Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
Japan is considering dissolving the Moonies
Gotta be one of the most successful adventurists of all time
the guy who killed shinzo abe is what the unabomber wishes that he was. everyone in japan is spontaneously coming to the conclusion he was right.
Greece Weather report with hidden commie W
So right now the Thessaly erea (Center of Greece) is being hit with probably the heaviest rainfall in recent years in Europe. Already at 100-500mm in the last ~12 hours in large ereas and cities and it wiil probably rain ~1000mm in overall till Thursday, maybe even more in places. Naturaly things have started to get fucked up and floods have hit the second largest city in the erea (Volos, 80k population). No one can do anything against such rainfall, its not the politicians fault right?
Well the largest city in the erea is Larisa (200k population) , and it is situated basicaly in a hole and bellow sea level and with a major river going through it. Seems like an apocalypse ready to happen. But it wont. Larisa had regural floods at every other downpour and river surge but it also had a communist mayor from 1980 to 1994. Former ELAS captain, imprisoned tortured and exiled for decades and all. Aristidis Lambroulis. He got his hand on any European and state found he could find, brought over Soviet engineers and technicians and basicaly dug up most of the city for years instaling the largest stormwater drainage system in Greece and also split and redirected the river bed inside the city to decrease volume and make flooding less likely. And Larisa hasnt flooded since and is unbothered even by the heaviest rains. Now this one will be a real test and historicaly big but still. It will pull through thanks to the legacy and struggle of a communist administration
Liberal champions of sovereignty are now frothing at the mouth about a Chinese company designing a Chinese smartphone in China because the US didn’t “allow” it.
This is what liberals believe: nobody can do anything without whitey’s permission.
Colonial mentality in action. They need to be reminded that they don’t control China anymore.
My workplace is having a reading contest this month, so pretty great reason to crack open some books again. Started reading A People’s History of the United States, read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and also The Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela’s autobiography really slaps hard on par with Blackshirts and Reds.
HR doesn’t like me discussing socialist theory probably because I’m objectively right and 95% of the workplace agrees with me, lmao
America deserved 9/11
I’ve been going over reddit data a bit today and roughly a month or so ago every single subreddit on the site lost around 75% of its activity.
A few comments-per-day samples, look at what happened on July 11th on all of these:
In order - /r/mildlyinfuriating /r/whitepeopletwitter /r/gaming /r/Askreddit
What the fuck happened on July 11th? Some sort of delayed aspect of the API closure? Tokens for a major mass botting operator run out?
75% (or more, up to 95%) is an absolutely behemoth drop in overall site commenting activity.
Was this much of reddit literally fake activity? I don’t think this is just people that stopped using the site, not all simultaneously, this all happening at once points to some sort of major event with automated commenting all stopping sitewide simultaneously. You can check every single god damn subreddit, the same thing happened everywhere.
I knew reddit was botted, you see it a lot on the mod side of things and you recognise a tonne of sus bots going haywire. But if this is the scale of the fake activity that existed on the site it’s wayyyyyyyyyyy bigger than I believed it was and I was among some of the more paranoid people about it.
EDIT: And since it happened, nothing is recovering. Everything is going down, everywhere. The drop in comments is causing a slow drop in comments over time site-wide. This is catastrophic data, worse than what musk has done to twitter in my opinion.
