Is there any basis behind the claim that Trump would be worse on Palestine than Biden, other than "Trump is evil, therefore, he will be worse than Biden on everything"?

Medvedev posting Ukraine balkanization maps on national tv.

China seems to still be sticking to their guns on the Yemen issue despite some speculation due to them sending a diplomat to major countries involved in the Middle East.

But analysts have said the diplomatic mission is unlikely to yield any solid breakthroughs in the crisis due to Beijing’s continuing reluctance to intervene further – and threaten its neutral position in the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Last month, Wang Di, director general of the foreign ministry’s West Asian and North African affairs department, became the first Chinese diplomat since the crisis began to visit both Saudi Arabia and Oman as he met with Saudi, Omani and Yemeni officials. In all his meetings, he had a similar message.

In Saudi capital Riyadh, Wang told Yemeni deputy foreign minister Mansour Ali Saeed Bajash that China attached great importance to “maintaining security and stability in the Red Sea region”, adding that Beijing supported Yemen’s “legitimate government”, but it would only pursue a “political settlement” on the anti-government Houthi militants. While there, he made the same point to Saudi Arabian officials – that Beijing was willing to work with the country to “restore safety and stability” in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Wang also highlighted China’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza during his tour, telling Omani officials that Beijing believed the Red Sea crisis was a “prominent manifestation of the spillover from Gaza”.

“Actually, Wang’s diplomatic visit is about furthering Beijing’s goal of a political solution to the Palestinian-Israeli issue, which is to achieve a ceasefire [in Gaza] through diplomatic mediation and political approaches,” he said. But Yin Gang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that since Wang was not considered a senior official of the foreign ministry, his visit was more of a “routine” one, underscoring Beijing’s reluctance to get more involved in the crisis. He noted that as the Houthi militants gave the green light to Chinese and Russian vessels in the trade corridor, Beijing needed to maintain a balanced approach so it would not be blamed for “conspiring with the Houthis and Iran”.

Looks like China is basically saying to the West: "Yep, this is your problem, not ours. Good luck with sorting it out. Maybe if you weren't supporting genocide in Palestine, things might not have gotten to this point. Fuck around and find out, what more is there to say?"

brags of running over a Palestinian with a tank (a different guy) (cw dead body)

The IOF has definitely not sexually terrorized Palestinian women unlike Khamas (CW: IOF goon fondling a naked mannequin's breasts): https://twitter.com/palebirdy/status/1765461976136692039

RIP Toriyama

Chrono Trigger was my first brush of his work. His signature art style is iconic. His characters and stories legendary.

There is a game coming out next month from Toriyama - SAND LAND.

On Nuland stepping down, three possibilities, from the most optimistic to the least:

Case 1: The blob has determined that the PNAC strategy is too costly for the empire to sustain, following the attritional warfare in Ukraine as they did expect Russia’s change in strategy (Phase 2) to work. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has effectively stopped the expansionist aspiration of the empire all the way towards Iran, or has significantly delayed it in its tracks.

Case 2: Nuland takes the fall but the imperialist doctrine will persist without her involvement. This will likely follow with a pull back on the current strategy in Ukraine promoted by the neocon faction, while the empire redraws a new approach towards achieving the PNAC goals in more strategic and realistic manners.

Case 3: Nuland is getting promoted. The empire is going all in on a maximalist approach against all its geopolitical foes, leveraging on every piece of advantage it has (or still has, before they lose it completely in the near future) to retain its relevance as the global hegemonic power.

Thoughts?

It's color revolution time in Mexico: https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1765468160663404963

A correspondent on my television is standing and saying that "a recent UN report" says that it is "very likely" that female hostages are being sexually assaulted by Hamas. He does hide it under a "'Israel' says" fig leaf but to the casual western news consumer it would feel like a vindication of their racist fantasies about muslamic savagery.

Boeing 737 Max 8 ran off Texas runway ‘into grassy area’, says United Airlines

China drops 'peaceful reunification' reference to Taiwan

BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - China will boost its defence spending by 7.2% this year, fuelling a military budget that has more than doubled under President Xi Jinping's 11 years in office as Beijing hardens its stance on Taiwan, according to official reports on Tuesday.

