Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos

Some pleasant news from the Ukraine war:

A memorial to the brave men and women of the Red Army who fought in the Great Patriotic War was rebuilt in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol

The banner of victory once more flies above the corpses of dead nazis, as it should.

Ex-US ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha charged over spying for Cuba

A former US diplomat who served as ambassador to Bolivia has been charged with working as an agent of the Cuban government for more than 40 years.

Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, is accused of helping Cuba gather intelligence against the US since 1981.

Mr Rocha referred to the US as "the enemy" and claimed his work as a secret agent "strengthened the Revolution", according to court papers.

Footage of Hamas monitoring "Israeli" soldiers literally right outside their tents.

Unbelievable. This is why tracking above-ground control is meaningless militarily.

I've been quite busy with random annoying life problems recently, so I haven't exactly had time to devote to the beloved cuck n chad power rankings. We're back baby. Russia vs Ukraine still gets the top row out of respect for our god ordained traditions.

Earlier today I went out to walk to the corner store to grab some stuff. When I rounded the corner that a busy bus stop is on someone who was waiting for the bus had a seizure and went down HARD, smashed up their face, teeth and glasses. While I and a two of my unhoused neighbors stayed to provide aid, every single other person there (about 15) got on the bus and left her for dead on the sidewalk. She was overweight, the three of us were barely able to move her onto a bench to keep her upright and talking as we waited for an ambulance to come.

The most heart wrenching thing I've ever experienced is someone who just had a seizure, passed out and hit their head, try to tell me, as they can hardly speak, that they can't afford to go to the hospital. I stayed with her until the ambulance came, trying to talk to her to keep her conscious.

I'm a street medic, this isn't the first time I've had to give aid to someone who had a seizure. It is never any less terrifying. The most twisted part is that a lot of people with epilepsy don't need medical assistance afterwards, and it's important not to call an ambulance because we neither have enough to pick up everyone who needs emergency medical care, and the excessive cost of medical care in this county completely ruins people's lives. I hate it here so much. DEATH TO AMERIKKKA

idk if anyone has pointed this out yet, but I feel like it can't be a coincidence that the US govt, US media/propagandists, and Israeli propagandists are all talking about sexual violence suddenly, almost 60 days into the genocide... within a week of a poll coming out that showed a double-digit disparity between women in the US and men in the US supporting Israel's military actions (phrased in the most uncharitable way).

Like, idk if this is conspiracy-theory sounding, but it seems like in an effort to temper Biden's complete loss of the electorate, and that they think that generating some kind of me-too controversy over Palestinian resistance will score them a real victory or something. It is just so seemingly manufactured. They saw a demographic that they think typically falls in line during election times (women, especially young women) and they just decided to run with this in the most cynical way possible because SA is something that young women actually care a great deal about.

tbh, it feels the same with the congressional grilling of university presidents a few days after declaring that anti-zionism is anti-semitism. Israel knows that a ton of pro-palestinian organizing is happening on college campuses or by college groups, and the only way to really stop that quickly is to create a climate where college administrators. Things like canary mission are losing their potency as pro-palestinian consciousness has been raised, but college administrators are a (relatively) small group that are typically over-paid and already obsequious towards donors (private schools) or political pressure (for state schools). It seems like the high degree of coordination that existed before oct 7th. I am sickened to think that the US/Israeli propaganda complex is finding its footing, but tbh I think I am also too disconnected from corporate media to see if any of it is even working in the first place.

Roderic Day reads Hexbear

Half-asleep bears are wandering around Siberia because it's too hot to hibernate

Bears that are struggling to hibernate due to abnormally warm weather in Russia's Amur region are wandering around in a daze, having suppressed their metabolism in preparation for winter.

