The Fox News-tier story that’s been pushed around for the last few years is that Communist Triads (yes, seriously) are sending fentanyl one step away from being synthesized over seas, and the last step is done in Mexico or Canada. This dodges all customs, and furthers the nefarious plot to undermine our sacred and precious democracy. This explains a little why China, Mexico, and Canada are all part of the fentanyl thing in Trump’s mind. Warning for The New York Post, but it’s a good brainworm sample.

In reality, China has the largest chemical industry in the world, and makes most every precursor chemical used in USamerica. This includes chemicals used by pharmaceutical companies, and maybe savvy consumers, to make fentanyl and carfentanyl. Most precursors are some type of piperidone, and most of those are already List 1 chemicals. If you have the knowledge and equipment, you can synthesize fentanyl without using any of those precursors. You could also make your own piperidone the long way from black pepper. Is this a thing Trump will bring up and threaten about? Yes. There isn’t really a reality to the narrative though, so idk how China can fold towards the fantasy story.

In the spirit of discussing the Chinese dollar bonds, i’d like to talk about “China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves: Past and Present Security Challenges” by Yu Yongding, published first in July 2022 (so 5 months after Russian forex got seized) and translated here. It concludes, amongst some other things, that “[China] should strive to avoid becoming a creditor as much as possible”.

The internationalization of the RMB is a good for security in the long term, but in the short term “even if China’s foreign exchange reserves consisted entirely of RMB assets, their security would not change.” Why? “Because the key to the problem does not lie in the currency that China’s foreign exchange reserves are denominated and settled in, but in whether China owes the United States money or vice versa.” If the US does not want to service the debt, then China is left in the lurch/ bag-holding even if the $1 trillion US dollars in China’s reserve magically turned into RMB. The security threat outlined in this article is China being stiffed to the tune of trillions, and the security solution outlined is to stop being owed anything. The author repeatedly notes how China’s current foreign exchange reserves generate negative investment returns, largely because they are over-leveraged. Most countries have much smaller reserves of dollars on hand. So Mr. Yu advocates for getting dollars out of the country in a way that generates positive investment income.

But why does China have so many US dollars? Shortly after China’s opening up, “the shortage of foreign exchange was the main bottleneck”. As such, the RMB was devalued sharply. In 2003, financial turmoil caused China to delay the appreciation of the RMB until 2005. As a result of the late appreciation, “China’s trade surplus increased sharply, and, on the other hand, the domestic asset bubble and the strong expectation of RMB appreciation led to a large inflow of ‘hot money’. China’s capital account surplus once exceeded the trade surplus and became the primary source of new foreign exchange reserves. It is fair to say that China’s failure to let the RMB appreciate in time and its lack of exchange rate flexibility were the conditions that led to the country’s excessive accumulation of foreign exchange reserves.”

Why can’t the RMB just replace the dollar? “In short, for the RMB to become an international reserve currency, China must fulfill a series of preconditions, including establishing a sound capital market (especially a deep and highly liquid treasury bond market), a flexible exchange rate regime, free cross-border capital flows, and long-term credit in the market. In short, China must overcome the so-called ‘original sin’ in international finance and be able to issue treasury bonds internationally in RMB. Otherwise, it will be difficult for the RMB to become an international reserve currency and RMB internationalization will remain incomplete.”

China will not do many of those things, because that would be giving up control of the economy to financial markets. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? China can’t establish itself as the world’s reserve currency, not least because its financial institutions are not ‘advanced’ enough. The USA is a decrepit shell that has spent 40 years hollowing itself out to be the best financial market possible. The current proposal seems to be using both of these facts to China’ advantage.

