An image of the wildfires in Rhodes, taken on July 23rd, showing the flames and the plume of smoke.
Greece, in late July, faced a heatwave in which over 8 million people experienced temperatures about 41C, with some areas reaching above 45C - all in all, both the longest heatwave in Greek history, as well as some of the highest temperatures on record.
Due to these high temperatures, Greece was then struck by hundreds of wildfires this summer, affecting nearly 200,000 hectares. About half of the total burned area was in the north-east of Greece, in the Dadia national park near the city of Alexandropoulis - the single largest blaze that the EU has recorded. Other parts of the country were also struck, such as Attica, Magnesia, and islands like Corfu and particularly Rhodes; the last one prompted an evacuation of 20,000 people, the largest evacuation operation the island had ever seen. Of course, this is just one country of many that have been caught in the European wildfires this year, of which the total burned area approached 500,000 hectares - the only consolation is that this was less than last year.
Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkiye were impacted in early September by flooding caused by massive storms bringing a deluge of water - in Greece, this mainly impacted Thessaly, in the centre of Greece.
Luckily for Greece, despite being a very earthquake-prone country, they have experienced no significant quakes lately to round out the four (I hope I haven't jinxed it) - though, of course, earlier this year, a major earthquake struck nearby Turkiye, killing 60,000 people and injuring 120,000.
The Country of the Week is Greece! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's update is here!
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.
We need to figure out a way to numerically define a vassal state and publish it as a vassal state index. I would genuinely be interested in building a website with a map out of something like this.
this seems less terrible for the environment
Less luring, more “will kill if backed into a corner by someone’s untrained predators.”
We need to come up with a new sport for suburban men to play that doesn't use so much water.
Golf as a sport does not necessitate using that much water. Someone else has said it better before, but Golf would be a much more interesting sport if the natural biome of the course had to be taken into account.
We have disc golf; all the being outside, walking around, and standing around of golf but you can mostly leave the natural environment in place. It makes you look lame but so does golf.
it uses tons of pesticides and herbicides though, and is essentially massive lawns with high maintenance and no bio-diversity
You are misunderstanding me, cynesthesia & MoreAmphibians have the right idea.
It is possible to organize golf courses around natural habitats, with the natural traits of the biome as "course hazards."
Like "oops, all sand traps" or "Boy, I sure am glad I brought this atovaquone to my tee time in the malaria swamp."
Maybe we make it use a bunch of their blood?
The late Samir Amin tried something similar with how much of a country's development was sovereign vs globalised. He considered 70-75% sovereign a very big achievement given the nature of the global economy.
The two countries I can remember was China having 50% sovereign and 50% globalised, and South Africa's being 0% sovereign and 100% globalised.
Found the source, pages 12-17, a dependency pioneer. Not very detailed though.
This is an interesting approach. I will have to give it a thorough read.
I think there's some real value in doing this. Like, illustrating for people what the empire is, what the vassals of the empire are and what the new multipolarity really means seems like a good thing. We need to visually understand what the new world looks like. And to be frank a lot of people didn't visually understand what the old world looked like because of a lack of this kind of thing.
I particularly think this has value given how much the prevalence of map-brain has been lately. Probably brought on by videogames.
Yeah there is a lot of theory that he and others have written on these kinds of subjects, it can be very useful to read and try figure out.
Here's a map that keeps track of how UN states vote up to 2019. The colors are kinda crappy, but it's a somewhat useful tool to see how the blocs line up based on how they vote UN resolutions. It's not perfect (Pakistan apparently vote 82% similar to India from 2009 to 2019).
Ok so I went ahead and did 2001-present and only used votes America deemed as "important" (202 votes) and it's remarkable how well it separates out the based department from the empire stooges.
Left to right (most based to least based): DPRK, Syria, Cuba, Iran, Laos, Zimbabwe (???), China, Venezuela, Sudan, South Africa, Vietnam, Pakistan (RIP Khan's admin), Russia, Belarus...then we skip ahead to the chud alliance... Canada, Australia, Micronesia (US colony), Marshall Islands (US colony), Palau (US colony), Israel.
It's remarkable how most European nations actually did vote a lot against the US on "important matters" to the US, around 50% compare to Canada up at 78% and DPRK at 3%
For Zimbabwe, it's because of Mugabe. The West doesn't like him because he ordered the seizure of land from ex-Rhodesian farmers and redistributed the land to Zimbabweans.
EU countries tend to abstain when the US vote is No (see: resolutions against the glorification of Naziism, US and Ukraine vote No, the rest of the vassal states abstain). Effectively the same as voting against it but with plausible deniability. If you check "Treat abstentions as no's" their compliance jumps to the 70s and 80s, in line with Canada.
This isn't numerical but literally any country which has a trade agreement with Investor-state dispute settlements, like TPP, are effectively vassal states of American capital. Hudson talks about this in Destiny of Civilization.
The wiki page for isds is very funny too.