Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it’s important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism’s decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
An update to last night’s post
The F-35As from the 158th Fighter Wing in Vermont that were used in US airstikes on Iran earlier this year, are on the move towards Puerto Rico. A KC-46 Pegasus mid air refueling aircraft was tracked from Burlington to Key West, Florida, and the F-35As were photographed at Key West.
F-35A photographs and flight tracking of the KC-46.
The 158th Fighter Wing (“Green Mountain Boys”) appears to have been converted to a specialist Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD/DEAD) unit upon operating the F-35As. Their insignia features a “Wild Weasel” holding a lighting bolt. Another name for the SEAD/DEAD mission in the US military is the wild weasel mission. This would explain their use in Iran earlier this year, and moves towards Venezuela now:
Combat Search And Rescue (CSAR) aircraft have also been forward deployed to Puerto Rico, including 3x HC-130J Combat King II aircraft, and a specialist HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter flown over from Japan, one of only two operating outside of the continental US. These are the aircraft that will assist with the rescue and extraction of any US pilots if they get shot down or their aircraft malfunction.
Source
I guess the upside of all this is that the major rivals are taking notes on how the current US moves and mobilizes
On the flipside, a the US is well aware of how the open source flight tracking software and community functions and how it’s almost impossible to hide certain movements in the modern age (they wrote a whole report on it recently), and everything we see on the flight trackers is what they want the world to see. There’s a lot happening that we can’t see. The flights of the B-2 bombers towards Iran show an example of how the US uses this flight tracking to send messages and signals to it’s opponents (“the B-2 bat signal” over Guam), and to mislead (sending some B-2s west towards Guam and Diego Garcia, while the rest flew East and crossed the Atlantic towards Iran, only one guy actually listening to the radio messages picked up on the callsign switching and that some B-2s had an unknown destination). When the US wants to move “silently” outside of the build-up that can’t be hidden, it can do things like that. The strikes on Syria in Trump’s first term are another example.
Like with this movement, the US knows that moving this specialist unit that suppresses air defences and participated in the Iran airstrikes to Puerto Rico, along with the EA-18Gs sent previously, will send a message to the Venezuelan military. There’s little need to forward deploy them to Puerto Rico, flying during the day and being photographed in the air and on the ground, etc. The point is to be seen in this respect, little effort is being made to hide. Right now F-18s off of the coast of Venezuela are flying with transponders on.