De-dollarization is a non-starter unless the US goes apeshit crazy with SWIFT sanctioning. SDRs are cool, but the World Bank and IMF are USAmerican puppets for shock therapy. A bancor would require a lot of diplomatic work that no one will want to do for a while. Too many debts already exist denominated in dollars. The proposal with re-dollarization is to take advantage of the facts that China has too many dollars and some nice manufactured goods and that most of the Global South has commodities or other inputs for manufacturing and too much dollar debt. The US wants to be the turbo-finance hub of the world. Now, many of us here would argue that’s a broader manifestation of USamerica standing in the role as the current hegemon in a capitalist world and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. At the ground level though, the finance people are blind dogs chasing blood, and they could not care less from where it flows. If the debts are getting paid, there shouldn’t be anything to complain about. And i personally doubt that the ‘Art of the Deal’ President is going to be some savvy financial genius. i think some guy once said something about capitalists selling the rope to hang themselves. As it is currently argued, China is setting up a win-win-win that slowly de-leverages their oversized dollar reserves and other countries’ debt.

Saudi Arabia may be mostly aligned with the West and the dollar, but that is a role they were forced into, not one they chose. The whole idea of the petrodollar comes from when OPEC tried to grab the “West” by the balls in the 70s and 80s, and then ended up with too much money to do anything with. Cash alone doesn’t do much in the desert. The US won that fight, because the Gulf States ended up recycling all of that money into US debt. Oil price spikes, a global recession, and soaring interest rates were the ingredients in the very first neoliberal shock. Interest rate and currency exchange rate manipulation led to IMF loans conditional on reforms, and the accompanying mass privatization and austerity. The US in 2024 has nowhere near the industrial or political capacity to pull off a second global financialization, mostly because there’s nowhere left in the world that hasn’t already been financialized. Even Russia and China represent financial markets outside the US’ control, not fully untapped markets. After 2008, quantitative easing, and the acceleration of money printing since 2020, domestic investors, banks, and the stock market depend on the federal interest rates in a way they really never have before. The snake is eating its own tail.

If anything, China’s attempts to do literally anything other than buying more US debt represents learning from the 80s. i do not see this as an obvious China L, though it may turn out to be.

countries on the persian gulf exported around 18 million barrels of oil per day in 2022 (according to wikipedia). now, ~1.8 million of those were from Oman, who’s kinda on the outside, and Iran themselves. i think there’s an argument for this collapsing the global economy specially because of knock-on effects with China’s oil imports almost entirely coming through the Gulf, but i think there’s an earlier problem.

crude oil has ‘flavors’, namely light or heavy (referring to the length of hydrocarbon chains) and sour or sweet (referring to the relative amount of sulfur). the upshot of that is that oil refineries are built to take in specific flavors of oil. part of the reason Chevron is so mad about Venezuela is that, for fairly obvious geographical reasons, Venezuelan oil fits the refineries for the USA pretty well. shorter carbon chains have higher boiling points (more butane and less boat oil) and sweet oil does not need to have the sulfur removed from it. for instance, Saudi Arabia’s most common crude oil export is called ‘Arab Light’, which is a medium and sour crude oil. if Iran strikes at oil rigs, refineries, and distribution centers, there is no guarantee that other, unaffected infrastructure can actually do the same job. refineries built for sweet crude can not refine Arab Light. there could be barrels and barrels of oil sitting on boats and in pipelines, unable to be refined.

all of that is to say, depending on how and where Iran strikes oil infrastructure, the issue could very quickly become whether or not certain petroleum products are available at all, not just if the price is spiking. the price would also spike. there would be rationing and restrictions on international trade, most likely. in the areas most affected (hard to predict without knowing details), there would be pressure to declare ‘move it or lose it’ wars, with ‘it’ being all the fuel you currently have in stockpile. desperation and material interest can erase all alliances. the flip side of what could be several regional wars is that people are aware that those wars could happen. Saudi Arabia recently denounced genocide in Palestine (too little too late), and had meetings with the Iranian military. it’s certainly not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia didn’t start changing its tune until after True Promise II. Iran discussing strikes on oil infrastructure is as much a diplomatic tool as actually striking the infrastructure

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-u-s-navys-missile-production-problem-looks-dire/

An article from the ~~Burger Eagle Freedom Center~~ American Enterprise Institute from a few months ago about the Imperial Navy’s missile production. The two USA ships that attempted to intercept Iranian missiles on Monday launched 12 missiles between them. The 2025 military budget, and allocations for the next five years, will produce 12 SM-Block IIA missiles annually. While about a hundred of another missile type has been ordered, this is apparently 10% of the number ordered in 1985. This year, the White House has passed several budget cuts for USA Navy missile production. Point and laugh.

