My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
The last week has had a lot of Trump admin dipshittery that isn’t important enough to be worth remarking on, so I’m just going to skip right past all that. The sanctions campaign against Iran appears to have stalled before it even left the starting line, with China saying that, nope, they aren’t going to cut off their ally for the sake of their enemy. From what I’ve gathered from Naked Capitalism’s (albeit limited) reporting on the state of Iran’s economy, the impression I get is that while inflation is running kinda wild, everything else, including state revenues, are doing sufficiently well that there isn’t going to be an economic collapse this year nor probably next year if we assume a continued no-deal situation over Hormuz.
The underlying geopolitical situation has had some interesting little developments. Iran and Oman appears to have worked out their plan for joint control over Hormuz. Ansarallah is continuing their explosive campaign against the Saudis, who are now begging the US for help. Additionally, the ever-barking never-biting Türkiye is showing some signs that they might soon, finally, after three years of witnessing outright genocide, do 1 (one) (the first numerical digit) action that isn’t to the Zionist’s direct benefit, by putting up a modicum of resistance in defence of their puppet in Syria; but, quite frankly, I’m not holding my breath on anything truly substantial happening while Erdogan’s in charge.
The state of oil flows in and around Hormuz are very hotly debated right now. Many of the oil flow numbers can be dismissed out of hand because they aren’t reflective of the reality of Iranian control and vision of the strait. Due to the narrowness of the strait, full visual coverage of the ships travelling through the channel can be achieved with technology no more advanced than a dozen people with binoculars and a not-especially-tall mountain. However, figures that are around 3-5 million barrels per day (compared to the pre-war 20 million per day) seems plausible when including Iran allowing some allied vessels out (notably Iraqi and Chinese vessels, among others). This, plus China’s rather odd actions in the oil market over the last six months, have resulted in the US’s SPR now draining at “only” 4-6 million barrels per week, compared to 8-9 earlier in the war. However, the war’s impact on fertilizer and diesel stockpiles and prices are now unignorable even to those with their heads in the sand, with anxiety steadily building in the mainstream media about food crises next year.
Meanwhile, Trump has decided to pick fights with Canada due to their strange unwillingness to graciously hand over their sovereignty to the US, with the two countries now in a tariff war. That being said, oil seems to be one product that neither side wants to fight over: the US needs a producer, and Canada needs a customer. The only other country in the vicinity with major oil reserves is Venezuela, who has been in the news a lot lately for precisely this reason, but they simply don’t have the production to do much of anything to alleviate the US’s stockpile issues and likely still won’t by the time Trump has left office, and so they can be safely dismissed as a significant player in this ongoing global energy conflict.
On the subject of naval trade routes, a fascinating development is that Russia has finally unveiled the Northern Sea Route as a regular maritime passage, with a small fleet of eight Chinese vessels taking the route as a test run in mid-August. From Shanghai to Hamburg, the route is a little over 7000 nautical miles and goes through no chokepoints (though I suppose the Bering Strait could hypothetically become one), compared to the Suez route which is nearly 11,000 nautical miles and goes through three chokepoints (Malacca, Bab el-Mandab, Suez). Russia has the world’s only nuclear icebreaker fleet, and the increased power from those reactors is necessary to provide the sheer force to break up the ice along the route, making them even more uniquely situated to benefit from the route. Many countries, China foremost among them, have identified the advantage of not being subject to chokepoints and hostile waters as the US navy continues its rapid transition to outright piracy, so it’ll be interesting to see to what extent the route is adopted in the coming years.
Last week’s thread is here.
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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 the Zionists’ 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:
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.
Multiple explosions reported in W and SW Iran just now. It looks like all the explosions were new launches towards the SoH.
Earlier; https://x.com/bonzerbarry/status/2096234396479041915
US forces struck three Iranian crude oil carriers, Sept. 5, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched ballistic missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships patrolling regional waters.
A U.S. aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer successfully evaded multiple Iranian attacks.
