Fund the South-East Asia communism Tour of 2023

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In 2016 we went to Ukraine. In 2017 we went to Georgia and Armenia. In 2018 to Jordan and Israel. In 2019 to Zimbabwe, in 2021 to Moldova and in 2022 to Central Asia. All have in common a recent history of having been influenced (or outright conquered) by the Soviet Union. Additionally, over the years, we also went to Albania (2018), Germany (2019), Sweden (2020) and Bulgaria (2021) without making a fundraiser for it – but those places were also chosen for their totalitarian recent past.

So in keeping with this tradition of gathering knowledge and wisdom and then delivering it to you as stories, we submit to y’all the proposal for a South East Asia Tour dubbed as either ”The Khmer Empire Tour of 2023” in order to avoid algorithmic suppression on social media or, more honestly, the ”Killing Fields Tour 2023” since what we’ll really study is the brutal totalitarian past of Cambodia and Laos.

The video above goes a bit into the itinerary and the minimum things to expect from this tour.

This article is focused on the financial details. Not all expenses are thoroughly detailed – only those funded through the fundraiser.

So, without further ado…

For consistency, all expenses are converted in USD at the median exchange rate for the period between February 1 and February 15, 2023. This is also because all donations are converted to USD as it’s the working currency for almost all operations of this Network.

In places where there is price variation (e.g. flights and trains within Cambodia and Laos) – the maximal option is listed. The rest of the list represents the median/most likely costs.

1. Cluj Napoca – Viena (round trip)

Train: $100
Housing in Vienna: $70 [2 nights]
Food in Vienna: $50

2. Vienna – Phnom Penh

Flight: $1000 (round trip, all fares included)

3. Visa costs

$30 per entry. $90 in total, since one will have to enter Cambodia twice.

4. Housing and transport in Asia

~$20/night on average, no more than 30 nights, no less than 26 nights [to be decided depending on flight availability if the first goal is reached in time]

As such, budget for housing: $600
Phnom Penh – Vientiane – $350 (return flight)
Phnom Penh – Siem Reap train – $40 (return ticket)
Vientiane – Luang Prabang train – $60 (return ticket)

5. Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Video fees: $50
Books: $50
Food: $100
Coffee: $50
Transport within the city: $40

6. Siem Reap, Cambodia

Video fees: $50
Food: $70
Coffee: $30

7. Vientiane, Laos

Video fees: $20
Food: $70
Coffee: $20
Transport within the city: $30

8. Luang Prabang, Laos

Transport around the city: $40
Food: $50
Coffee: $15

9. Other

Health insurance: $45
Equipment insurance: $30
On-the-fly consumables (batteries, memory cards, etc): $80
Exchange rate fees: $100 (maximum)
Unexpected expenses: $450 (minimum)

Total: $3,750

This number represents the optimal in order for the tour to take place. The total cost may be higher, but not by much. The upper threshold will be placed at $4000.

Any excess will be redirected towards fulfilling the wishlist or towards funding another project in 2024.

Minimums and deadlines

The tour is due to take place sometime between in the month November and December and it will last no more than 35 days [including the 4 days needed to get from Cluj Napoca to Phnom Penh and back]. This means that plane tickets should be purchased no later than July 1, 2022.

As such, if the fundraiser doesn’t reach to at least $1500 by May 25, 2022, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects.

If the fundraiser doesn’t reach at least $2000 by June 25, 2022, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects. Of course, if it will be $1890 on June 25, it will be fine. But too much leeway downwards will lead to cancellation – because by June 25, The expensive flights must be paid for already.

Anything beyond $4000, as well as any remaining shekel after the tour, will be redirected towards other projects or to fulfilling the wishlist.

The state of the fundraiser will be updated regularly on the main page of the website and semi-regularly on the Youtube channels.

If this convinces you, head over to the Donate page and pitch in. Every dollar counts!

Some administrative changes

Following the announcement earlier this month and the subsequent consultation, we continued to implement new changes in the way things are done around here, all with a view to make the workflow easier as our teams grow and the backlog of things to do also grows.