Fucking bleak

Unknown investor(s) shorted billions of shekels of Israeli stock five days before October 7th👁

Does any other country in the world divide their military structure up into geographical command groups? CENTCOM/AFRICOM/EUCOM/NORTHCOM/INDOPACOM/SOUTHCOM

Like this alone strikes me as a unique and obvious indicator the US is a globe-spanning empire that sees the entire world as belonging to them and has absolutely zero respect for sovereignty anywhere at all. Yet we hardly ever remark on it.

western media and governments are in complete meltdown over ukraine right now. Everyone seems to be saying that ukraine is going to lose this war. Wonder if we'll start seeing a proper push for negotiations in near term

The F-35 works perfectly fine, unless there happens to be birds in the sky, in which case all bets are off.

The flagship fifth-generation US fighter jet has met its match in South Korea: a bird. The South Korean Air Force has decided to retire an F-35A that was damaged when it hit an eagle last year, because repairs would cost more than the $85 million cost of buying a new one.

The decision was announced on Friday, when the Air Force revealed that an analysis of the damaged jet showed that repairs would cost at least 140 billion won ($108 million) and would take four years to complete. The plane’s maker, US defense contractor Lockheed Martin, assisted in the review, which found that the bird strike had damaged around 300 components, including the engine, navigation system and airframe.

...

The jet was flying at an altitude of 330 meters (1,082 feet) when it reportedly struck an eagle over North Chungcheong province, in central South Korea. The bird was sucked into the plane’s air intake, damaging systems required for navigation and operating landing gear. The pilot made an emergency belly landing at a base in Seosan, about 80km (50 miles) southwest of Seoul.

It takes 4 years and $108 million to fix the damage caused by an eagle being sucked into the airtake. Complete paper tiger.

Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.

Holy shit.

This was probably posted in a previous news mega, but...

The US blew up a Minuteman III nuclear missile early because it failed a test last month

A test launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California went awry "due to an anomaly" early Wednesday morning, according to a press release from the service. The cause of what went wrong with the nuclear-capable missile is still being investigated.

...

The intercontinental ballistic missiles were first put into service in the 1970s, with an original planned lifespan of 10 years. The Minuteman III has been in the service now for more than 50 years. The Air Force is planning to phase it out for the LGM-35A Sentinel, made by Northrop Grumman, and aims to reach the essential operating number of the new missiles sometime in 2030.

You know all the western cope about Russia's nuclear missiles probably not working? Well, Russia's missiles are maintained by a whole-ass branch of the military explicitly tasked with missile defense. Meanwhile, the US is using fifty year old missiles, forty years past their planned service life, maintained by a branch of the military that definitely believes wunderwaffen jets that don't work are cooler places to dump cash than ballistic missiles.

Israel has nowhere near the level of popular support ukraine had in the imperial core. I know it doesn't matter, but there's a lot of young people who no longer believe in the democratic party as an entity that does good things

DOD intelligence reports that 4 Star general Pablo Yanez has been promoted to Commander of the Armed Forces by Nicholas Maduro in preparation of a potential conflict with Guyana

My biggest take away with the Guyana thing is of course the British are behind it.

Have the US anti-war protests actually accomplished a single thing in the last 30 years? Asking for a friend.

Cant wait until libs invent their own qANON and say Putin, Hamas, Khamenei, Maduro, and Xi Jinping are all in the same discord server coodinating attacks against America.

Yemen's Ansarullah has announced that they will now attack all ships travelling to Israel if they try to enter Bab Al-Mandab.

Previously, they only attacked ships belonging to Israelis.

...and up the escalation ladder we climb...

Just wanna say I have covid which is why I've been absent.

Love you newsgang.

I kept begging Xi to open a third front in Taiwan but Maduro saw that he wasn't listening and said "I got you, Comrade"

Al-Qassam:

Yesterday, as enemy soldiers tried to open the door to a booby-trapped tunnel entrance in north Gaza, the device detonated instantly, killing the son of Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff and War Minister. A number of other enemy soldiers were also killed & injured.

you'd have thought they'd have stopped falling for this trick the tenth time it happened

Ukraine Israel Guyana guys fighting each other for US military aid.