https://archive.is/cGiyS

Warning for Haaretz, but it’s the absolute other end of perspective on “20 F-35s destroyed”. And they give satellite imagery of the Nevatim base after Monday. The cope about missile interception might be entertaining for some. While the destruction of 20 F-35s is probably exaggerated, the F-35 has something like a 30% mission capability rate. So while the warning from Iran likely let them get some of their F-35s in the air, at most a third of them were actually capable of missions. Now i am not a plane person, but i believe a plane that isn’t fully mission capable can still be flight capable. So if we very generously flip that ratio and say only 30% of F-35s could not fly, there were at least 6 planes grounded when the missiles hit. The red circles in this top image are a bit strange to me, because the entire top row of cubbies (?) is covered in what look like blast marks to me. It’s possible only one plane has been destroyed, but individual F-35s fail all the time. Maybe “israel” has too much invested in its reputation to come up with a training accident story, but it seems likely several were damaged if not destroyed.

Hello, comrades. Like many of you, i do not live in SWANA and am saddened by the death of Hassan Nasrallah. i do not have any primary sources to add, but i do think there is at least one early operational lesson to be drawn from the facts we do have.

We know that a block of Beirut was destroyed by a number of missiles and bunker busters. Several hundreds if not over a thousand innocent people were killed and injured. But what is a bunker buster? In short, it is a bomb with a very thick shell (and so they are often very heavy relative to the payload size) and a remote delay or altitude based fuse. The ideal is that it smacks into the ground, keeps going forward for a certain depth or time, and then it goes off. And what kind of bombs are the USA and its lapdog using in their depraved spiral of carnage?

First, the GBU-28. Designed and produced first in 1991, there is actual technical information available. I have a deeply biased source, which gets a little too cutesy with the story of USamerican ingenuity. The relevant information here is “penetrated 22 ft of reinforced concrete and then kept flying for half a mile [of air]”. This bomb has a warhead containing roughly 675 kilograms of explosives. It’s also worth thinking about the fact that this bunker buster was designed with Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the DPRK explicitly in mind.

Next, consider Al-Jazeera reports of 5000 pound bombs and also this article from three years ago. The GBU-72, released in 2022, was designed with advice from IDF experiences with the 28. This is a JDAM conversion, which is the US military term for how the Russians are slapping basic guidance kits and two wings on surplus ordinance to create modern precision weapons on the cheap. So it has a larger warhead (though we don’t know how much) and it’s more accurate. Accuracy should mean hitting the street or ground in order to not waste the penetrating power, but who knows with the zionist entity. It’s worth noting that these are technically laser guided munitions. But how do you think the West determines where to put the laser if not via satellite imagery? And if they are figuring out a location from satellite imagery, what would they use if not GPS, which was put into space for this purpose?

Now we can talk all day about tunnel design and where we should be meeting with important diplomats. But the big point here is that JDAM, and all other dumb bombs with smart targeting, are wholly reliant on GPS. there are no USamerican bunker busters (that i can find info on) that do not use GPS. i, with all my authority as an armchair analyst, think that the Axis of Resistance needs to start working on spoofing and hardening devices against GPS (i am certain they already have). Spoofing refers to setting up a transmitter to feed a false stream of data into the environment, which makes it an obvious target but also creates a sort of bubble protection. Hardening can mean several things, but in this case i mean double checking communication devices for tracking bands (many chips can be built to only transmit at certain frequencies), reducing all GPS interaction in the area, and literally covering the walls of certain areas with aluminum foil if it comes down to it. i say reduce because i don’t know if you can stop all civilians in the area from using map software. If anyone wants to scream from the rooftops about Iran, don’t say you want them to launch anything. Iran needs to deploy every piece of electronic warfare it has, at home and in Lebanon, and then it needs to put in an order for twice as many more from China and Russia.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/israel-war-lebanon-what-arms-hezbollah-have

A detail-light breakdown of the main equipment being used right now (drones, rockets, short and medium range missiles, and ballistic missiles). When thinking about the ranges, keep in mind the current depth Hezbollah seems to be attacking is roughly up to 80 km from the border, and “israeli” censorship begins at Haifa, roughly 80 km from the border. This depth is Hezbollah’s escalation ladder. Incredibly, they also seem to have found a Western military professor with eyes, who comments “…the Hezbollah threat [is] one that Israel cannot destroy militarily.”

