Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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 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.
South Korea has been freed from all ballistic missile limitation, and has just unveiled an enormous, 3000km, ballistic missile bunker buster, with a claimed penetration ability of 100m. additionally, the US B-21 Stealth Bomber program is progressing at an impressive pace, with basically production ready design and 3 airworthy units under testing, and can be deployed to bases in Japan or South Korea with the US's newest bunker busters. In China's Southwest, India also has robust and modern ballistic and cruise missile programs, including hypersonics based on Russian 3M22 Zircon, and has foreign buyers in the Philippines.
so, can someone tell me why is China building it's cutting edge, extremely massive and utterly immobile particle accelerator lithography machine in Xiong'an New Area instead of Xi'an? okay, the researchers are from Tsinghua University, but you also have 300km/hr trains running back and forth every day.
That South Korean Hyunmoo-5 IRBM is literally the same weight as the US Minuteman 3 ICBMs. It has an 8 ton (yes, that's correct, 8000kg) warhead and impacts the target at Mach 10.
It's a weapon with the purpose of a first decapitation strike against the leadership of the DPRK. The thing is, if you're part of the military leadership of the DPRK, and you see this giant missile being rolled out, do you launch the nukes? This whole thing is a massive escalation. The closest the ROK can get to building a nuke without actually doing so.
I don't think super small chips that are mostly for C/GPUs and overpowered smartphones are gonna be that important in World War 3
autonomous loitering munition:
anti-Stealth Radar:
Passive Acoustic Sonar filter:
what is this collection of words
Using AI to interpret Hydrophone arrays to detect and identify submarines or surface ships.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-submarine
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/05/17/france-turns-to-ai-for-signals-analysis-in-underwater-acoustics-war/
They really, really will. It's very likely that drone swarms will be a significant weapon. It's a serious issue right now because there's no real way to defend against a quad copter strapped with a hand grenade flying at an infantry positon six feet off the ground at forty miles per hour. Afaik it's already possible to build hundreds or thousands of those, network them, and send them all off at once.
We really are headed in to a horrifying brave new era and very compact robots with robust hardware are going to be key. Those little drones will need to be able to run a whole lot of sensors to navigate, avoid obstacles, and choose targets.
China already has 7nm chips which and close to 4nm. Samsung's flagship is a 4nm and Huawei's flagship with a 7nm is only a little weaker
any drone big/heavy/strong enough to fly through a little wind, especially if they're carrying a live load will be relatively large compared to these smartphones
ik there's other factors like heat and energy usage but those can be supplemented by other factors like better batteries, and is a much bigger concern for data centers and smartphones carried by humans all day long