The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it. This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d'être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse. You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image ... to replace reality with its own "reality."

We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new "reality." That's what an official ideology is. It's more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute "reality." In order to make your beliefs "reality," you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific "experts," academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one "reality" and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their "realities." We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what's required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or ... you know, a deadly global pandemic.

When Donald Trump suggested renaming Fort Bragg after Al Sharpton, it was a punchline. Contrary to the former President's wishes, ten Army posts named after Confederate generals are to be renamed. Trump's joke could well be prophetic. To guess what kind of names the powers that be might go for, we can look to the Navy. Military ships have historically been named after warriors and Presidents. Breaking with tradition, the Navy has named a whole class of vessel after civil rights leader John Lewis. Each ship is being named after a civil rights figure. The USNS Harvey Milk, for example, is named after the first openly gay elected official in California (who also happened to be a long time supporter of Jim Jones, leader of a mass suicide cult). Other ships in the John Lewis class include Robert Kennedy; Lucy Stone, a suffragette; Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist; and Earl Warren, a former US Supreme Court justice. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said it was "important to recognize those who fought in a different way, who fought for the ideals we value as a country."

John Lewis died in 2020. At his eulogy, Barack Obama dubbed Lewis "a founding father" of a "fuller, fairer, better America". In that most tumultuous of years, statues of America's real founding fathers had been pulled from their pedestals. Of the "relentless young people" responsible for widespread rioting, looting, and arson, Obama said, "John, those are your children". The new fuller fairer America demands new symbols. According to one poll, many liberals would like to replace the stars and stripes with a flag that "better reflects our diversity as a people". In many ways, that's already happened: the rainbow ensign flies on military vehicles, on embassy buildings, and every redoubt of American domination. Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized diplomatic outposts to fly the Pride flag on the same flagpole as the U.S. flag - not just for pride month, but all year round. Blinken also authorized U.S. embassies to fly BLM flags and banners.

The British government has been accused of aiming to covertly implement a national ID programme, after it partnered with a company that has advocated turning vaccine passports into a multi-purpose document.

Entrust, an IT firm that bills itself as a "global leader in identities, payments, and data protection," was awarded a contract by the Department of Health and Social Care last month to work on the UK's Covid-19 vaccine certificate system. The company was given £250,000 ($346,000) to provide cloud-computing services for the government's Covid-status certification scheme, iNews reported. The contract is due to expire in March 2022, but the government has the option of extending it for an additional year.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated last month that proof of vaccination will be "necessary" for international travel, and in recent weeks reports have emerged claiming that the UK government may require the document of people attending sporting events or other large gatherings.

Supporters of socialist Pedro Castillo and conservative Keiko Fujimori took to the streets by the thousands in Peru on Saturday, as tensions rose over the result of the June 6 presidential election.

Castillo was leading the official count while Fujimori sought to get votes annulled, although pollster Ipsos Peru said it had done a statistical analysis of the ballots and found no evidence of abnormal voting patterns that would have benefited one candidate over the other.

"We are not going to allow them to ignore the popular will, to ignore the electoral result. We are going to defend democracy," Veronika Mendoza, former leftist presidential candidate, said at the Castillo support rally.

The Biden administration revealed on Tuesday that guys who can't get laid may be terrorist threats due to "involuntary celibate-violent extremism." That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential "domestic terrorists" that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns.

Since the French Revolution, politicians have defined terrorism to stigmatize their opponents, a precedent followed by the Biden administration's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The report labels the January 6 clash at the Capitol as a "domestic terrorism" incident but fails to mention it spurred a mushroom cloud of increasingly far-fetched official accusations. Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress that January 6 was "a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists." Less than a thousand protestors entered the Capitol that day but apparently any Trump supporter who hustled down the Mall towards the Capitol became the legal equivalent of Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, this "seen walking in the same zip code" standard for guilt could be the prototype for Biden era domestic terrorist prosecutions.

Alasdair Macleod: Yesterday, the FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] released its June statement which only served to remind us that its members are powerless in the face of inflationary conditions. They refuse to accept the price consequences of monetary inflation, still clinging on to an increasingly untenable hope that price rises are "transitory".