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/three-carriers-simultaneously-china

A description of PLAN deployments in its own waters. The ocean surface isn’t the only thing getting hotter in the East Pacific. For those who don’t like ship details, it’s worth noting that Kuznetsov class carriers are really missile cruisers with a flight deck. The titular Russian vessel has anti-air, anti-missile, and anti-submarine defenses as well as 12 anti-ship cruise missiles and 24 8-missile Kinzhal batteries. The USamerican Nimitz class super carrier (which admittedly has a larger flight deck) has anti-air and anti-missile batteries, and no offensive armaments. Presumably, the Chinese have their own missile systems. There is one US carrier group asea in the Pacific, and i think it’s leaving through the Straits of Malacca. Always a good time to drill and train your ships when the enemy isn’t there.

https://www.labornotes.org/2024/09/strike-threat-wins-boarding-and-retro-pay-american-airlines

A little positive news about successful labor action. Every time i’ve been to LAX since 2021 or so, there has been a billboard about labor action on Howard Hughes (the main drag that we must sit in traffic before entering the airport where we sit in traffic). Covid kind of ravaged them, but there seems to be more and more airline related labor action. While the pilots, flight attendants, and transit workers are not necessarily radical unions, every win for labor lets the snowball roll forward. The reputation shift of unions is not because of messaging, it’s because of results. Good to get in the last hits before Trump or Harris guts the NLRB (which is doing pretty good under this admin, exceptionally critical support with an eye to past betrayals).

https://resistancenews.org/2024/09/24/the-exhilaration-of-first-strikes-in-lebanon-israel-repeats-the-mistakes-of-2006/

An article looking back at the last few days by the editor-in-chief of Al-Akhbar, translated by Resistance News. According to wikipedia, Al-Akhbar is a left wing, anti-zionist, leaning pro-syrian Lebanese daily newspaper. They also call it a semi-tabloid without a source, which makes me think that it reports facts that some wikipedia editor doesn’t like. So not to replace analysis with contrarianism, but i don’t feel compelled to verify further. Resistance News is a good source. The mention of Western and comprador nations trying to stir up Syrian and Lebanese groups “in an uprising to demand a ceasefire from the Resistance” is interesting, since I haven’t personally seen anything about that before now on my side of the language barrier. The latter paragraphs underscore one of the lessons of post-Vietnam military thought: the USA (and friends) have developed a theory rich and deeply analytical conception of how best to apply massive terror bombing and mechanized shock and awe against opponents without air defense. They have now taken the existence of complex theory as evidence that this must work, which is a blindness that can be exploited. Unfortunately, this blindness does not change the mass death and destruction the “Western way of war” will bring.

i have an early shift today, so i will be posting the other articles later.

good morning, comrades. several comments in the rules request thread were about solid links and substantive main comments in order to build discussion. while i am not sure strict rules are required (there is something to be said for making sure people aren’t so concerned over self-esteem or “real leftism” that they stop talking), i do enjoy discussion based on links from good sources. also, there are people who post very good links and videos from telegram and twitter of primary events, so i am going to try and link analysis of things that have happened in the past few days.

as such, for at least this week, i will be posting what i think are the top three-ish naked capitalism articles of the day, along with some commentary. think of it as a bootleg and abbreviated rip-off of comrade 72T’s bulletins. if it looks like i have time for it with work and people like it, i will do my best to continue.

