Image is of Putin and Scholz sitting on opposite ends of a frighteningly long table back in 2022. Folks, the table is gonna get ten feet longer.
The latest round of US-Russian diplomacy is taking place on August 15th in Alaska, where Putin and Trump are meeting in-person to maybe try and bring an end to this godforsaken conflict. While I don't want to totally discount the possibility that they may come to an agreement - you truly never know! - there's a lot stacked against this encounter yielding much of anything.
Russia appears to have demanded a land swap; that Ukraine fully withdraw from Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts (in exchange for unspecified Russian gains, but probably parts of Sumy and Kharkov) as a precondition for a ceasefire that could perhaps lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict, and Ukraine seems completely unwilling to do anything of the sort, saying that even if they wanted to, the process of just giving up a couple oblasts would take significant time and require referendums. I say that Russia has appeared to demand it, because there's been a lot of confusion - probably in bad faith - about what Russian diplomats and Putin himself have said and what the demands even are. There are some who speculate that Trump will sell out Ukraine and blame Zelensky for refusing to agree with Russian demands, and there are others who say that this just the latest of many examples of the US and Russia meeting up with such fundamental differences that a deal is impossible, and that Trump fully expects to put sanctions on Russia after Putin declines some harebrained American scheme.
Anyway. After the summit, in late August, Putin is due to arrive for a visit to India, at Modi's invitation. Previously, I was unsure exactly what India would do in response to American sanctions pressure, and now we appear to be receiving an answer, as Modi has made public statements that suggest that he is only getting closer to Russia. Fascinatingly, Modi will soon make his first visit to China in seven years at the annual SCO summit at the end of August, and Putin will be heading to China too on September 3rd. There is an increasing amount of dismissal about the potential of BRICS (especially one that contains India), and that dismissal is certainly rather justified, but I am still deeply curious about what developments may occur as the global south braces to face the remaining ~85% of Trump's presidency.
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Israel'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 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.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DISCUSING U.S. TAKING STAKE IN INTEL — BBG
I actually agree with this.
But uhhh nationalization of industry under a fascist state hits a little different. Transferring the means of production of critical industries from capitalists to the state is not a good thing if the state is not ruled by the proletariat. This is just increasing the efficiency of the fascist state.
As Mussolini would say, this solves the contradiction of labor being subservient to capital!*
*by making both classes subservient to the state
liberals crying about MAGA gommunism.
Yeah I mean Biden just gave Intel billions with no enforcement mechanism of what it should be used for other than him saying "Please build foundries in the United States" and instead they did a huge stock buyback program. If you want Intel to do something strategic for American interests, the government has gotta run it.
DEAR TRUMP PLEASE FIX THE SILICON DEGRADATION ISSUE IN INTEL 13TH GEN AND 14TH GEN PRODUCTS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
Yes US please take a stake in a failing company whose only relevant because of their worldwide monopoly on CPU architectures while they gut all their workers and self destruct.
I don't think this changes anything materially, Intel has always been the arm of the US military and technological overreach.
Yeah I don’t think it’s going to change anything with regards to Intel.
However, I imagine the playbook goes like this:
This is the future libertarians wish for. Even if a leftist government comes into office (not going to happen in the US but let’s be generous with our imaginations), they will find themselves with very limited power to enact their platform.
Also Intel is the big loser in the AI space race: nobody wants their compute, desktop video game hobbyists don't want to touch their GPUs, office workers would rather be given ARM macbooks and qualcomm looks like they want to eat their lunch as well with snapdragon PCs, their newest ventures are flops (with mass firings to boot) and they won't be getting their chip fabs running anytime soon and will be reliant on TSMC for the foreseeable future. Mobile smartphones? Even dreaming about it is absurd for Intel.
With this context, being overtly absorbed into the US government and being treated as the favorite, obedient child is their best bet.
Intel has absolutely dropped the ball over the last couple decades, and the US government will never let them die.
They’ve essentially cancelled their Ohio fab, and have scaled back their new fab in Arizona by about half of the original design, but the half that is still going forward is nearly finished with tool installation and they’re getting close to the first production lot being completed. (No source, original reporting)
They do have an internally developed AI on their in-house servers, but from what I’ve been able to learn I don’t think it’s an LLM.
That's already the case and also that situation will never come to pass outside of a revolution anyways.
N word
Got that government ~~cheese~~ CPU