With the funeral of the late Khamenei drawing crowds of millions of Iranians, and many dozen visits from foreign delegations and high-up figures from around the world, the war itself has hit a temporary lull. It appears that the battle over whether the Omani route is legitimate is continuing, with transits sometimes relatively elevated (but still nowhere close to pre-war levels) due to American air support, and sometimes stopped by an Iranian strike. What’s currently happening in the negotiations is extremely unclear to me because of a massive deluge of conflicting information and intentional disinformation.
However, with Vance confirming on live TV that they are treating the MoU as an opportunity to refill oil stocks (not physically possible to any significant degree given current transits and the SPR’s current level) and that they’ll see where they’ll go from there, the US maintaining that Iran cannot be allowed to have a toll/service fee system, and of course the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, I currently can’t see how this ends without a return to war. The alternative, of course, is that either the US’s or Iran’s position is much precarious than they’re letting on, and they are bluffing but will capitulate under serious fire. I’ve been keeping my mind as open to the latter possibility as I have the former, and of course, it’s not as if Iran’s economic situation is all sunshine and rainbows and so that could potentially be the deciding factor, but to me, militarily, Iran has never looked stronger. The missile cities truly stood the test, and its air defense network is still plenty powerful enough to deter American planes and drones from getting too close to its airspace.
Elsewhere, we are nearing the completion of the latest wave of comprador installation in Latin America, with Colombia and Peru returning to a hard right political stance after a brief stint with more left wing politics. Venezuela is also being forced into submission regardless of which party is technically in charge under threat of overwhelming force by the US, after the US successfully bypassed Venezuela’s major and only defence, a well-armed and party-loyal population in the hundreds of thousands, by simply saying “If you take arms against us on the ground, we will do you what we did to Gaza.” Whether the Venezuelan people will continue to accept this humiliation or rise up is still up to debate, but if there is no response by the government at all, it does seem to spell a pause, though not necessarily the end, of Chavismo as it is currently conceived, and new developments will be needed to take Venezuela forwards. And, finally, Cuba has been forced to take the Dengist route (reform and opening up) for the possibility of survival after nearly a century of a more tightly controlled socialist economy, as the siege this time around proved even more impactful than even the very difficult times after the fall of the USSR. The next logical steps for the US will be to crush Brazilian and Mexican leftist politics, so we may see the ignominious return of the Bolsonaro faction, and perhaps even the man himself.
As I currently see it, with electoral tampering and fraud now both very commonplace and essentially unpunishable by leftist forces, there’s three main paths forward for the continent: 1) a return to the anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare that characterized much of the 20th century due to the once-again-confirmed failure of electoral politics; 2) just accepting submission to regional US hegemony as the US withdraws and relocates its forces and agents from Eurasia under fire, and hoping that maybe they can win an election here or there and that Somebody Abroad Does Something (the mythical “international community”, etc); or 3) the allure of the growing Chinese hegemony proves too powerful for even the American compradors to resist and they sign developmentalist business deals with them that undercut the IMF and World’s Bank plan to maintain imperialist underdevelopment.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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:
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.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian commented on the World Cup:
“The U.S. government’s conduct as World Cup host follows its familiar foreign policy: bending rules, humiliating rivals, creating obstacles, and cheating. This is their MAGA playbook. Iran rejects such games. We stand firmly for our rights.”
https://xcancel.com/Gaurab/status/2074288901947318758
The United States has roughly two dozen people who know how to run rare earth solvent extraction at commercial scale. The Chinese Society of Rare Earths has over 100,000 members. In 2023, American mining engineering programs graduated 162 students. China graduated about 3,000 from 45 programs. Twelve US universities have shut down their mining engineering departments, including UC Berkeley and Ohio State. The Bureau of Mines, the federal agency responsible for mining research and training, was dissolved in 1996. Chinese pricing drove Western rare earth operations out of business through the 1990s and 2000s. The people who knew how to run those plants retired, changed industries, or died. Rare earth separation requires understanding how 17 chemically similar elements behave across hundreds of interconnected mixer-settler stages over months of continuous operation. That knowledge is accumulated through years of hands-on work in facilities the West stopped running. The average US mine worker is 46. 221,000 are expected to retire by 2029. Building an entirely new critical minerals supply chain means rebuilding the workforce that was eliminated a generation ago. The operational knowledge only comes back by running real plants.
https://xcancel.com/sephardi_genius/status/2074319635168604361
Imagine how good it feels to be a card carrying member of the Chinese Society of Rare Earths
im thinking about thos minerals…Tasnim is throwing me an error right now but I’ll update this when I can
ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen are disabling custom AI agent features ahead of China’s Interim Measures on anthropomorphic AI interaction services, effective 15 July. The rules target bots offering sustained emotional interaction while sparing workplace and productivity agents. Tencent pulled a similar Yuanbao feature in June, and users are protesting the loss of chat histories.
