Or perhaps the end of the beginning, if you’re a little more pessimistic.

Image is from this Bloomberg article, from which I also gathered some of the information used in the preamble.

While Trump was off in the Middle East in an incompetent attempt to solve a geopolitical and humanitarian crisis, China has been doing something much more productive.

Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, had a summit with CELAC (a community of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries). There, he promised investment, various declarations of friendship, and visa-free entry for 30 days for citizens of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Lula signed over 30 agreements with China. Colombia is joining the New Development Bank and hopes to gain the money for a 120-kilometer railway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as an alternative route to the Panama Canal. Even Argentina, ruled by arch-libertarian and arch-dipshit (but I repeat myself) Milei, was uncharacteristically polite with China as he secured a currency swap renewal to shore up their international reserves.

It wouldn’t really be correct to say that Latin America is “siding with China over the US” - leaders in the region will continue to make many deals with America for the foreseeable future, and even Trump’s bizarre economic strongman routine won’t make them break off economic and diplomatic relations. What’s significant here is that despite increasing American pressure for those leaders to break off all ties with China, few appear to be listening - and given that China is perhaps the most important economy on the planet right now, that is a very predictable outcome.

As the current American empire takes actions to try and avoid their doom, those very actions only guarantee it. As Latin America grows ever more interconnected with China and continues to develop, America will grow ever more panicked and demanding, and this feedback loop will - eventually - result in the death of the Monroe Doctrine.

Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

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 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.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

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.

  • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    46·
    22 hours ago

    As Trump had a press conference about the “Golden Dome”, the US Military received it’s first radar for the Golden Dome project a few days ago: an upgraded AN/TPY-2 radar with a Gallium Nitride (GaN) front-end. Radars, unlike logical processors in consumer electronics, are one of the areas where GaN is actually highly useful

    US takes delivery of first upgraded AN/TPY-2 radar

    The new version of AN/TPY-2 has a longer range and can provide targeting coordinates to other missile defense interceptors beyond just the Army’s THAAD batteries, Jon Norman, Raytheon’s vice president for Air and Space Defense Systems Requirements and Capabilities, told Breaking Defense.

    “What the TPY-2 does now, with the Gallium Nitride front-end in it, is it can see things twice as far, so we can make that command and control decision a lot earlier on which effector to use, whether it’s an SM series or it’s a Patriot, or it’s a THAAD,” he said.

    The radar can be deployed as a standalone, mobile unit rather than being directly wired into a THAAD battery, Norman explained, which positions it as a potential contribution to President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome plan to create a comprehensive missile shield for the US homeland.

    Double the range means a 6000km range, and given the inverse square law, much more power and target tracking capabilities at closer ranges, differentiating the target from decoys much sooner.

    “If they have anything else falling off, you can discriminate very accurately and say, ‘This is the warhead. This is what we need to shoot. All the other stuff is just junk. It’s like litter on the road, so don’t waste the missile on the junk. Hit the thing that we want to hit,” he said.

    The upgraded AN/TPY-2 can now “detect these very, very small targets, and you can detect them at the separation when the booster separates from the warhead,” he said, adding that with the longer range “we can shoot sooner, and we can hit it before it starts maneuvering.”

    That last paragraph is what the US Navy was doing to ballistic missiles launched from Yemen towards Israel when they had the opportunity and SM-3s to spare. Early midcourse phase or late boost phase intercepts. A recent Senate meeting revealed that the US had fired “dozens” of SM-3s at missiles from Yemen. I came to this conclusion very early on in the US bombing campaign against Yemen. Now imagine the US doing the same thing, but to hypothetical Chinese or Russian ICBMs that would fly over the Pacific towards the USA… Place a GaN front-end AN/TPY-2 radar in East Asia, and some US Navy missile destroyers armed with SM-3s in the West Pacific, or an AEGIS Ashore facility in Guam, and this is possible with the massive increase in range and power of the upgraded AN/TPY-2.

    China and Russia have said as much in a joint statement, that this aspect of the “Golden Dome” undermines deterrence and makes arms control and treaties like the previous INF treaty impossible:

    Deeply destabilizing in nature is also the recently announced “Golden (Iron) Dome for America”, a large-scale program designed to establish unconstrained, global, deeply layered and multi-domain missile defense system to protect against any missile threats, including all types of missiles from “peer and near-peer adversaries”. First of all, this means a complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability. The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.

    • MelianPretext@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      1·
      50 minutes ago

      Seems like an unimaginative SDI copypasta. The space element is just extrapolating the US’ recent bout of LEO satellite spamming through Starlink as some success that lends a permanent perceived advantage in space that they just flatly assume China could not reciprocate. The plain thinking is that space is the new paradigm shift that elevates the US military above its adversaries—like gunboats shelling junks or drones bombing foot soldiers. To maintain this desperation for asymmetry, the Trump admin in particular, since his first term with the branding of the “Space Force,” has been diving headfirst into the pandora’s box of near space weaponization. The idea that space can be maintained as an exclusively US domain is not sustainable in reality and the US will inevitably regret giving its designated adversaries the permission, in international eyes, to match its near space ambitions.

