Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal's adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
The mainstream Western perception of WW2 on Eastern Front is essentially distilled Nazi propaganda that was consciously pushed once WW2 slid into the Cold War, and the Soviets became the designated enemy. Every time the Eastern Front came up in casual conversation I would hear the smugest takes like "How the Russians won? Oh, they just waited for winter to save them and got lucky", "Russians can't fight, they just zerg rush and overwhelm you with bodies", "They were saved by Lend-Lease so basically America won the Eastern Front". When people grow up on a twisted fanfictionization of history where the Red Army was huge incompetent mass of untrained Asiatic conscripts who have to share one rifle between two people and only won because the Germans ran out of bullets to shoot at the horde and were eventually overwhelmed, they will believe all the bullshit "Superior British tanks will epically own Putin's orcs" articles and parrot them. Goebbles is laughing from the depths of hell.
Yeah if the eastern front is talked about at all it's generally people pulling from straight nazi propaganda. Honestly, I originally never learned anything about it but I could tell you all about the US in the Pacific or Africa or whatever.
"When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler" by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House is a good read on the topic if anyone wants to read something about that front. It's got the obligatory whine about the purges and Authoritarianism but otherwise is a good summary. Currently loaned my copy to a friend who was interested, which reminds me I need to get it back
I second the recommendation, it can get exceedingly dry when you hit the full paragraphs detailing army compositions and their commanding officers, but it's a very good read for dispelling the most common Eastern Front myths. It shows the Red Army as a capable fighting force that was able to quickly adapt and learn from its mistakes, from the initial shock of invasion and early mass encirclements to pulling off stuff like Operation Bagration.
I still haven't read the full series of book they put out on it but they do the same in the Stalingrad books too. It's just very funny because I knew it was coming and was like here we go again
I can third the recommendation alongside Glantz' other works. Of course because he works for the war demon college his writings can be quite terse when technical things pop up because the audience he was writing for is the general staff of the U.S armed forces alongside and strategic level officers who've generally in or around the more political positions of the military.
I hate Enemy at the Gates and I hate the fact that I've seen Enemy at the Gates countless times because I was a le epic military history kid (somehow managed to avoid the alt right pipeline at least) and ~~was~~ am down horrendous for Rachel Weisz.
The “le epic history nerd, to I love reading history so it’s time to read David Glantz, to wtf everything they taught us was lies written by Nazis, to what else were they lying about, to Stalin was the truest hero of the working man” pipeline.