Resources page

Following both practical necessity and strategic demand for increased transparency (to make delegation easier and also to simply keep track on things) we made a few changes around here.

For starters, we added the Resources page which documents the resources available for the public much better and also chronicles the resources developing for the benefit of those who choose to join the Donors’ Circle.

With this occasion we also cleaned up the site’s menu and removed some legacy pages whose relevance was deprecated.

Expanding the News Feed team

The News Feed that we’ve been maintaining on Telegram for over four years now has attracted a more diverse audience than we expected.

Initially, the Feed was made more or less for internal use so we can keep track on what’s going on and maybe pick up links to then use in podcasts/videos. However, it turns out there was a need for a curated news feed for others as well, attracting quite a bit of praise, including from people who generally disagree with us.

While we appreciate the positive feedback, the fact remains that the Feed was largely run by a team of four,… more or less. We are already underway to changing that by expanding the team and also opening up applications for new members.

As such, we published the first version of the guidelines for the Feed, making a step we stayed clear from for years: towards quasi-institutionalization.

We’re hoping to improve the quality of the news feed during 2023 and increase the status of the Feed as a reference point for relevance on politics.

Other less visible technical changes

In the background, we started managing our activities (or at least trying 😅) through a ticketing system that we’ve also made transparent (for the most part) to our donors. The same system will now be used for some internal communications.

The system is not (yet?) ready for public consumption and we’re still unsure on whether such a resource should be public to begin with. The risk of spam is much higher than the potential benefits.

The idea is to remove critical dependency from services we don’t control and we have limited trust in (e.g. Telegram). Social media (including Discord, Telegram, etc.) is great for growth and some coordination, but far from great when it comes to non-public conversations or, even worse, hinging a group’s very existence on one of them. Many good projects died as a result of their group being wiped out from social media.

While we are under no danger of that happening to us anytime soon, it is better to be prepared in advance. Besides, it simply is good practice to own your internal affairs, rather than outsource them on an opaque third party that doesn’t have your best interests in mind.

Also, we moved both torrent folders (for public and DC) on the same server.

Speaking of torrent, we’re still testing webapps for that. If we end up implementing one of them, it will not be announced on the website.

Still no consensus over the forum so the issue will thus be kicked down the road again.

As January draws to an end, so does the talk about change.

That’s it. Time to work more.

On diversification and increased resilience

Every year between December 20 and January 15-ish we change some things around. Some changes are recurrent (such as the Christmas hat on our logo in the videos), some changes are not visible (like the behind-the-scenes clean-ups and upkeep) and some changes are on the policy level and on the way we do things. It is this latter category that this short note is about.

Censorship-resistant

To be fair, over the last 8 years, we had minimal troubles on this front – with the exception of Faceberg. Fortunately, Faceberg’s importance in the milieus we’re interested in has been steadily declining for 4 years in a row now so, overall, there was no serious issue. In fact, our effective reach increased after our already-throttled Faceberg page was finally shitcanned.

With that said, one of the reasons we didn’t have big issues is because we stayed ahead (or sometimes behind) the curve by implementing measures meant to absorb potential blows without compromising on what we need to say. Measures such as:

  • Moving to Telegram in 2017 (the rest of the world learned either in 2020 or in 2022 that moving to Telegram is a good idea).
  • Implementing our own IRC server for quick discrete chats in 2015
  • Big shoutout to the Discord moderation team who’ve been running our Discord server diligently and cleanly since 2018, entering in the 5th year without any major incident and keeping a much-needed balance between shitposting and serious chats
  • Getting a discrete (but consistent) presence on alt-tech [Gab, MeWe, Bitchute, Odysee]
  • Opening up this website in 2018 [using partners with a proven trackrecord of standing firmly for freedom of expression in the face of great adversity]
  • Acquiring a parallel physical infrastructure for backups-of-backups to make sure that if we are taken down, we’d be back within 72 hours
  • Implementing an internal sharing procedure and the Donors’ Circle in 2020

All of these (and others less visible) have made it very difficult to effectively censor us.

