Image is of a Khorramshahr-4 medium range ballistic missile, which has a range of about 2000km.
As I said in the last megathread, trying to figure out what exactly is happening is becoming ever more difficult. The gist of things is that Iran has, very justifiably, refused to negotiate (assassinating their leader and striking their country with hundreds of missiles in the middle of negotiations causes some reluctance to return to the table, I suppose). Censorship across the Middle East has further ramped up, with reportedly extreme punishments for posting footage of Iranian strikes online. From what I can gather, Iran’s number of strikes have stabilized at a comfortable daily rate, with strikes into both the Gulf monarchies and Occupied Palestine continuing apace. Official charts of these strikes over time seem very disconnected from reality on the ground, but again, it’s hard to really get at the specifics.
The messaging on how long the war is expected to last is rather muddled on both sides. The Trump administration fluctuates more than daily - and even sometimes in the same speech - on whether the war is already won or whether it’s going to last months longer. The US seems to be coming up a new possible scheme every few hours: a ground invasion with the Kurds? A ground invasion without the Kurds? An amphibious assault? A series of commando operations to steal Iranian uranium? A massive parachuting operation into Tehran? Fuck it, let’s just send the Navy into the Strait of Hormuz? There doesn’t seem to be a coherent plan for continuing hostilities beyond firing more and more of a limited stockpile of cruise missiles into mostly non-military targets, hitting easily replaceable drone and missile launchers with a limited stockpile of drones, and burning a limited stockpile of interceptors at an astounding rate (and, in the process, disarming every other Western-aligned country of their interceptors).
Meanwhile, from Iran, I’ve seen rumors and reports from classic anonymous “senior IRGC officials” (no doubt some invented by Zionists to sow confusion), that I don’t know how to substantiate, ranging anywhere from “If the US pulls back their forces now, we will restart negotiations,” to “It doesn’t matter what the US or the Zionists do or say, we aren’t stopping until every last trace of Zionism in the Middle East has been extinguished,” to a few positions in between those poles. Despite the damage to infrastructure in Iran, it doesn’t seem like there has been any political or social fracturing. Not to speak too soon - perhaps the West will start earnestly trying to overfly Iranian territory to drop their very plentiful bombs soon - but every indication is that there will be no regime change nor societal collapse in Iran in the short and medium term.
The US is desperately trying - and mostly failing - to keep a lid on the economic firestorm they have ignited. There has been much ado about oil prices and oil futures and indexes and what all the myriad Lines going up and down signify and things like that, which is befitting such a financialized empire which is so disconnected from the actual physical flows of materials and much more attuned to vibes and speeches. The only thing I’m personally paying much attention to on the economic front is the drones and missiles slamming into fossil fuel infrastructure, the Hormuz blockade, and the resulting global shockwave of shortages, stoppages, closures, bankruptcies, and force majeures spreading out from the epicenter that is Iran.
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.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.


BREAKING: US crude oil prices surge above $95/barrel.
every morning I wake up, get ready, look at the news, see drones and missiles slamming into tankers and oil infrastructure, keep scrolling a bit, see that factories downstream of oil and LNG are shutting down en masse and that the world is progressing towards the greatest energy crisis in human history, scroll down a bit more, and see the oil prices have gone down by $15 because some high ranking US politician tweeted at Larijani that they’re gonna put his ass in the Hague or something like that and market traders are utter fucking dipshits
randomly generated economy
Don’t worry everyone, Trump said the war will be over “soon”, and everything will go back to normal, oil prices included. Let’s just ignore that the US just spent a small fortune moving half of the active B-1B bomber fleet to the UK, 12 bombers, to drop JDAMs 24/7 on Iran. War will definitely be over “very soon”.
How will the markets react when the war is not over “very soon”, I’m worried.
the market can stay irrational for much longer than the market can actually exist
Bessent said he was considering shorting oil index futures. they’re probably doing it already. and based on the last drop, they time it with fake news from Trump. They said the IRGC was using mines and showed videos of them blowing up random ships. IRGC said they were not using mines and instead close the strait using a combination of missiles and drones.
The way I understand shorts to work, someone’s got to bet on Oil prices going down for you to be able to short them, right? Who would make that bet right now?
I guess what I am asking is: who is colluding with who to even make this possible? I assume state actors are losing the money that these short betters are winning?
Short squeeze the US’ attempts at covering up the war’s effects, counter the US propaganda, and profit?
You can short with a second party.
Party A is holding 100 oil futures contracts worth some price or a stock.
Party A and B agree to let B short. B borrows those stocks or contracts, then sells them. If the price goes down, they can buy 100 of whatever at a lower price than they borrowed - can return it to A and still have some float. A isnt doing this for free necessarily, they get to charge a premium. For commodities futures, they can sell the contract right now and promise to deliver 100 oil barrels (whatever the underlying commodity was) believing and hedging that it will be less than the futures contract. You dont have to wait until the contract to actually close the position, you can always buy or spin up a futures contracts for 100 barrels at a (hopefully) lower price and give it to Party A.
People actually producing like futures because it makes the price stable, its just a contract. They trade the futures around and thats the speculation. But if you grow soybeans or pump oil or whatever you want the price nailed down now so you can actually plan. You just ship x to whoever and get paid.
Okay. But why bet on oil going down right now? Do they want to lose money? The only way they wouldn’t is if they have insider knowledge of the next lie tweet about the war being won that the markets somehow believe.
Is this sort of shit how Bessent fucked Iran’s currency in November?
How much money did he blow to pull that off?
Hehehehe
Which US official will tweet something to try to manipulate it down tomorrow?
And how many days in a row will it continue to work without fail?
yeah I wonder what else they could conjure up🤔 maybe they got some alien tech that they havent pulled out yet and can stop shit like green lantern?
Turns out, releasing the strategic reserve actually scared the market more. That means this isn’t going to be quick.
This should be a pinned top level comment
but then again, there’s that anti-icon thing in Islam i nevwr really got my head aroubd - remember when there we’re billboards in Tehran with a depiction of Alah and Mohammad without faces?
With Khamenei being the Martyr Ayatollah…
Well, I’ve told people years before it happened, that if it were to come to pass, he’d become so legendary that in a 100 years people would pray to him.
Similar to how some religious experts furiously try to convince some people that you shouldn’t pray to Mohammad, just god.
Maybe next century, anti-idol policies would be inacted - and depictions of Khamenei will be banned.