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
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.
Not to get too much of a conspiratorial lib, but could some of the reason of the rise in everything being so expensive be that there has been a three-year long capital strike?
Biden is still way too far to the left that the overton window allows, so in protest in order to get people to vote Trump,
will triple the price of everything, people blame Biden and vote Republican and the day after election day they bring prices down.
I think the reason everything is becoming more expensive is because the inherent nature of capitalism is to push wages down to subsistence levels. Marx had it right in Capital Volume I. But today, instead of companies slashing employees’ wages, they can just wait for prices to go up, which effectively acts as a wage cut over time, with much less worker anger aroused than actual wage cuts.
Yea idk if others have noticed but wages on the lower end has raised a ton the last few years (relatively). Fast food and retail jobs are paying 2-3 dollars more because of supply and demand
Companies are just adjusting their prices to keep up
Is he? What outcome does national or international capital want that Biden won’t deliver?
The exceptional thing is that the US went into a recession despite more rounds of extreme helicopter money.
For me to believe this, prices would have to come down after Trump gets elected, which is a thing that never happens.
No, if there was such a thing it would be a very minor effect at best. A few points regarding inflation in the US:
1- The majority of inflation is explained by corporations rising prices almost arbitrarily and finding out mainstream economic principles was false, you can indeed charge people well above what shit stupid concept like price elasticity would explain because some of these goods and services are essential, you can’t opt out of buying food or energy or rent.
2- The part beyond corporation profits is explained by the Fed’s money printing/QE through COVID and over the last 3 years.
3- As a consequence this inflation wasn’t necessarily without consequence, as you see the stock market had a rough 2022. It is not in the interest of the Fed to let inflation get too high, therefore they’ll use their BS “tools” like interest rates which in turn was bad for the market. As a consequence the market only recovers when the Fed finaly signals they’ll stop raising rates. Do you think a year of market stagnation is worth anything? Looking at the “lost” value after every crash e.g 2008, 2020, 2022 it doesn’t seem like it.
4- As an even further consequence of everything before the US economy is even more dependent and dominated by these giant mega corps, I don’t think the past 2 years benefited the smaller capitalists subgroup at all. For instance the major issue is still debt servicing costs.
5- American capitalism already controls politics through direct money and resource donations, PACs/lobbying. Why go through roundabout schemes when you can just say “I give you x Billions now do this or else”.
3-If there are more complicated dynamics these are quite few, I guess things like e.g the combination of interests between say government contracts, job creation and MIC budget, but this is unrelated to the topic I think.
Price elasticity is not stupid. The things you described that you can’t opt out of are price inelastic. It’s one of the reasons they can just jack up prices on that stuff. The problem with neoliberals is that they just plug their ears and shout about “free market competition” whenever it’s brought up that price inelasticity of demand places a lot of power in the hands of suppliers, especially when their are no price controls.
Lol