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.
time for another round of articles on why hypersonic missiles aren't actually important anyway
would love to know why they keep fucking it up. Like, the DPRK has them, right? I would assume that the technological expertise of the collective West could at least match that of the DPRK? or is Juche just that powerful?
really does feel like American military supremacy (or at least its perception, one can argue that it was never really that good as they keep losing wars of course) is coming to an end. just like with that stupid article that was making the rounds a few days ago about making a shitload of drones to counter China. they'll make like 300 drones named something like Freedom Avalanche and then the company making them will be bought by some ghoul who then turns 95% of its revenues into stock buybacks and then they'll make like 5 shitty drones per year, and in that same time, China will make like a hundred thousand drones and missiles
I have zero expertise in this so take everything I am about to say with a huge grain of salt:
I believe that it has to do with metallurgy and material science. A big problem with hypersonic missiles (unlike ICBMs) is that they’re maneuverable, and you have to be able to control their trajectory precisely while under strong air resistance (drag) at such high speed, so you need to have the technical know-how to create a material that can actually withstand the challenging environment.
I believe that the USSR had mastered the necessary foundations of metallurgy and material science that the US had never been able to catch up. I offer two examples here:
1 ) The USSR constructed the Alfa class submarine in the 1960s which had a titanium hull. It is extremely difficult to weld titanium because it absorbs oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen at high temperature and will cause imperfections that compromise the material strength. The CIA actually dismissed early reports of this project for 7 years because they thought nobody had the capability to weld titanium (certainly not the US). The Soviets solved the problem by building an entire warehouse and fill them with argon (inert gas), and had welders dressed up in space suits, which is very technically challenging and also very impressive for a heavy industrial project like building a full-scale submarine.
2 ) During the space race in the 1970s, the Americans gave up quite early when trying to build a closed-cycle staged combustion liquid propellent rocket engine because they thought it was too difficult to master (no metal could survive such oxygen-rich gas from the preburner at high temperature), and they actually thought what the Soviets did was just another Cold War propaganda. Well, it turns out that the Soviets did end up mastering the metallurgy and went on to create the infamous RD-180s (used for powering the American Atlas V rockets after the USSR collapsed) and the RD-170s (used for the legendary Energia-Buran flight).
After the Cold War, the Americans act shocked when they saw a full warehouse of RD-180s and bought them up for cheap, and by that time, the American economy had been sufficiently neoliberalized that they no longer needed to build up their own industries when they can just buy ready-made components from other countries for cheap (a path which Russia also went on to take and destroyed its own space and aviation industry in the process).
In fact, after the USSR collapsed, Russian scientists - who thought the Cold War has finally ended - were generous enough to share their hypersonic missile (scramjet engine) tests with NASA document 1 document 2 but it seemed like either NASA wasn’t interested or couldn’t actually replicate the Soviet test results.
I will remind you that nobody else in the world has a functional scramjet engine used for missiles except for Russia’s Zircon, which has achieved Mach 8-9 flight at its terminal velocity.
Given that Russia is currently so far ahead of everyone in the hypersonic race (Zircon being the world’s only hypersonic cruise missile at this stage), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Chinese and the North Koreans were able to learn something from the former USSR.
I found this really fascinating, are there any books about this topic that you would recommend?
For the titanium hulled Alfa SSN story, google “Unraveling a Cold War Mystery” and go to the first result hosted on the CIA website. I am not linking it for obvious reasons but it’s a very good read, definitely worth your time.
For the Soviet space program, google “Rockets and People by Boris Chertok”, which is possibly the most detailed account of the entire Soviet space program written by someone who was actually part of it. You can download all 4 volumes for free from NASA’s website, no need to buy them.
The CIA document was really interesting, thank you. They name drop a German Cross awarded Nazi submarine engineer in the document and can’t help but call him “distinguished”, fucking gross.
I need to shove this down the throat of every lib calling Russians Orc’s. It’s quite literally Nazi propaganda. I believe the same people who worked in the Nazi propaganda machine were brought to the US to continue their anti-soviet activities.
Just started Vol 1, really interesting from the start, thank you for the recommendations!