Going forward (with the approval of the Donors’ Circle) we are taking another two steps in the direction of both resilience and censorship-resistant infrastructure. As the Internet (re)Balkanizes, the opportunities present themselves.

As of this year, all of our public files and some of the internal ones shall be distributed using the BitTorrent protocol. This may seem like a step backward technologically (and it may indeed be) but the fact remains that distributing 7+GB files in an efficient manner and cross-platform compatible cannot be done more effectively and cheaper than the torrent protocol.

Sometime in the next 18 months (subjected to the Donors’ Circle opinion and technological constraints) we will try our luck with a semi-open forum. Open in the same way our Discord server is open, but also with reserved sections. The experience with the Discord server is encouraging enough to consider such an option – even though there are multiple reservations and concerns (not least in relation to privacy).

A heterodox approach to tech is the way forward and, just like we were right to switch to Telegram years before everyone else, we will very likely be proven right to set up the infrastructure for the rebalkanization of the Internet before it fully happens (mentally, it already happened).

Financially stable

The Network is not meant to turn a profit but activities costs money. And 2022 was a surprisingly good year in this department. So good that we still have a hard time believing it. In 2021 it could’ve been “blamed” on the exceptionally low-expense year of 2020. But last year exceeded the optimistic expectations. For the first time, there were no significant financial concerns.

We intend to work harder in 2023 to build upon this status quo. This will likely involve some legal changes too, though a lot of factors are beyond our control so no ironclad promises can be made in public. Suffice to say though that with a bit of luck, by 2025 we might be looking back at January 2023 as “late dark ages” in terms of the Network’s abilities to sustain itself financially.

Delegation

Throughout 2022 we managed to delegate more and more tasks and activities away from the core without any noticeable difference in quality. We are very proud for that achievement and for the work done by those who were willing to take on the tasks.

Regardless of financial results in the near future, we intend to delegate even more in order to both increase the output from the core (by freeing up time now still spent on activities that can be delegated) and also to strengthen the Freedom Alternative community. More people than we imagined 6 years ago ended up coming for the videos and staying for the community. And we want to reward that.

The decision-making process is intentionally slow, in accordance with our general philosophy and because oftentimes no policy may indeed be better than a rushed/spontaneous/spur-of-the-moment policy or action. That’s why we roll out new things slowly – much to the annoyance of some.

We know we can’t please everyone and we’re okay with that. We also know that we’re all inherently flawed so the best that can be done is to strive to do better whilst keeping in mind that perfect is the enemy of good.

To all those who’ve been with us through various parts of this magnificent journey, we humbly thank you and we hope you stay with us for new heights.

Let’s explore!

Send me to the Gulag – Fund the 2022 Central Asia Tour

Created using the Donation Thermometer plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/donation-thermometer/.$4,500Raised $2,475 towards the $4,500 target.$2,475$2,900Raised $2,475 towards the $4,500 target.55%

In 2016 we went to Ukraine. In 2017 we went to Georgia and Armenia. In 2018 to Jordan and Israel. And in 2019 to Zimbabwe. All have in common a recent history of having been influenced (or outright conquered) by the Soviet Union.

This tour should have taken place in 2020 but then the Wuhan Flu hit and both the donors and the public voted for a trip to Sweden instead after being presented the arguments. So that’s how the Coronachan 2020 Sweden Tour happened.

Throughout 2021, Kazakhstan has kept several objectives on the list closed and the last one opened in January 2022. With that said, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have essentially dropped the panic by August 2020 and have been operating as normal ever since.

In the meantime, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have been through profound transformations, as a result of popular uprising and other tectonic shifts in their societies – which makes them even more interesting politically today, than in 2020.

So in keeping with this tradition of gathering knowledge and wisdom and then delivering it to you as stories, we submit to y’all the proposal for a Central Asia Tour. The video above (made in 2019) goes into the details about the itinerary and the minimum things we expect to get from the tour. The only thing changed in the plan is the route. There is no direct flight from Hungary to Kazakhstan anymore so I’ll go via Istanbul.

