days after Ukraine announced the deal with their bondholders, Fitch downgraded Ukraine’s credit rating from CC to C, reflecting extreme credit risk reserved for countries that “entered default or default-like process.” Significantly, Fitch made it explicit that “the publication of sovereign reviews is subject to restrictions and must take place according to a published schedule…”

31 July 2024: Zelensky ‘temporarily’ suspends debt repayments
Zelensky signed a law enabling Ukraine to suspend payments of external debts for two months (or longer).

Thursday, August 1 2024: debt repayments freeze takes effect
Bondholders’ grace period expires; Zelensky’s unilateral debt repayments freeze takes effect.

What’s peculiar about the British financial system is that the taxpayers are obliged to reimburse the Bank of England for any losses it sustains on its balance sheet assets. If the price of gilts on the bank’s balance sheet collapses, British taxpayers must cover those losses and make the bank whole. So, what kind of money are we talking about? As the the FT reported last July, the BOE has estimated it will require the Treasury to transfer a total of £150 billion by 2033 to cover expected losses on the central bank’s quantitative easing program.

So how much is £150 billion? Provided that things haven’t deteriorated since July 2023 (they have), we’re talking £2,240 per man, woman and child in Britain. Stand and deliver: that’s the ransom that the BOE is claiming from them! But given that the British workforce is only about half the population, and that private enterprise accounts for less than 55% of the British GDP, this sum represents nearly £10,000 per employee working in the private sector.

In all, the situation is impossible and all the cabinet reshuffles and cosmetic patches changed nothing of substance in the UK; they amounted to a sort of rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic as the ship is already sinking.

Translation: Ukraine is bankrupt and can’t even pretend that it’s going to repay all of its massive war-related debts after defeating the Russians. The economic collapse of the Ukrainian government will lead to a political collapse and the military collapse of its armed forces; Russia’s increasingly rapid advances in the Donbass are in part due to the beginning stages of the latter. And the surrender of Ukraine may lead directly to the economic collapse of Britain as well as several countries inside the EU, most likely those most deeply invested in Ukraine, which includes the Baltics, Germany, and Poland.

28 August 2024: Game Over? Ukraine Announces Partial Halt to Payments on Its Gargantuan Debt

This is the genius of Putin’s patient multi-front attritional strategy and why he has an economist running the Russian Ministry of Defense. He never needed to bomb Britain or Berlin in order to comprehensively defeat them. And as for the USA, well, China and Iran are taking the lead with regards to the Clown World’s major stronghold.

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