This might be the first time (that we know of) that Iran directly targeted an US aircraft carrier after the 40 day war. The type of missile used was reportedly Khalij Fars anti-ship ballistic missiles with 300km of range. IIRC, that is not their best anti-ship missile?
New El Nino models are out. Most models are predicting the El Nino to max out at around 4C. The current modern El Nino record is ~2.9C.
https://x.com/AMK_Mapping_/status/2096102173129998509
The Ukrainian Air Force released their claimed figures for how many glide-bomb strikes they carried out on Russian positions during August. According to them, approximately 300 sorties were carried out by the Ukrainian Air Force - an average of 9.7 per day (unchanged from their July claims). Because this is an official report, this is the maximum number possible. The true number will likely actually be lower as they have an incentive to lie. In comparison, Russia launched over 8,673 glide-bombs in August (up from 8,300 in July), with an average of ~280 per day (up from 268 in July) (as per the Ukrainian General Staff). The true number is likely slightly higher as this is also an official claim with an incentive to lie. If we were to make a rough estimate of 2 glide-bombs per Ukrainian sortie, then it would give us an airstrike ratio of around 14.4:1 in favour of Russia (up from 14:1 in July). This has a large margin of error due to Ukraine’s incentive to lie, and because Ukraine’s numbers include sorties while Russia’s include individual munitions.
https://x.com/ripplebrain/status/2096276902507839666 (privated account)
This discrepancy remains one of the most consequential for the strategic balance of the war, and casuals are totally unaware of it. Russian and Ukrainian FPV and long range drone strikes are relatively close in scale, but the Russian Air Force is dropping 5-10 million more pounds of bombs than the Ukrainian Air Force every month. To give a sense of the scale, if we average it out by assuming all of those bombs are FAB-500s (the VKS uses both lighter and heavier glide bombs) we get around 5000 gross short tons of bombs a month. The USAF achieved a rate of around 40,000 tons a month during Desert Storm, but just 8% (7,400 tons) of this was precision guided munitions and they only had to sustain this rate for 43 days.
seems really smart that Ansarallah have gone on the offensive at this stage, given that the KSA is under a lot of stress (can’t sell enough oil, asking for loans) and their imperial masters in the USA are totally overstretched dealing with Hormuz. if they can make gains now they can likely consolidate them whenever the west is finally forced into agreement via economic collapse
Hundreds of masked dudes linked to Tommy Robinson blocked Dover today.
Can’t help but think this comes off the back of the Foreign Minister of Israel saying last week that if the UK plans to sanction Israel they will “take action”.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DcjGOQzzWmB/ Japan is at it again rewriting their history using school text books, only 1 out of 9 addressed the Nanjing massacre and calls what Japan did to China an aggression, they now downplay what happened to comfort women (even more than they used to that is), claim all disputed colonial territories as unquestionably Japanese and soften hard labor among other shit and war crimes. Yet fellow diasporoid Chinese are going “oh don’t hate Japan its not their fault all govs are bad” yeah sure. How convenient this is happening at a time where they are militarizing huh.
Reporters Without Borders calls for borders for reporting (RT)
The US- and EU-backed organization has called on the EU to close tech loopholes allowing Europeans to access Russian media censored by the bloc
The Paris-based RSF, which lists EU and the US National Endowment for Democracy among its backers, found that popular AI services can provide RT articles, links, excerpts, and news summaries to web users. “Public chatbots can access these websites and redistribute their content,” a statement by the organisation claimed on Wednesday.
So funny to have a “reporters” organization (same one that refuses to condemn the zionist entity for its massacring of journalists) calling for more and better censorship of opposition opinions.
CBS News - Iranian media report explosions in Kharg Island area of Gulf. Iranian media on Saturday reported several explosions near the country’s major oil hub of Kharg Island in the Gulf, days after renewed fighting broke out with the United States. Fars news agency said blasts were heard by its correspondent but that there was no smoke visible, while the SNN news agency claimed “an Iranian tanker was targeted by the U.S.” near the island.
