Image is of Yemen seizing the first ship in its blockade of Israel (the Galaxy Leader) with a helicopter raid.


Alternate title: What If It Was The Bab El-Womandeb And It Was Just For The Ladies?

Ansarallah is a key component of the broader Resistance movement, backed by Iran, and has been a stalwart member in engineering the ongoing collapse of Zionism. It has steadily escalated both its rhetoric and, rarely nowadays, its actions, proving that the mythical “red line” might actually exist in the world after all, after going MIA in both Russia and China. It has been striking first Israel-owned ships heading through the Bab el-Mandeb - the strait that leads into the Red Sea and then to the Suez Canal - and, recently, has demonstrated its promise that any ships that intend to dock in Israel will be attacked. While this is really only half a blockade, the cost of going around Africa is significant, and Western insurance companies really don’t like it when their ships get blasted by missiles and drones. Several shipping companies have already stated their intention to alter/stop shipping routes through the Red Sea, trying to prompt the West to find a “solution”.

Despite US naval presence in the area, Yemen possesses the ability to strike the oil refining facilities of the Gulf monarchies, leaving the US in a very difficult position. If they attack Yemen, then not only do Western ships risk being attacked directly, but those oil refineries may go up in smoke depending on if they help the West - and global oil prices will skyrocket, in an already declining world economy - and it might cost several Western leaders their leadership positions, including Biden himself. A regional war could ultimately tumble into worldwide chaos.

Equally, however, the US cannot afford to lose Israel. It is the single most important American imperial outpost, perhaps alongside Taiwan. If Zionism is destroyed as a local destabilizing influence, then the Russia-China-Iran axis will find itself in a leadership position over the region. Israeli military losses in Gaza increase every single day as they advance further into the labyrinth death trap under the obligation to show some kind of military victory, with Hamas’ strategy of attrition taking its toll. And Hezbollah sits there, having destroyed most of the border infrastructure, silently threatening the obliteration of Israel’s infrastructure under the rain of a hundred thousand missiles.

As world attention gradually shifts away from the Gaza genocide, we continue to approach the brink.


The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Saturday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.


The Country of the Week is Yemen! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli 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 Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

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.
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.


  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPM
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    6 months ago

    It’s really a tidal wave of effects, yeah. It’s easy to be like “Oh, rising energy prices will knock out X% of the industry and thus a decrease in GDP of Y%” but there’s a ton of second and third order effects too. It’s the same reason why it’s so laughable when you get people who are like “Who cares if global agricultural declines massively under climate change, it only makes up a small percentage of the global economy!” forgetting that, y’know, humans need to eat food to survive

      • iridaniotter [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        Yeah but there’s not that many C4 crops, people don’t like changing their diet drastically, and changing C3 crops to C4 is really tough. And what about the places that currently grow C4 crops but in the future can only support CAM? Let them eat cactuses? agony-consuming

        • ElHexo [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 months ago

          people don’t like changing their diet drastically

          We’re on track to do 55 million years of climate change in 150 years. That plants are predicted grow at all is a blessing (unlike the challenges meat eaters will face).

          A little pineapple as a treat? Hopefully the slow but continued industrialisation of the third world can address that (through trade infrastructure, etc) but the barbarism outcome is looking likely in some parts of the world

        • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPM
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          6 months ago

          There’s three ways plants have evolved to do photosynthesis - there’s the “C3 pathway”, the “C4 pathway”, and “CAM”. The last one is used by plants growing in arid conditions. C3 is used by most plants on Earth, while C4 is less common.

          Carbon dioxide is taken up by plants and is made into sugars through a complicated series of reactions and molecules. C3 plants have a design flaw where one of the molecules will sometimes grab hold of oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, and this design flaw happens more often in drier conditions and higher temperatures. This makes photosynthesis less efficient, sometimes by like 20-30%. C4 plants found a way to overcome this design flaw, and do photosynthesis better and more efficiently at higher temperature conditions.

          Note that if the problem was merely higher CO2 concentrations, C3 plants might be better suited as they can take more CO2 in than C4 plants. But with added problems like higher temperature and drought, the C4 plants are better suited for that.

          Scientists are trying to convert some C3 plants like rice into C4 plants, but this is difficult.

            • ElHexo [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              6 months ago

              Centralised coordination, research and development in collaboration with other public and quasi public bodies, as well as subsidies and information to farmers to use the new cultivars

              Which really should be intuitive - e.g. you have 100 scientists, should you divide them into teams and make them compete separately to deliver an outcome or direct them all to work together to the same outcome.

              Late flowering lines were then crossed to high yielding varieties from the temperate zone of the world to obtain high yielding soybeans. The further breeding work at the national level was carried out mainly by the National Soybean Research Centre, whereas selection and testing in the low latitude Cerrados was carried out by the Cerrados National Research Centre (CPAC), both of EMBRAPA.

              The success in selecting high yielding and stable cultivars of this breeding programme was based on the growing interchange among research Centres, State research enterprises and other members of the research cooperative system, under the leadership of EMBRAPA. In the establishment of uniform trials, differences on day-length, soil and climate were considered, given the vastness of the region.

              Thus, with a network of experiments in a range of environments, the release of new cultivars was followed by practical recommendations to the farmers of growing conditions under which they were selected

              https://ainfo.cnptia.embrapa.br/digital/bitstream/item/212883/1/Breeding-soybeans-to-the-low.pdf