The fact of the matter is that the world is now awash with excess money, the two greatest inflationists being the Fed and the Bank of England. In the US, the Fed's $120bn monthly QE continues to goose financial asset values, while the US Government has spent a further trillion into circulation from its general account at the Fed. This tidal wave of money threatened money market funds totalling over $4 trillion with negative rates, thereby "breaking the buck", which is why the Fed has increased its outstanding reverse repos to $721bn.

Interest rates will have to increase far earlier than the Fed admits to stop foreigners dumping dollars, not just for commodities which have nearly doubled since March 2020, but for other currencies as well.

Welcome to the everything bubble, whipped up by American and British neo-Keynesian policy makers who are now increasingly cornered by their own monetary fallacies.

While an overwhelming percentage of voters chose the conservative candidate Ebrahim Raisi, the fact that less than 50% of the eligible voters participated underscores a growing lack of support for "religious democracy" in Iran.

The 2021 Iranian Presidential election may go down in history as the event that broke the back of Iran's tumultuous 40-year experiment with "religious democracy," where the legitimacy of autocratic religious rule is validated by the will of the people as expressed through the vehicle of voter participation.

It is not the result of the election that causes concern - the overwhelming victory of Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative former head of the judiciary, came as a surprise to no one, especially after the Guardian Council, Iran's constitutional body that, among other tasks, vets candidates for elected office, purged the list of potential contenders for Iran's executive, removing several would-be candidates, including the former Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, who could have challenged Raisi at the polls.

The failure of the two-term presidency of Hassan Rouhani, considered to be a moderate reformer, to better the daily lives of Iranians virtually guaranteed that Iran would put a conservative in office. Rather, it was the historically low turnout - with only 28.9 million out of 59 million eligible voters casting their ballots, with 3.7 million of these voiding their ballots, allegedly in protest over the intervention of the Guardian Council. This marks the first time in Iran's history that voter turnout dropped below the 50% level.

"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail," said Mark Twain. So it is that pundits have interpreted forthcoming Basel III rules as simply an opportunity to bash bullion banks and to assert that gold prices are going to the moon. Again ... yawn.

Imagine for a moment that your cash at bank became "allocated" ... that is to say your bank holds it in physical form and it moves from account to account to reflect every single transaction you make, instead of the current book entry system that allows debits and credits to be offset, cleared and settled overnight through a central agency that used to be called BACS. Yes, chaos would ensue ... but assuming banks could manage, costs would rise dramatically, and that would be passed on to you. Madness you might think ... why would regulators introduce something so retrograde and inefficient ... herein lies the story behind the proposed Basel III changes and gold ...

The Taliban on Sunday said they are committed to peace talks, and want a "genuine Islamic system" in Afghanistan.
Reuters reports Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in a statement said:

"We understand that the world and Afghans have queries and questions about the form of the system to be established following withdrawal of foreign troops. A genuine Islamic system is the best means for solution of all issues of the Afghans. Our very participation in the negotiations and its support on our part indicates openly that we believe in resolving issues through (mutual) understanding."

This statement comes as progress on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have slowed amid rising violence brought on by foreign forces withdrawing from the country, Reuters notes. Officials have said the Taliban has not yet submitted a peace proposal upon which talks could be started.

According to Reuters, Baradar said in his statement that women and minorities would be protected under the proposed system, and diplomats and NGOs would be permitted to work securely. Baradar said "facilities would be provided" for women to be educated and to work.

"We take it on ourselves as a commitment to accommodate all rights of citizens of our country, whether they are male or female, in the light of the rules of the glorious religion of Islam and the noble traditions of the Afghan society."

Sayyed Ibrahim Raisi's victory in the Iranian presidential elections was not a surprise, but the polls and their results are very significant and send domestic, regional and international messages.

The number of voters is powerfully expressive: Raisi won 17.926.345 million votes out of the 28 million who voted in the elections, regardless of the Corona pandemic that continues to threaten all countries and cause a reduction of the participation in elections. It is noteworthy that the second place went to the hardliner, former IRGC - Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohsen Rezaei, who won 3.4 million votes. The third place went to former central bank governor Abdel Nasser Hemmati, who represented the weight of the reformists, reaching only 2.4 million votes. Conservative lawmaker Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi ended up with more than one million votes.