The increase mirrors the rate presented in last year's budget and again comes in well above the government's economic growth forecast for this year.

China also officially adopted tougher language against Taiwan as it released the budget figures, dropping the mention of "peaceful reunification" in a government report delivered by Premier Li Qiang at the opening of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp parliament, on Tuesday.

Is anyone more familiar with the theory that the UK blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?

It's being investigated and promoted by an anonymous online blogger, supposedly someone working in data analysis in Finland, using public information and claims to be "the only public, open-source investigation" into the bombing.

I haven't delved into every post yet, but the top line narrative and some of the circumstantial evidence around UK military deployments, reorganisations, and government behaviour just before and after is reasonably compelling. The anonymity and (although superficial) tone of some of their Twitter posts though raises my eye brow a little though.

What did genocide joe say in his speech? Didn't catch it and don't want msm takes.

Syrsky has been tasked with auditing the existing armed forces to find more combat-eligible troops, after Zelensky’s office recently announced that of the 1 million people who have been mobilized, only about 300,000 have fought at the front lines. But nearly a month after his promotion, no one in the military leadership or the presidential administration has explained where those 700,000 are — or what they have been doing

Washington Post seems to disagree with Zelenskyy’s 31,000 casualties claim

Naked Capitalism has a new piece on Israel. Simplicius also wrote a piece a few days ago.

TLDR:

Socially:

• It's difficult to have a great idea of what's really going on in Israel because of the sheer magnitude of propaganda and narratives and hasbara. The best you can really do is stumble around in the fog and decide whether or not this article or that statistic is meaningful or meaningless.
• From what we can tell, Israeli opinions against Palestinians are not improving, which is expected. If anything, the young appear to be more conservative and bloodthirsty than the older generations (though I'm not somebody who believes in generational politics or that the zoomers will save us or whatever, so idc).
• Israeli society nonethless appears to irrevocably shattered. The sense of safety has gone, and the dramatic victory and display of military might that could have repaired it has not happened and seems less likely to happen every month that this goes on. On the contrary, Israelis seem to believe that the death count is higher than the Israeli government is letting on.

Economically:

• Israel experienced a 20% decline in Q4 GDP. I don't put much stock in GDP figures but a hit like that is extremely difficult to just shrug at.
• Imports are down 42%, which indicates that the blockade is being more successful than previously thought.
• Spending is up by 90%, while investment is down by 70% and private consumption dropped 27% and public consumption dropped 90%. Israel also suffered its first sovereign credit rating downgrade.
• NATOpedia says that the number of settlers evacuated from the Lebanese border is at 96,000. If scaled up to the US population, that would be 3.5 million people. These settlers are receiving social support which is perhaps not sustainable in the long term, and regardless, every month that goes by without businesses operating near the border makes it more unlikely that they'll be revived. They'll just set up shop elsewhere.
• According to rumours, 500,000 Israelis have emigrated and immigration into Israel fell by 70% in November. People who can emigrate on short notice are more likely to be affluent, so them not being around anymore to spend money is probably not great.
• About half a million compensation claims for businesses have been filed so far, and the damage is so far 6 times greater than the war in 2006.

Militarily:

