Image is of Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro walking together at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2022, sourced from this article.
Ordinarily, I avoid straying into the American domestic situation, but the government shutdown appears to be continuing into increasingly harmful territory. If the situation is not resolved, soon tens of millions of Americans will lose food assistance, and already millions of federal employees are furloughed or are working without pay. To those not in the know, this situation has essentially stemmed from the Democrats refusing to sign off on the Republicans’ plan to substantially shrink Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which would eventually result in tens of millions losing healthcare coverage and tens if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
To be clear, though, the Democrats have not exactly been paragons of healthcare: they not only oppose plans to make affordable healthcare a right (in defiance of wide popular opinion), but also do their part to maximize suffering. Biden’s policies during the pandemic ensured at least one million people died, and millions of children lost public healthcare coverage. We may never know the true toll, as the US decided that simply ceasing to report on a problem means that the problem no longer exists.
In other news, over the last couple weeks, the US has expanded their hostility against Venezuela by also including Colombia in their ire, and particularly the left-leaning leader, Petro. Both countries are now experiencing major economic and covert pressure by the US to try and cause regime change. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela and is conducting a military training operation with Trinidad and Tobago, which Venezuela has warned may be the prelude to the long-awaited attack.
Additionally, the US is attempting to combat Chinese geopolitical interest in central America and the Caribbean by carrying out digital attacks and launching pressure campaigns against Chinese and pro-Chinese countries and organizations. Given China’s enormous economic weight, if central America were to break all ties with China, it would be a catastrophe for them; such decisions would only be made by outright compradors, and the resulting economic problems would make their reigns unpopular and, hopefully, brief.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
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.
12 B-52 Stratofortress bombers conducted what appears to be a Minimum Interval Takeoff (MITO) exercise at Dyess Air Base in Texas, as part of the Strategic Air Command nuclear exercises taking place in the United States over the past week.
Video of the MITO exercise
This is a technique practiced to get as many bombers as possible into the air as quickly as possible in the event of a nuclear war, as the air base would be destroyed by incoming ICBMs in a matter of minutes should a nuclear strike take place. Bombers (and tankers if possible) taxi onto the runway and line up behind each other, taking off in 12-15 second intervals, and proceeding to fly in different directions as soon as they get airborne to minimise the effect of turbulent air from the aircraft taking off in front of them. They then fly as far away from the airbase as they can, to avoid getting caught up in a nuclear strike, and then proceed on their mission, with no where to return in the event of an actual nuclear strike.
To be clear, this is all an exercise in the above video, but definitely one of the more intense and dangerous exercises. Pilots take off at higher speeds than normal and may temporarily lose control of the aircraft just above the ground.
I know this is an exercise but just imagine the real event and being such a pathetically loyal servant of the empire that you get an opportunity to survive its apocalyptic destruction along with the rest of human civilization and instead of checking the fuck out and saving your own ass, you get yourself killed trying to firebomb pockets of survivors in the smoldering remains of an enemy city
On top of abandoning your friends and comrades on the airstrip as the ballistic missiles burst through the atmosphere back to earth. Left for dead.
That’s how the concept of mutually assured destruction works, unfortunately. Russian and Chinese bomber pilots and submariners are in the exact same situation. Mutually assured destruction only works as a concept if the credibility of a second strike is high.
Yea it’s horrifying, stupid, mass insanity, but that’s how the whole cold war went. It looks like we’re returning to that. If we don’t get a trilateral “New START III”, there will be more tests, more escalation, more exercises.
It works out great in an exercise but I’m having a hard time believing pampered American soldiers who are supposed to be left behind are going to just go out peacefully if a nuke is actually inbound. It seems more likely that they all kill each other in a desperate attempt to beat everyone else to the planes.
Not that it will matter in the end, considering civilization = over regardless of whether they get off the ground.
So they just ditch their planes somehow?
Nuclear war is so fucking stupid man
In a modern nuclear exchange scenario, the likelihood of a target surviving is a bit better than in the past, so there’s a chance of finding a nearby airbase that survived the intial attacks.
Failing that, there are loads of seconary and tertiary airfields, airstrips, and lengths of (hopefully) cleared highways that pilots will likely have prepared to land at instead, even if taking off again would be impractical for a little while. S/VTOL (F-35s, Harriers, etc.) are typical aircraft classes designed for this sort of scenario, but I’m sure the relative survival of any airframes post-nukening is a priority.
I guess the final point is that these aircraft arent really part of the nuclear equation in an age of ballistic missiles. Even if armed, they’ll be slow and large targets for interception - they’re basically on a one way trip as it is.
Depends if you can return to the USA or not. The B-2 was designed to deliver a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union (16x gravity bombs), land at any surviving airport with the infrastructure to support a 727, hot pit refuel and reload another 16x nuclear gravity bombs, and go again, until the war ended or it broke down or got shot down…
The B-52 is a different story, it’s a cruise missile truck. It’s job nowadays is to fly over the Arctic or the Pacific, lob nuclear armed cruise missiles at Russia or China, and turn back.
In both cases, the chances of having enough fuel to return are low. You’d need mid air refueling. High chance it’s a one way trip.