      From a technical perspective, it’s the latest cope against Russian and Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle technologies. The US strategic doctrine is fettered, just like Israel, to the psychological chains that adversaries “aren’t allowed” to touch the sacred land of CONUS. Everything else seems to be crafted to work backwards from that teleological endpoint.

      During the 80s, the success of the ultimately non-existent SDI was the demoralizing psychological effect it had on the Soviet nuclear doctrine. The 70s saw the USSR’s nuclear stockpile surpass the US and this had been a major source of pride for the Soviets. Reagan coming along and insinuating “Nuh-uh-uh, actually your payload advantage is useless because we swerved in a new direction that makes that arsenal obsolete” provoked the Soviets into the panic of an exhaustive arms race which they could not industrially and economically sustain vis-a-vis the US from a budgetary standpoint. This budgetary black hole caused by the Soviet SDI psychological panic was what allowed Gorbachev the political room to militarily capitulate to the US through signing the USSR onto unequal nuclear arms agreements.

      The issue for the US in trying to reuse this psychological bluff, because that’s what it’s really about, is that that it is now in a inverse position to its adversaries industrially and economically. The more important thing that this might effect is that any move by the US in this domain legitimates the PLARF to finally green light an expansion of the paltry Chinese nuclear arsenal to a level actually commensurate of comprehensive second strike potential. Additionally, it allows China the justification to continue to reject any of the recent “trilateral” US-Russia-China nuclear arms agreements that the US has been trying to bind it to, which would place it at a distinct disadvantage as the newcomer party still catching up.

    • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      21 hours ago

      that’s about decoys which are different from the warhead though (like thermal/radar, which are used in cruise missiles), isn’t it. which largely is not the case, they usually use exact same decoys as active warheads since like 80s if not before, i believe. b) dunno about russia/china work to that effect, but feasibly ground based laser systems can knock down satellites (at least i’ve seen articles to that effect about orbital trash removal, on the scale of roughly half a year-2 years, via ablation*), and that’s the problematic intercept location, the midocean ones can be dealt with with earlier separation and stuff.

      *the evaporation of the surface of the satellite under high power pulsed laser can slow it down a little bit, the theory was you do it enough time each hour it passes, and over months it will start to destabilize in orbit. The laser power and optics required were in the oof territory, but feasible for states.

      but obviously that all requires investment, and destroys mutual destruction for a time, so not great.

      • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        19 hours ago

        I think the satellite and space based intercept stuff (Golden pebbles or Star Wars version 2) is more of a typical Trump distraction from the real issue of the US trying to make it’s existing interception technology, in SM-3 interceptors as part of AEGIS Ashore and AEGIS missile destroyer warships, more viable, just how “rare earths” was a Trump distraction from the US taking all of Ukraine’s natural resources. So I’m not focused much on it. It doesn’t even exist yet and it might never exist. Meanwhile, AEGIS and SM-3 does exist, and so does this new upgraded radar.

        As for decoys, there are those that aim to replicate the behaviour of warheads. But there is also chaff and smaller decoys, the idea being that you surround the warheads in a cloud of radar reflective material, so the radar can’t track the warhead accurately. Such a strategy will be less effective against more powerful radars like this upgraded AN/TPY-2.

      • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        21·
        20 hours ago

        That article is focused on space based interception using satellites, a different part of the “golden dome” system, that’s only in the conceptual stage as of now. It doesn’t exist yet. The upgraded GaN front-end AN/TPY-2 radar has been delivered and can be deployed anywhere in the world right now (with more being built) along with missile destroyers US Navy warships armed with SM-3 interceptors, that’s why I chose to post about it. You’d have to get the missile destroyers pretty close, but it could work to blunt an opponent’s attack. The article you posted states:

        For a land-, sea-, or air-based interceptor to intercept an ICBM during its boost phase, the interceptor must typically be based within about 500 km of the expected intercept point, have a speed of 5 km/s or more, and be fired less than a minute after the launch of a potentially threatening missile has been detected.

        However if you’re prepared to perform some sort of midcourse interception (early in the midcourse phase of flight, also called the assent phase or post boost phase), those numbers become more realistic, you don’t need to be as close. An SM-3 block II has an altitude ceiling of 1000km, a range of 2400km, and a top speed of 4.5km/s. What a radar like the upgraded GaN front-end AN/TPY-2 does is make this kind of early midcourse interception plan more realistic, as you can accurately track the missile much sooner after launch than before. The launch gets detected by satellites, an SM-3 can be fired before the radar starts tracking, and as soon as the radar starts tracking, it can relay the information back. With the upgraded AN/TPY-2, the time between satellite detects launch to radar starts tracking missile is reduced significantly.