One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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.
I love seeing the headlines about Hurricane Milton being "not as bad as expected." It was just a mild climate change-fueled nightmarish natural disaster where millions of people were displaced and thousands of people, some already impoverished, lost possessions and lives. Don't think about it, Americans. It definitely couldn't happen to you. Enjoy your slop.
With respect to the absolute mayhem destruction in western NC from Helene that will take months/years to recover from, it does seem like Florida got out much better than what it was made out to be throughout this week. Which makes me concerned with the discourse around this storm — every news outlet, reel, TikTok, meteorologist, local politician etc was describing this storm in a way that you would assume the devastation would be even worse than Katrina. Absolutely catastrophic. Tampa wiped off the map. It’s obviously important to take it seriously and I’m glad they did, it got a lot of people to evacuate. But it also painted a picture of near rapture proportions.
That didn’t turn out to be the case. There was damage and lives lost of course, from a storm fueled by climate change, which is the real story sad and lesson to be taken. But I fear millions of people will see that contrast from this storm and as a result not take future ones very seriously, because they’ll see it as clickbait hype rather than serious warning. Idk what alternative there is, we always need to be taking these storms seriously before they strike (with one very big reason being the actual material government response afterwards will not). But the news and social media industries are for-profit, so there is a baked-in incentive to overly hype future storms for the sake of clicks and views. Weird place to be
This happened in Houston with Hurricane Rita many years ago. There was a huge alarm about it, thousands and thousands of people tried to drive out of Houston at the same time and got stranded on freeways for days on end, more than a hundred people died from the evacuation, and the hurricane was extremely minimal. Anybody who evacuated from that event learned only one thing: hurricanes ain't shit I an't going anywhere.
Apparently it swerved slightly before landfall and a cold front hit just in time. Turns out the government can control the weather but they just take their sweet ass time.
I know multiple people who live within 30 minutes of Tampa and they all already have power back on. They're saying it's not that bad because it wasn't lol
I guess the people with beachfront property got kinda dabbed on but they're all millionaires so who cares