This article is focused on the financial details. Not all expenses are thoroughly detailed – only those funded through the fundraiser. I have updated the prices to account for inflation and other changes that can be documented.

The biggest changes are in transport (fuel prices going up and inflation), in visa costs (now all down to $0) and unexpected expences (pandemic BS, basically – PCR tests etc., which in that area of the world are simply bribes).

Also, to please the donors who voted for this tour in 2020, I have decided to start the fundraising from the amount proportionate to those who voted in that direction back then.

Created using the Donation Thermometer plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/donation-thermometer/.$4,500Raised $2,475 towards the $4,500 target.$2,475$2,900Raised $2,475 towards the $4,500 target.55%

So, without further ado…

For consistency, all expenses are converted in USD at the median exchange rate for the period between March 15 and March 21, 2022. This is also because all donations are converted to USD as it’s the working currency for almost all operations of this Network.

In places where there is price variation (e.g. trains in Central Asia) – the maximal option is listed. The list represents the minimum costs.

1. Cluj Napoca – Budapest (round trip)

Train: $40

Housing: $70

Food: $30

2. Budapest – Nur Sultan

Flight: $515 (round trip, all fares included)

Visa cost Kazakhstan: $0

3. Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan

Housing: $70

Food: $50

Transport in the city: $15

4. Karaganda, Kazakhstan

Nur Sultan – Karaganda Train: $30

Housing: $75

Transport around the area: $65

Museum and other fees: $10

Food: $40

Books and newspapers: $50

5. Almaty, Kazakhstan

Karaganda – Almaty train: $30

Ancient cities tour: $60

Big Lake tour: $35

Housing: $60

Food: $30

6. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Almaty-Bishkek transport: $100 (round-trip)

Kyrgyzstan visa: $0

Ala-Archa national park: $15

Books and newspapers: $50 (minimum)

Museum and other fees: $20

Food: $30

Housing: $70

7. Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan visa: $0

Transport Almaty-Tashkent: $75

Museums and other fees: $20

Housing: $60

Food: $40

8. Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Train from Tashkent to Samarkand: $30

Museums and other fees: $20

Housing: $80

Food: $40

Books: $30

9. Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Samarkand – Bukhara train: $30

Museum fees: $10

Housing: $80

10. Other

Trains from Samarkand to Nur-Sultan: $120

Health insurance: $40

Equipment insurance: $30

On-the-fly consumables (batteries, memory cards, etc): $80

Exchange rate fees: $100 (maximum)

Unexpected expenses: $450 (minimum)

Total: $2,895

This number represents the absolute minimum in order for the tour to take place. The total cost will be somewhere in the vicinity of $4500 which will serve as the maximal threshold for this fundraiser.

Given past experience, even in worst case scenarios, the cost goes somewhere between the two extremes. Any excess will be redirected towards fulfilling the wishlist or towards funding another project in 2022 (possibly the Independence March in Poland in November).

Minimums and deadlines

The tour is due to take place sometime between in the month of August and it will last 25 days. This means that plane tickets should be purchased no later than May 15, 2022. Update: This has happened. ✅

As such, if the fundraiser doesn’t reach to at least $1500 by May 10, 2022, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects.

If the fundraiser doesn’t reach at least $2900 by July 15, 2022, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects. Of course, if it will be $2790 on July 15, it will be fine. But too much leeway downwards will lead to cancellation – because by July 20, most of the housing should be booked and paid for already.

Anything beyond $4000, as well as any remaining shekel after the tour, will be redirected towards other projects or to fulfilling the wishlist.

The state of the fundraiser will be updated regularly on the main page of the website and semi-regularly on the Youtube channels.

If this convinces you, head over to the Donate page and pitch in. Every dollar counts!

[FUNDRAISER] Bulgarian election coverege

Created using the Donation Thermometer plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/donation-thermometer/.Raised $2,475 towards the $0 target.$2,475Raised $2,475 towards the $0 target.100%

So far we have raised $2,475 towards our $[Value missing on settings page] goal! That’s unknown% of the total!

Bulgaria will hold presidential elections AND Parliamentary elections on November 14, 2021. The presidential election is due (the incumbent’s term expires and he is up for reelection).