China’s regulations on “anthropomorphic AI models” come into effect in five days, and companies like Alibaba are already pulling their personalised LLM agents in response. The regulations basically say that any LLM that attempts to simulate a human and use human-like emotion are subject to a lot of scrutiny, banned for minors, etc. Interesting that the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of China have arrived at the same position, where LLMs are fine when used as tools but demonic when impersonating humans. Some details of what the regulations will apply to:
Pursuant to Article 2 of the Measures, the regulatory scope covers services that “utilize AI technologies to simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles for the purpose of providing continuous emotional interaction to users within the territory of China”. Such services may take the form of text, images, audio, video, or other modalities, and typically include functions such as emotional care, companionship, or psychological support. The determination of whether a service falls within the scope of the Measures is based on three key elements, namely (a) the simulation of human-like personality traits, (b) the continuity of interaction, and © the presence of emotional engagement. Among these, continuity is the decisive factor. If a product or service is designed to engage in sustained emotional interaction with users over time, it is likely to be subject to regulation. By contrast, services that do not involve ongoing emotional interaction, such as customer service tools, knowledge-based Q&A systems, workplace assistants, educational platforms, or scientific research applications, are expressly excluded.
Per https://thenextweb.com/news/china-humanlike-ai-agent-rules and https://www.hlc.com/en/publications/chinas-interim-measures-for-the-administration-of-anthropomorphic-ai-interaction-services
Proposal for football containment. Real things are happening.
Khatam Al-Anbiya HQ says Tehran will deliver decisive response to US aggression, terrorist act in south Iran. #PressTV
Another wave of US attacks on Iran has started. Time for Iran to respond in a very serious way.
About a week ago,
RubioJD Vance (IIRC) said that the plan with the MoU is to refill the reserves and then attack again. Now the MoU is dead (the US never implemented the MoU anyway) and reserves have never been lower. I guess they believe that low oil futures prices are good enough, lol.Cuba today proposed an additional debate in the UN assembly on the necessity of ending the U.S. blockade on Cuba.
9 members voted to block the debate from taking place: Argentina, Costa Rica, Czechia, Israel, Morocco, North Macedonia, Paraguay, Ukraine and United States
Long March 10B launch livestream. This is just for the launch, we won’t get a livestream of the first stage recovery attempt unless a very brave fisherman feels like it. I will be posting updates as soon as they are available.
EDIT: Liftoff was successful! It looked good coming off the pad. The cable catch will occur in about 10 minutes.
EDIT 2: Source says recovery was successful, not sure how trustworthy.
EDIT 3: Catch confirmed. China has become the second nation to successfully recover a launch vehicle.
🚨 BREAKING: After FIVE hours of debate, Paraguay’s Senate passed a majority vote motion condemning senator Celeste Amarilla’s racist remarks about Kylian Mbappé and rejecting all forms of racism & discrimination.
The Senate also said that Amarilla’s comments do NOT represent the position of the Paraguay National Chamber
Five hours to decide that racists tweets are bad
https://xcancel.com/policytensor/status/2076204808529150380
There is no leg of the escalation ladder that is going to magically solve the problem of retaking Hormuz. Even a very large dose of mass violence just adds to our crimes without getting us any closer to the political objective of securing Hormuz. It’s not that it is not easy. It is that it is not possible. The cost of suppressing Iranian fire is prohibitive.
more
First, it is not something that can be secured with the air weapon. That is what was tried and found wanting this March. Not to mention, there is not a single instance of victory from the air in the whole century of Anglo-Saxon air power. There is no possibility of a surprise success of air interdiction here.
Second, the mature precision-strike regime is strategically defense dominant in the sense that it strongly favors the situated state’s denial campaign against the power projection of the world power. Tactically, this is because the situated state can more easily dig and harden to ensure that its strike capabilities are survivable (like Iran’s missile cities). This creates zones of denial near a great missile power where the command of the global commons is frustrated. This military situation is not going to change but get worse. A good clock for the decay of the US military position is the CEP of the theater missiles (MRBMs) in the arsenal of its military rivals. Iran is one of the greatest missile powers in history. It has more advanced theater missiles than the US. It is a technological leader in precision-mass. The size of its inventory of MRBMs is larger than that of China or the US. Iran’s rise as a great power is not a coincidence. It is a specialized power in a technological era that lifts its specific technical missile capabilities to great strategic significance (like Germany in the age of machine tools—more on that on the Substack).
Third, the only way to retake Hormuz is to suppress Iranian fire, and the only way to suppress Iranian fire is to occupy Iran and dictate its political orientation. But the cost of invading and occupying Iran is prohibitive. Not only can the US not raise enough divisions to occupy Iranian cities. It simply cannot take the casualties. All of Vietnam had less than 10mn men of military age. Iran has 40mn. The US is not capable as a state formation at this time to pay the price. Just compare the enthusiasm for the 250th military parade with Khamenei’s funeral. Attendance in the latter was two orders of magnitude larger than the former. If the US does get sucked into a land war, it will destroy the American political order. Iran will either defeat the US outright by driving its forces away from Iran. Or if US forces manage to occupy Iran, they will lose the counterinsurgency war as the home front breaks down. In either case, Iran will recover faster and in firm control of Hormuz.
The military defeat suffered by the US was not due to an American error (beyond launching the war of aggression). It is dictated by a structural transformation of the balance of power that is not about to be repealed any time soon. It is important to not only to accept the military defeat, but to understand it. Because if we do not comprehend the loss correctly, we will find ourselves face to face with the mother of all losses in a vastly bigger theater than the Gulf.
The NATO Summit in Ankara in a nutshell:
Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?