• Once again, the West's inability to fight wars of attrition for a drawn out length of time is on full display.
• The war in Gaza is going badly and most are aware of it. Resistance groups inside the strip do not seem to be meaningfully weakened despite us being in month 6 of the conflict. It's entirely possible that Hamas has recruited more people than they've lost.
• Israel says that they're going to invade Rafah soon, so Israeli casualties will increase even further soon.
• Border settlers want Hezbollah pushed back to the Litani River to provide a buffer zone. Unfortunately for them, this doesn't seem possible. Israel made two (albeit limited) attempts recently to strike at Hezbollah in cross-border attacks and were routed both times. Israel is striking further into Lebanon to kill civilians and such, but this doesn't have much effect militarily. The US is trying to defuse the situation on the border by proposing deals that Hezbollah will obviously never accept.
• The US produces 30,000 artillery shells per month, of which 10,000 go to Israel. This is not enough for a war against Hezbollah, so if Israel starts shit against Hezbollah officially, then Ukraine will collapse even faster than it already is.
• On that note, Israel is now officially no longer doing a weird balancing act between Russia and Ukraine, siding fully with Ukraine and offering early-warning systems. This seems both delusional and difficult to actually achieve given the enormous hole Israel is putting itself in, and making an enemy of Russia when they're becoming more friendly with Iran does not seem like a good idea either.
• There have been rumors of waves of resignations; I'm unsure how much stock to put in them in terms of both veracity and the actual impact they're having overall.
• The Haredim in Israel are also under pressure by the government to undergo conscription; they were previously exempt. Polling suggests only ~30% of them are fine with joining the army. It's hard to tell whether this is due to desperately needing more troops, or if it's more to do with spreading the pain throughout society so as to bring it together and ensure no particular group is unaffected while another bears most of the weight.
• Yemen's blockade obviously continues, with the US continuing its definitely-sustainable strategy of firing $5 million missiles at $2000 drones. Ansarallah have also shot down three Predator drones, which is $100 million down the drain there too.
• The US seems to still be in talks about the withdrawal of forces from Iraq and possibly Syria. They may be trying to draw it out to see whether conditions might improve, but Iran will very probably keep the pressure on.

China is digging Kaiju hole. Over 10km deep now.

You ever have a spice vision of a way that the empire could resolve certain contradictions, only to not want to post it lest whichever fed responsible for watching this place thinks it's a good idea and passes it on?

Nazi drone boats hit another Russian ship in Crimea.

Guess they haven't learned that every time they do this Russia typically responds with heavy ass missle barrages at major cities. So expect headlines around that to come next.

Thinking about the proposition that passed in SF around waiving taxes for commercial real estate sold for conversion to residential units….keep me honest here:

There’s no fucking way these offices get turned into housing, right? I’ve sat by a window so rarely in an office. How the fuck are you going to take these open plan spaces and make them into homes that investors can sell? Not to mention the costs of completely changing the plumbing in the building to support multiple housing units.

Is there more to this, or is the “convert offices to homes” thing just a massive grift to allow commercial landlords to offload their unoccupied real estate, while receiving handouts from the city budget? While making it look like the mayor is “building housing”?

"Resistance is continually benefitting. Whatever you pay in resistance, if you don't reap it in your lifetime, you will get the results later." —the revolutionary, resisting martyr Basil Al-Araj

From the Resistance News Network. I don’t read Arabic, I’m not sure I understand the word “benefitting”, context clues tell me it’s just something that generally positive.

US is saying that there may be an "extremist" attack in the next 48 hours in Russia

Big serge's latest on Russia Ukraine strategy, theory of victory is good. His analysis centers on this war as a war of attrition and so he spends a lot of time discussing industrial bases of the parties and how that actually influences what's happening at a tactical and operational level.

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-the-deluge

What I intend to argue here is that 2024 will be highly decisive for the war, as the year in which Ukrainian strategic exhaustion begins to show out at the same time that Russia’s strategic investments begin to pay off on the battlefield. This is the way of such an attritional conflict, which burdens armies with cumulative and constant stressors in a test of their recuperative powers.

One note about the mediazona Russian casualty tracker is that it always fades to nothing in the last month or so. The nature of their data is that they don't record casualties as they happen, they track obituaries and other data with lag times. Every mediazona chart thus trails off to nothing making it look like Russia has had an amazing last month, but really it takes a couple months for data to catch up.

Selina Robinson, the BC, Canada parliamentary rep who recently did the "Zionists made the desert bloom" bullshit got dumped as a cabinet minister a month ago, left the party entirely because of "antisemitism" (read: her Zionist tears) yesterday.

Her former party is the NDP, they're left libs or at most sucdems that currently run BC. The premier David Eby is the best of Canada's senior elected officials at the moment (not a high bar but nevertheless). It's good that she was told to pound sand and cry elsewhere. Maybe he learned something for Corbyn, who knows.

https://archive.is/Ve32B