However, it is the third time in 2021 that Bulgaria holds a general/parliamentary election. That’s extraordinary even by Europe’s standards – where fragmented Parliaments, minority governments, votes of no confidence, government resignations and snap elections are very common. And are getting increasingly common.

In June, for instance, for the first time ever, a vote of no confidence passed through the Swedish Parliament. In October, the chancellor of Austria resigned (after having been ousted through a vote of no confidence before – in May 2019). Also in October the government of Romania collapsed through a vote of no confidence and Romania is heading (insh’Allah) slowly towards snap elections.

The point being that this kind of instability is growing in more countries of Europe – and Bulgaria is just at the forefront (further down the curve than the rest of Europe).

As such, we want to go there and observe just a bit. And also gather some information from the field in the energy sector (hopefully with some on-camera discussions too) – as Bulgaria is likely to be the worst affected state by the ‘green’ policies of the Европейски съюз.

It will be a quick(er) trip than the Moldova one since we only intend to cover two cities (Sofia and Plovdiv) and the Maritsa Iztok Complex (the largest one in Southeastern Europe – and the sticking point of the growing anti-EU sentiment). If time will allow, we’ll also take a quick trip to the Bulgarian UFO. But no guarantee on that.

While we’re there, we’ll also be able to tell how Bulgaria really deals with the Wuhan Virus – since the country has been in the international news lately since their people refuse the miraculous serum that makes you immortal more than anyone else in the Европейски съюз.

We shall travel by car. Here are the expenses.

Nr. crt.ElementAmountObs.
TOTAL$715
1Housing$115In Sofia for 6 nights.
2Fuel$250About 1800km round trip Cluj-Napoca - Sofia plus Sofia-Plovdiv-Mritsa Iztok plus road taxes
3Food$150
4Coffee$50
5Supplies and Misc.$50Batteries, cables, memory cards, exchange rate fees, communications, etc.
6Emergency funds$100Medicine, unpredictable expenses, accidents, etc.

Republic of Moldova election coverage – the financials

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So far we have raised $2,475 towards our $[Value missing on settings page] target! That’s unknown% of the total!

Since the response has been positive to the idea of having both Romanian and English-language coverage of the Romanian elections, at the request of the regular donors, here’s some financial and logistical details.

We will be traveling entirely by car. So that’s 1200km (Cluj-Chișinău-Cluj) just to get there. And another (at least) 500km inside the country. A very generous donor has offered to cover the trip part entirely in exchange to access to knowledge. While we are very grateful for that, we hope we can offset some of that burden.

Cost of living in Moldova is not wildly different from the one in Romania and the costs presented here are for 15 days for two people.

The currency in Moldova is the Moldovan Leu (international symbol: MDL). All expenses are expressed in USD at a rate of $1 = 18 MDL and $1 = 4,1 RON.

Nr. crt.ItemCost per day or per personTotal
TOTAL:1660
1Housing-310
2Fuel-250
3Food, coffee, et. al.$25/day/person750
4Consumables (batteries, SIM-cards)-30
5Health expenses (compliance with cough19 bs, health insurance, etc.)35/person70
6Emergency fund (in case compost hits the ventilator)-250

These represent the maximum values. For instance, if we’re lucky, health expenses and emergency expenses could be zero. But, if we’re unlucky, health expenses could be twice or thrice of the shown amount (hence the need for an emergency fund).

It is quite impossible to spend more than $1700 in two people in 15 days, but it is also unlikely that we can get away with less than $1200 considering the unavoidable expenses.

Sweden or Gulag? You decide

As announced in the video, the Wuhan Flu panic comes with a challenge and an opportunity. And you will make the decision on which one should be followed.

Sweden or the Gulag?
181 votes · 181 answers

The arguments:

For Sweden:

  • It’s the story of the moment (regardless of how the outcome will look like)
  • It’s clearly doable (from a logistical standpoint)
  • Offers the opportunity to get the content that wasn’t possible in the previous Swedish tour (2017)
  • Offers the opportunity to get incontrovertible evidence about the Swedish approach to the Wuhan Flu. Everyone speculates – why not go and find out from the field?

