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.
Libya: Gaddafi's Green Book was more coherent than most people like to give it credit for. Was it very well written and a revolutionary theory that added to communism? No. Was it the insane ramblings of a mad dictator? Also no. There is a bunch of orientalism which made all the scholars switch off their brains, but Gaddafi bases his Third Universal Theory on the assumption that there has been too much abstraction and mediation from a natural state of things, which he refers to consistently throughout his books. this is the ideational foundation for his approach to direct democracy, for example. He was still a believer in development etc, so it is pretty wrong to say he espouses a "primitivist" worldview or something orientalist like that.
There might be some arguments about a "naturalist" point of view he takes, but being an oil exporting and consuming country, it is obviously silly to think he was an environmentalist.
Mu3ammar al-Gaddafi, actually al-Qadhdhâfî ("softer" th, Q comes from the back of your throat, î is a long vowel) was very flexible, which he had to be. He took power 1969 by taking leadership of a group of officers that styled themselves in the image of Naser, calling themselves the Free Officer (ad-dubbat al-ahrar) and establishing similar bodies after throwing out the western proxy Idris as-Sanousi who was a far cry from his grandfather, the founder of the Sanousiyya, a sufi order that lead the
fight.
Originally, he had no desire to rule Libya as its own state, which was divided between Tripoli in the West and Cyrenaica in the East as well as independ tribes in the South. Being a good Nasserite, he wanted it annexed to Egypt under Naser, whom he saw as his personal hero. Tragically, Naser died and al-Gaddafi did not like Sadat at all, so he decided to do his own thing. His position was very precarious. Libya was underdeveloped, had little national identity, neither pan-arab nor Libyan, both the USA and the USSR kind of liked and kind of didn't like him, there were internal power struggles in the ruling comitee as well, which Gaddafi won by virtue of his charisma and stubbornness. After a lot of experimentation and getting rid of rivals, he solidified his rule enough to be more or less the guy people turned to for questions. His politics put him closer to the USSR than to the US, even though he never cut ties with anybody or joined a camp during the cold war.
He was kind of a guy out of his time, having come to power after the Naksa (set-back) 1968 whose effects on the pan-arab movement are hard to convey in a few words, but basically, the hopes that the ba3th and Nasser would manage to turn the "backwards" arab states into socialist bastions of modernity were dashed, the PLO began to emerge as the hope for a lot of leftists for Arab independence and revolution in the Levante. al-Qaddafi was not impressed, holding on to the ideology for quite some time. Economic development was rocky at start, but his famously robust welfare program was probably not a bad call to hold onto power and achieve some form of national identity, considering the situation he was in. He also financed a lot of Palestinian groups. I am not knowledgeable enough to trace his involvement into the Lebanese Civil War starting 1975, but he did host the Abu Nidal group, which was just one of the worse palestinian groups, objectively speaking more busy killing Palestinians and random jews around the world than killing Israeli leadership, trying claim Arafat was a homosexual with AIDS and other gameresque shit.
He was pretty good at playing both the USSR and the USA for support for his country.
The Green Book is a reference to Mao's "Red Book". He published three parts, 1975, 1977, 1981, the first on Politics, the second on economics, the third on society at large. It's not long, go read it when bored. Most points you'll disagree with, but his point about sports was pretty agreeable to me. He famously received a visit from the German Greens 1982. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/gaddafi/index.htm
I can continue rambling on if you find this interessting, but I need to do irl stuff rn.
This is probably a bit too nice to him, I should talk about his mistakes in a second part. You can read the wikipedia meanwhile thing to get a rough idea, they don't outright lie there, just omit a bunch of stuff. Part 3 of the green book is pretty misogynist, his military adventures cost unnecessary money, stability and lives without even achieving their stated goals etc etc.