Israel must be destroyed

Israeli army tells WHO to remove medical supplies from southern Gaza: Tedros

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the World Health Organization was notified by the Israeli miliary that it should remove supplies from its two medical warehouses in southern Gaza “within 24 hours, as ground operations will put them beyond use”.

“We appeal to Israel to withdraw the order, and take every possible measure to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and humanitarian facilities,” the WHO director-general said in a post on X.

Death to

https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2023/xi-jinping-tightens-control-over-chinas-finances

This outlet was founded by the former Editor in Chief of Buzzfeed News.

BelTA - Lukashenko identifies source of funding for resolving all climate problems 01/12/2023

Aleksandr Lukashenko said: “Everyone looks for sources of funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. They are easy to find. First of all, it is necessary to stop wars and conflicts on the planet and everything that goes with it. And we will find about $5 trillion. It is five times as much as what we are trying to find today in order to reduce emissions.”

Speaking about prospects of the establishment of peace in Ukraine, the Belarusian leader referred to the speech of his Brazilian counterpart. In particular, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pointed out that $2 trillion spent on weapons last year should have been spent on fighting hunger and climate change instead of wars.

Foreign reporters asked the head of state about his stance on the conflict in Ukraine and pointed out that Vladimir Zelensky had not come to the summit. “Ukraine has been invited. Vladimir Zelensky should have been here. He may still be on the way. The forum is not over yet. He will come,” Aleksandr Lukashenko remarked.

PolandDaily24 - Duda Resigned from Group Photo at COP28 Due to Lukashenko’s Presence 01/12/2023

Polish President Andrzej Duda declined to participate in a group photo at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, citing the presence of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, according to a statement from the President’s Office. In solidarity with President Duda’s stance, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda and Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics also opted not to participate in the group photograph.

DW - Platitudes and accusations: Lavrov at the OSCE 02/12/2023

"I know that in Germany, it's fine for government members to tell journalists what they should write, but we treat our journalists with more respect," Lavrov said. The Russian diplomat also repeatedly criticized the OSCE itself in Skopje, calling it an appendage of NATO and the European Union, and questioning whether it still made sense to revitalize it.

Poland and the Baltic countries refused to attend the gathering.

Euronews - Wind of change: Germany gets serious about plans to make military 'fit for war' 15/11/2023

But with the Ukrainians struggling to push Russia back on their crucial southeastern front, Germany is trying to push things further. And Scholz's defence minister, Boris Pistorius, is now talking about Germany's defence posture in terms unlike anything heard since the country was reunified in 1990.

Writing in newspaper Tagesspiel recently, Pistorius called for "fundamental changes" to the German army, the Bundeswehr, which he said needs major structural reform "to be effective and fit for war in the future".

That phrasing is starkly different from the relatively tentative way German governments have addressed military strength in recent decades – and in his final paragraph, Pistorius wrote in even more strongly unilateral terms that will have made many thinkers and policymakers in Berlin uncomfortable.

"We need a change of mentality not only in the Bundeswehr, but also in politics and society," he declared. "At stake is the security of our country, and thus the foundation for social coexistence, progress and economic growth. As a state and a society, we need to be able to defend ourselves and be resilient so that we can continue to live in peace, freedom and security in the future."

Reuters - German union head: will expand railway strikes after talks failed 24/11/2023

The head of Germany's GDL train drivers' union on Friday said wage negotiations with state-owned railway operator Deutsche Bahn had failed and added that strikes will be expanded.

GDL wants a reduction in working hours with full wage compensation and an extension of the GDL collective agreements to the network and maintenance division of Deutsche Bahn.

Deutsche Bahn has firmly rejected both points, saying that a reduction in working hours would require the hiring of 10,000 new employees, which is impossible in the current job market.