Against the Coronachan Swedish Tour 2020:

  • It’s expensive. Not gigantically expensive, but enough to push the either/or approach

For sticking with the original plan:

  • It has been promised
  • Those who donated for the Gulag may not be interested in the Swedish igloo
  • While the Uzbek part of the plan is in doubt, the main point (the Gulags) is very likely doable as planned

Against sticking with the original plan

  • Flights will be more expensive
  • The theme is not timely and it can wait another year
  • Uzbekistan may not allow tourism in due time to stick with the original plan
  • More unforeseen troubles (e.g. random rules changed without notice)

The polls will be open for 5 days – until April 26th, 2020 at 23:59, Romania time (GMT+2).

While the popular vote matters, priority will be given to the donors’ vote because it is only fair for the donors to get a larger say into the final decision.

Those who wish to vote in the donors’ poll and haven’t been contacted yet, are kindly asked to use the Contact form.

 

Send me to the Gulag – Fund the 2020 Central Asia Tour

In 2016 we went to Ukraine. In 2017 we went to Georgia and Armenia. In 2018 to Jordan and Israel. And in 2019 to Zimbabwe. All have in common a recent history of having been influenced (or outright conquered) by the Soviet Union.

In keeping with this tradition of gathering knowledge and wisdom and then delivering it to you as stories, in 2020 we submit to y’all the proposal for a Central Asia Tour. The video above gets into the details about the itinerary and the minimum things we expect to get from the tour. This article is focused on the financial details. Not all expenses are thoroughly detailed – only those funded through the fundraiser.

Created using the Donation Thermometer plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/donation-thermometer/.$4,000Raised $2,475 towards the $4,000 target.$2,475Raised $2,475 towards the $4,000 target.62%

So, without further ado…

For consistency, all expenses are converted in USD at the median exchange rate for the period between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15, 2019. This is also because all donations are converted to USD as it’s the working currency for almost all operations of this Network.

In places where there is price variation (e.g. trains in Central Asia) – the maximal option is listed. The list represents the minimum costs.

1. Cluj Napoca – Budapest (round trip)

Train: $40

Housing: $60

Food: $20

2. Budapest – Nur Sultan

Flight: $410 (round trip, all fares included)

Visa cost Kazakhstan: $0

3. Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan

Housing: $65

Food: $50

Transport in the city: $15

4. Karaganda, Kazakhstan

Nur Sultan – Karaganda Train: $20

Housing: $75

Transport around the area: $50

Museum and other fees: $10

Food: $40

Books and newspapers: $50

5. Almaty, Kazakhstan

Karaganda – Almaty train: $20

Ancient cities tour: $60

Big Lake tour: $35

Housing: $60

Food: $30

6. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Almaty-Bishkek transport: $80 (round-trip)

Kyrgyzstan visa: $52

Ala-Archa national park: $15

Books and newspapers: $50 (minimum)

Museum and other fees: $20

Food: $30

Housing: $65

7. Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan visa: $40

Transport Almaty-Tashkent: $45

Museums and other fees: $20

Housing: $60

Food: $40

8. Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Train from Tashkent to Samarkand: $20

Museums and other fees: $20

Housing: $70

Food: $40

Books: $30

9. Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Samarkand – Bukhara train: $20

Museum fees: $10

Housing: $70

10. Other

Trains from Samarkand to Nur-Sultan: $100

Health insurance: $40

Equipment insurance: $20

On-the-fly consumables (batteries, memory cards, etc): $80

Exchange rate fees: $100 (maximum)

Unexpected expenses: $300 (minimum)

Total: $2,547

This number represents the absolute minimum in order for the tour to take place. The total cost will be somewhere in the vicinity of $4000 which will serve as the maximal threshold for this fundraiser.

Given past experience, even in worst case scenarios, the cost goes somewhere between the two extremes. Any excess will be redirected towards fulfilling the wishlist or towards funding another project in 2020 (possibly the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Tallinn, Estonia).

