My sources for the preamble come mostly from here, here, and here.
The thread image depicts Kenyan police, trained by the Zionist entity, in a meeting with President Ruto before being sent to Haiti, sourced from this article.
As has been planned for the last couple years, foreign police officers have been inside Haiti for a few months now. It will surprise nobody to learn that this has not gone very well. Gangs continue to control much of the country, and violence has continued in the form of massacres and forced relocations (approximately 1.3 million). Something like 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under the control of one gang or another.
The aim by the US was to import 2500 police officers to Haiti from a wide variety of countries. One of those was Kenya; President Ruto had to fight his own country's courts to force this through, and ironically is now apparently considering withdrawing those officers once the UN mandate expires on October 2nd. The issue here is not only the limited manpower (Haiti has a population of 12 million), but also very pedestrian things, like the fact that the officers who arrive don't even speak the language.
The situation in Haiti appears to be a fairly standard operation of American national control, in which both battling sides are being supported by the US in order to create maximum disorganization and prevent a coherent political force from arising and thus threatening their Caribbean interests. While the US funds foreign forces to arrive in Haiti to "control the situation" or similar justifications, the Haitian gangs get their weapons smuggled in from the US itself. That this is happening alongside escalations against Venezuela is obviously not a coincidence - in a world in which American interests are being gradually shrugged off, and where the American state military is becoming rapidly more impotent and unable to dissuade and defeat even tiny states like Yemen, total imperial dominion of their immediate surrounding territory must be ensured by any means necessary.
The police and the gangs are likely designed to be mutually reinforcing, without even much kayfabe of fighting each other. As an example, once the Kenyan police arrived, they immediately began brutalizing anti-government protestors instead of focussing on gang activity. They were trained by the Zionist entity, after all.
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.
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.
The US's MRAPs are fucking enormous, heavy and expensive and they only have four seats, so they're using unarmored cars now. Is there a reason they can't have something like Russia's Tigr, basically a SUV with 9+ seats and basic bulletproofing to move infantry squads around in? Hell, Turkey's Kobra even has an angular hull for mine resistance and it still seats 9 and weighs half of what the M-ATV does.
They actually already have that - while the regular Humvee has more of a typical car layout with just 4 seats (+ potentially one more guy poking out of the top to man the machine gun), there are variants with an extended troop compartment which fit exactly in this SUV-style category with 9-10 total capacity (7-8 in the back plus the 2 regular seats in the front). Some of those are open at the back, pickup-style, and just get a canvas covering, but there do seem to be variants with proper covering in the back, although I'm not sure what the thickness of it is.
Plus, if we want to go a bit further into something better suited for fighting, with a proper armored hull that can be armored much better at less weight (since the hull shape itself is optimized for that, while a regular car layout which has to account for side-doors and windows isn't), basically an American BTR - well, that also exists! The M1117 has had variants with stretched hulls to make them into more of a proper APC:
Going even further back, for something even more BTR-style with an 8x8 layout - there's the LAV-25, adopted in the '80s. The Army was actually planning on buying over 2000 of a variant without a turret (just a .50 cal on the top instead), which would have basically been the Stryker 20 years earlier (and somewhat smaller and lighter, and presumably cheaper), but Congress cancelled the funds for that so it only ended up being bought by the Marines in a turreted variant with the same autocannon the Bradley uses (and interestingly, the LAV actually competed against a predecessor of the M1117 mentioned above).
So both for Humvees being sent into Iraq, and now these completely opened-up pickup trucks without even doors (have fun either cooking or freezing to death when you have to ride this in any harsher climate I guess!), there were already existing solutions for a better-armored vehicle - still wheeled so it would be simpler and cheaper than a tracked APC/IFV, but with a purpose-built hull that can actually provide at least some protection - a concept the Soviets figured out basically right after WW2 (while the 8-wheeled BTR style most people are familiar with comes in the '60s, they had 4x4 and 6x6 ones earlier). The US just dropped the ball with procurement and had to scramble other unarmored vehicles into service.
Seems like a no-brainer to reconfigure some HMMWVs rather than buying something new, but what do we know? For the purpose they're using this for you wouldn't need any more bulletproofing than against 7.62×51/54mm, certainly a hell of a lot better than no protection. The first one you showed is based on the newer M1151 variant that's built for armor (2004-present), I'm sure they have tons of these to work with in addition to all the older humvees that didn't have armor when they were made.
A bigger M1117 Guardian wouldn't be bad in hindsight, but the US only has the 4-seaters in relatively small numbers and they're on the expensive side for a transport vehicle. Seems like everything the US Army goes for has a huge expense and bloat problem between the matvee, the canceled M10 "light" tank and the Strykers.
Yeah - Western militaries do need light and cheap vehicles, it's just that this is swinging too far towards light, to the point that it doesn't even have doors anymore. And you don't exactly need to be some big innovator here, the model was already figured out by the Soviets over half-a-century ago - and if the BTR's ergonomics are unacceptable, you can easily make a vehicle of the same style but bigger and with rear doors, like the French VAB or German TPz Fuchs (although you'll also probably want a boost of mine protection to modern standards).
For the Humvees - I posted another article today, and it turns out readiness rates of ground vehicles are getting pretty bad due to lack of maintenance and parts. So a lot of those Humvees in storage might be barely-functional at this point. This wouldn't be a problem if they were just being continuously manufactured, but production was massively scaled down, so that ship has sailed.
The M1117 would probably be cheaper if there was an actual large-scale contact for it, but again, ship has sailed on that one, should have made the correct procurement decision a decade ago. The Stryker also seems pretty expensive for what it is, I guess it's just MIC grafting all the way down.