Yahoo News - At protest in Lviv, students demand firing of university professor over her ‘disrespect’ for Russian-speaking soldiers 14/11/2023

The professor sparked a wave of criticism after she responded to the fact that some military brigades of the Azov Regiment and the 3rd Separate Marine Brigade speak Russian, stating that she cannot "accept" to call such fighters Ukrainians, during an interview with Yanina Sokolova on YouTube channel Rendezvous on Nov. 5.

Students from Lviv Polytechnic, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and Kyiv National University of Technology and Design, among others, participated in the protest. The protesters brought posters with slogans such as "Farion out", and "Iryna Farion disgraces Ukraine" as seen in a video provided by Suspilne.

Farion herself said that she is supported by "hundreds of people." She called the incident a "regular provocation" organized by Russian propaganda. Lviv Polytechnic University said that it "does not bear responsibility" for Farion's statements and that the university students have contacted law enforcement.

Yahoo News - Politico names Zelenskyy Europe's most influential dreamer 2024 28/11/2023

The American digital newspaper Politico has chosen Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, as the most influential person in Europe in the Dreamers category.

:zelensky-pain:

Bonus: The newest installment of lib slop that is the Elon Musk biography clocks in at 688 pages or 20 hours and 27 minutes of audiobook time. :negative:

"This group can't be supported because they're homophobic" is the same shit racist white people use every time BLM protests make national headlines. Suddenly every attack on black trans women and homosexuals became an issue before going back to being ignored once the protests died down.

Biden is officially to the right of Reagan on checks notes genocide.

Israel rebuff's WHO claim: We didn't ask you to evacuate Gaza warehouses

Condensending bullshit. Then what the hell was the letter then?

Drip or drown

Find it extremely funny/sad that people argue that US billionaire oligarchs are less evil than those in Middle Eastern oil states. The argument, after you navigate through all the facades of actually existing capitalism, basically boils down to stating that US billionaires are less evil because they don't directly make the decisions that result in government oppression, war and human rights violations to the degree that oligarchs in oil states do, it's just that the entire apparatus that allows US oligarchs to be so wealthy is based off of all those same things.

I do not find this "argument of abstraction" convincing, to say the least. Even if this somehow makes US billionaire oligarchs slightly less evil than their oil state counterparts, it is definitely not something to be proud of.

And that's before even acknowledging how those oil states came to exist in the first place. Without Western support, both capital and military, it would be impossible for these stares to exist. Saudi Arabia even admitted this recently.

In general people really do not understand how "actually existing capitalism" functions and how it is synonymous with imperialism and polarisation. You cannot seperate the means of this wealth accumulation from imperialism. One can even take this further and argue that imperialism is not merely a stage of capitalism as Lenin stated, but synonymous with capitalism itself.

Taking this further, one can argue that capitalism and it's evolutions can only be understood as a single global system comprised of polarisation (the centre - periphery model), where the periphery countries do not lag behind those in the centre, but whose structure has been changed to enable polarisation by force. Thus, imperialism is not merely the subjugation of one nation by another, which is the colloquial definition, or a specific stage of capitalism, but imperialism is rather “precisely the amalgamation of the requirements and laws for the reproduction of capital; the social, national and international alliances that underlie them; and the political strategies employed by these alliances”.

Venezuela decides its time to add another decade in a week

Weird how everyone in Gaza who's in a position to effectively communicate and demonstrate what Israel is doing keeps dying. Probably just a coincidence!

Nitter

UNLV mass shooter was career college professor, source says, but unknown whether he had a connection with school

Looks like yesterday's campus shooting was possibly workplace violence motivated.

I can’t stop thinking about this Telegram comment. They know deep down what their government is doing is genocide and they fucking love it. But they’re rightfully concerned with how their unbridled glee watching the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians affects outside perception.

These people are psychologically identical to Nazi concentration camp personnel

It's fucked up how Castillo is in jail without any sentence and Fujimori, a man that commited genocide, is free.