Image is from this article, showing a march by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela Youth. The preamble’s information came from a few sources, such as here, here, and here.

Over the last few weeks, pressure on Venezuela from the US has mounted as their newest proxy, Gonzalez, lost the election to Maduro. The Trump administration now alleges that Maduro is the mastermind behind the “Cartel of Suns,” raised the bounty on Maduro’s head from $25 million to $50 million, and is working to deploy troops and naval assets to the region.

While I would not consider myself an expert, I believe an explicit boots-on-the-ground campaign by the US in Venezuela would be, at best, implausible, though the administration has not explicitly denied it (and even if it did deny it, denials by the US are merely confirmations that are being delayed). What seems much more likely is an intensification of a subversive campaign against Venezuela which seeks to further isolate it, with intelligence from the US given to whatever groups and individuals exist inside the country. There are certainly some parallels in regard to recent US belligerence towards Mexico, with both countries being implicitly or explicitly threatened with military force under the guise of “preventing drug trafficking” - and, of course, spreading drugs is one of America’s greatest specialities.

Will this work? I don’t know, though I am optimistic about Venezuela’s chances. The Venezuelan government does seem to be taking this threat with a refreshing degree of seriousness - with over 4 million militia members being activated across the country as of August 18th, as well as a call from Maduro to the armed forces to be on high alert. The socialist youth of Venezuela are being mobilized in defense of the revolution.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

Israel's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

  • Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    56·
    2 days ago

    https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61482 (archive.ph seemed to get stuck when archiving this one, not sure why, it’s not a particularly complex page, maybe gov’t websites have some robots.txt-esque rule preventing this?)

    Something important to remember about military equipment is that the numbers in inventories do not represent actual immediate deployment capability - there is, at all times, some portion which is in maintenance, or is only set up to perform certain subsets of missions and needs extra preparation for the full set. And the more complex and demanding the piece of equipment is, the larger that portion is.

    In the case of some marvels of design like the F-35, this can be particularly extreme. Now, the partial availability rates seem decent

    But as for full mission availability, the highest rate is a little under 40%, for the conventional runway-take-off variant, while the carrier-borne one is much lower, at around 20%, and the VTOL variant seems to be hanging around 15% (I wish they’d used a more detailed graph here…)

    But it gets particularly dire when age is considered - now of course, all things decay with age, but some decay a lot faster… In just 7 years of use, the carrier-borne and VTOL variants both shrink to around 10% availability, while the conventional one manages a whole 15% - a 30% drop for the first two, and a 45% drop for the conventional variant, which started off the best but is also dropping in availability the fastest (although this may just be a consequence of them being flown the most, not sure). Data for even older planes isn’t available, but the F-35 entered service in 2015 (for the USMC, 2016 for the USAF), so if we follow the stonks-down for 4-5 more years… according to the report, there were actually even a handful of 14-year old (as of September last year, so 15 today) planes in service (I assume ones which were originally used for testing before the official adoption?) - one can only imagine how well they’re holding up.

    So, I guess the F-35 might operate on dog years doggirl-sweat.

    Given the slowdowns in upgrades, plus continued contraction of industry (although I’m not sure how much the MIC specifically is affected - but given that all industry needs raw materials to actually make stuff out of, higher material costs brought on by tariffs aren’t going to help, and the sensitive electronics and sensors of the F-35 are probably particularly badly affected), I would anticipate that this might get even worse with time, as newly-manufactured replacement parts just aren’t available in the numbers needed and the planes in service get less and less reliable. Plus, with how production itself is going, I wonder if it could basically enter a death-spiral where planes are getting retired at a faster rate than new ones can be brought into service (or getting to a point where they should be retired because it’s straight-up risky to fly them, but they’re being kept since there’s just no alternative).

    Here’s a chart of yearly delivery numbers, with the data taken from here. Apparently Lockheed aims for at least 156 yearly as a “stable production rate” - 2025 has higher numbers, but this isn’t because of a scaling-up in production, but rather them delivering additional jets that were waiting in storage because the DoD was refusing delivery of them on account of those upgrade issues I mentioned. So the rate isn’t going to keep growing, this year is an aberration - and given the economic troubles mentioned above, will they actually reach that target? What if delays keep happening, and things actually return to the 2023-24 production rates, but even worse due to tariffs?

    Plus, you know, there’s supposed to be a bunch of other countries getting these planes. And if they decay so quickly, one of the classics of military procurement - the superpowers handing their old shit over to their allies and other friendly countries - might not be able to happen, since the old shit isn’t just going to be somewhat reduced in functionality, it’s going to be wholly non-functional. Well, I guess it’s good for the world on the whole if Western air-forces end up accidentally demilitarized…

    Now, according to the article I got the stats from, part of this is that priorities are shifting to the next 6th-gen fighter project - but given all the issues with the F-35, how well would the production of an even more complex and technologically-advanced plane go, especially with current immigration policies causing a brain drain? And apparently, there’s also supposed to be a doctrinal shift here, towards a small number of really fancy manned aircraft supported by “loyal wingman” autonomous drones… uh, good luck with that, and critical support to AI bros for doing their best to sabotage the future imperialist military. Looking forward to when the first “collaborative combat aircraft” collaboratively shoots down its human pal since its image-recognition algorithm fucked up somehow.

    And I’m now thinking about CoD Black Ops 2 again, so uh, the US MIC and nickels and all that I guess. One of the better CoDs tbh, also kind of the Black Panther of its time in having the villain be a revolutionary who’s actually basically correct, and then they have him do some arbitrarily evil stuff (although honestly, he doesn’t even do that much, there’s an attack at an ultra-fancy-1-percenter-resort I guess, where as part of kidnapping a high-value target his guys also just randomly do a bombing and mass shooting for good measure, but, you know… as the “good guys” you pull a SWAT classic and murder a little girl with a haphazardly-thrown grenade, so that’s cool… beyond that it’s mostly “well, he’s a populist appealing to the global poor, that’s inherently evil!”). Also a great bit at the end where the game’s all like “oh no, he’s going to use the hacked drones to attack these cities!”, and then he just self-destructs basically the entire arsenal of modern weapons and goes “well, global proletariat, it’s in your arms now, the imperialists’ shit is all broke!”

    Also a great 2012 time capsule, with there being a fucking USS Barack Obama, and a totally-not-Hillary-Clinton female president. Also David Petraeus for some reason?