Minimums and deadlines

The tour is due to take place sometime between July 20th and August 22 and it will last 25 days. This means that plane tickets should be purchased no later than April 15, 2020

As such, if the fundraiser doesn’t reach to at least $1500 by April 10, 2020, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects.

If the fundraiser doesn’t reach at least $2500 by July 1, 2020, the tour is cancelled and all collected funds redirected to other projects. Of course, if it will be $2420 on July 1, it will be fine. But too much leeway downwards will lead to cancellation – because by July 5, most of the housing should be booked and paid for already.

Anything beyond $4000, as well as any remaining shekel after the tour, will be redirected towards other projects or to fulfilling the wishlist.

The state of the fundraiser will be updated regularly on the main page of the website and semi-regularly on the Youtube channels.

If this convinces you, head over to the Donate page and pitch in. Every dollar counts!

Getting ready for the Poland tour

Just as I’m writing these words, I’m wrapping up the work intended for the Bucharest tour, which started over a week ago and included 5 on-camera interviews and a lot of off-camera work which, hopefully, will produce some of the results intended within the next 15 months or so.

Towards the end of this month starts the tour in Poland with similar intentions: to rally up the troops, consolidate the Network and improve the overall level of knowledge. We will do in Poland what we did in Bucharest – except it will be in English.

The initial reason for which this was scheduled is to provide coverage from the events which will mark the 75th anniversary since what history now knows as the “Warsaw uprising”.

While we will, of course, be present on August 1 in Warsaw for that (just like we were during the Independence March last November at Poland’s centennial), the purpose is a bit wider than that. In addition to interviews (both on the record and off the record), on the menu there is some exploring as well into areas of thought and history that is still, to this day, rather underexplored in the English language.

All of this will happen, for sure, but you can help with the how question.

Some of the friends of the Freedom Alternative Network in Poland will help with some of the aspects of the trip but a portion of the financing can still be made better.

At this point in time, the choice is this: Either some of the new equipment purchases are postponed in order to do the Poland tour as planned, or we can have both if enough of y’all give shekalim.

Just like there was one centennial last November, the same is true now: the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising happens only once – on August 1. So it’s an opportunity that cannot be postponed and ought not to be missed for our general objectives of knowledge and wisdom.

So, with that in mind, I shall lean again on y’all to consider an extra shekel for this endeavor. Ideally, we do both: no investment gets postponed and the Poland trip goes as scheduled.

For those who follow the Romanian language channel, results of the current trip will be available within the next two weeks and prior to the departure to Poland.

If time will allow it, I’ll try to get some of those in the backlog also published. The good news is that the Poland trip will also be the last one for the year which will be lengthy and tiresome. But, more on that in a few days after I get back home and put things in order.

So, with all of that being said, thank you all for your patience and support, please consider a shekel for this particular effort and… I will see you all soon.

Cheers! 👌🏻

3SI Summit journey starts

Although the 3SI Summit debuts in 4 days, for those of us not funded by taxpayers (of any country), the business starts in a few hours. As we write this, the final decisions are made on what equipment we can carry with us and what will have to be left at the home base.

Watch coverage from the 2018 3SI Summit in Romanian and in English.

We will be traveling by train and we’ll try to record logs (just like we did last year) both from the trip and on site. Editing and uploading them will be a different story, of course.

Depending on the technological capabilities on site, we will try to do a live-text coverage on the dedicated page. There is also a dedicated page in Romanian.

Unlike last year, we will not rely on social media during the event itself, but publish in real-time only on the website – while on social media we will link only the pages mentioned above. Well, that’s the plan anyway. We don’t rely too much on detailed plans because nobody can know for sure beforehand how things will look like in the field.

If the technological capabilities will not be satisfactory, the dedicated pages will be used for centralizing all the coverage from this event.

There will be other articles on the topic as well. Those will also be linked back on the appropriate page (depending on the language used).

Once again we wish to thank all of those who have donated to our fundraiser and made this possible for our small network. We hope we will be able to surpass the level of coverage offered last year as well as offer more analysis than last time.

Tschüss!