-–
Edit. Fuck CBS News. I thought the news was minutes old. NopeAl Jazeera - Iranian oil tanker off Kharg Island hit by four US missiles, Iran media reports. As we recently reported, an Iranian oil tanker off Kharg Island has been struck by missiles, according to Iran’s Student News Network (SNN). Iranian news outlet Khabar Fouri is now reporting that the tanker was struck by four US missiles and is being evacuated. Kharg Island processes about 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
Older update from ~45m ago
Missile hits Iranian oil tanker off Kharg Island. An Iranian oil tanker off Kharg Island has been struck by a missile, Iran’s Student News Network reports. No casualties have been reported. Kharg Island is crucial to Iran’s oil industry, accounting for 90 percent of its crude oil exports. Trump has previously threatened to seize the territory.
Contrary to premature claims by some Mexican-American channels that the Ansarallah offensive had stalled, the Houthis continue to engage with Saudi-backed PLC forces and advance in several areas towards Taizz and Mokha Heavy fighting continues, with the battle over several strategic mountain ridges expected to last several days.
- Middle East Spectator
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/03/ukraine-war-zelensky-corrupton-scandal-cabinet-election/
But now, after more than seven years in office, four and a half years of war with Russia, and a series of scandals involving his leadership team and close friends, Zelensky appears to have lost the nation’s political support. Indeed, polling published in early August points to a major mood swing among Ukrainians, suggesting that many of them have lost faith in Zelensky and would vote him out of office at the earliest opportunity.
You know Z-boy’s days are numbered when a NATO think tank posts this.
Rumor has it that they’ll probably replace him with Fedorov, who recently met with the CEO of Palantir. The people in Ukraine are tired and want peace even if it means territorial concessions, but the Great Satan has other plans.Things are getting pretty wild in Ukraine and Kiev specifically.
There was the street battle between fascist factions, and now the SBU building got hit by a drone. I’ve seen rumors this was not a Russian drone. No solid sources on that so far. Someone posted about Ukraine announcing a weekend ceasefire.
I guess this US fake “Labor Day” weekend is also starting with Iran forgoing the tit-for-tat escalation pattern as well with strikes across the region.
So I guess I’m wondering if we can make this weekend theme “the fall of the US empire”?
SBU building attack link:
Five of Israel’s six desalinization plants are offline. Untreated wastewater from Gaza’s destroyed sewage system could be part of the problem, experts warn.
Israel is facing a water crisis after five of its six desalination plants, accounting for a large share of its water consumption, were knocked offline this week by microscopic algae clogging intake pipes in the Mediterranean Sea.
This is pretty wild if accurate. Could also be propaganda for more fascism.
JD Vance on Washington’s war-fighting abilities:
“America has fought a lot of wars since I’ve been alive — 42 years. And we have won almost none of them.”
The latest news on Russia’s encirclement of a grouping of Kiev regime troops in northern Kharkov oblast:
“In the Volchansk sector, the Battlegroup North is tightening the encirclement in the Volchansk pocket,” the source said.
He also noted that many Ukrainian soldiers have already begun to surrender.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that in the northeastern part of the Kharkov Region, the encirclement of an enemy group numbering up to 2,000 personnel had been completed. The cauldron covers an area of 460 square kilometers and includes 27 settlements. Its liquidation will make it possible to move the front line in this sector back at least 20 kilometers from the border areas of the Belgorod Region, the president noted.
https://tass.com/defense/2182711
Marat Khairullin’s post for yesterday also covers this matter and offers maps and pictures of the area:
Markets are closed. If the US wants to strike Iran, this extended weekend in the US is a good opportunity to not scare the poor markets even more. Iran has so far fired multiple rounds of rockets towards Jordan and Kuwait, as well as towards the SoH.
Ukraine is seemingly trying to make a weekend ceasefire a thing by announced it and hoping that Russia follows along. Witkoff and Kushner are supposed to visit Kiev and Moscow in the next few days.