A breakdown of the recent German state elections in Brandenburg, as well as a general picture of the German economic and political trajectory (bad). i think it is worth extending some mental sympathy to BSW, since unlike many other ‘patsocs’, they wish to RETVRN to the GDR, a real and decent place, instead of purely nationalist fantasy. Many of the people involved, including Ms. Wagenknecht, were adults when the Berlin Wall came down. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09/atlanticism-or-sovereignty-fight-in-germany-continues-with-latest-state-election.html

A good explanation of how the ocean is getting warmer, and also a good example of runaway warming/ climate feedback loops. i will say that i think arctic-news’ estimation of up to 18 degrees celsius warming is a bit sensationalist, but sources i prefer suggest 7 to 10 degrees if no mass action is taken and we actually get worse at emissions (the current trajectory), which is still “we all die” territory. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/09/high-temperatures-despite-la-nina.html

A very brief report about Ukrainian military activity in Syria. Interesting to think about in context of “is this World War 3 yet?” Also a clear sign of Ukraine lacking a plan for victory (in what universe does a base outside Aleppo effect anything in the Donbass?). Since we know that all Ukrainian ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) is USamerican, you have to wonder what Uncle Sam wanted destroyed in Syria last week (and what the entity was doing to that Iranian base). https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/ukrainian-special-forces-syria

many news heads have rightly said that this pager (and now radio) attack makes sense only as a direct prelude to invasion, and the zionist entity seems to have wasted this opportunity. i also saw a comment, before the relevation that two hezbollah fighters had discovered the pagers, that “israel” has a tendency to pull the trigger on operations as soon as they are technically feasible. this sort of strategic flailing seems odd, but it also lines up with the conclusions of a US army analysis of the 2006 “israeli”-hezbollah war.

it’s about 60 pages of actual content, and it’s interesting for a number of reasons (there’s a good section on the missiles hezbollah used for people into that). now there’s a two decade sized grain of salt that should be taken here, but i doubt i could get access to current “israeli” planning, let alone in english. the biggest conclusion for recent events is that the zionist entity has focused on counterinsurgency and air power, degrading its combined arms capabilities and doctrine to the point that it does not have them.

specifically, “israel” has fallen for the US air force’s greatest lie - that air power and bombing can stand as a combat arm independently from ground operations. as such, the head of the military at the time was an airman, and the doctrinal changes created were both confusing and biased against ground combat. additionally, the long time focus on ‘counterinsurgency’ in Gaza (the phrasing is not mine) has led to reserve mechanized equipment not being replaced, tank and mechanized crews not being trained, and minimal training at the division or batallion level. the lack of training in large formations and the fact that doctrine became more confusing as the formations got larger led to failure, broadly.

to provide an illustration, i’ll run through the actions of two divisions in the last act of the war. the UN had passed a ceasefire resolution, and for reasons that are not completely clear, “israel” planned a last hurrah offensive. the symbolic goal was the litani river. division 91 of the iof was meant to be driving towards the mediterranean, but stalled out completely. In an inquiry after the war,

The investigation concluded that commanders within the division “did not fully understand their orders” and “were not present with their troops during important battles and even failed to fulfill basic missions.” The investigation also found fault “in the way tactical orders were composed, sometimes without a time element. Since the orders were not clear, they were changed, in some cases, on an hourly basis. Brigade commanders did not properly understand their missions. . . . They didn’t know what their goals were and how long they had to fulfill their missions.” Remarkably, according to the report, “an entire battalion sat in the same location for several days without moving and when the commander finally received orders to push deeper into enemy territory he was confused and failed to fulfill the mission.”

division 162 was looking to take Ghandouriyeh, a town that sat on a crossroads and high ground. they had to cross a valley, Wadi al-Saluki, to get there. first, the general sent air assault elements to secure the high ground over the valley. the air assault successfully landed near two towns, cleared several occupied buildings, did not take the high ground, and then reported that they secured the high ground. 24 tanks were sent up the road, and a collapsed building in front of them and an ied behind them had them trapped. each merkava had a smoke screen to make missile aim harder. dozens of anti-tank missiles then struck the column. not a single tank deployed smoke, and 11 tanks were hit. what infantry that was near was pinned by fire, and tank crew requests for artillery or air support were denied out of fear of friendly fire. the advance stopped at that town.

to me, this paints a clear picture of modern military material (tanks, electronics, aircraft, artillery, and infantry) manned by people who don’t know how to use them. there is no feature of the actions of these divisions where their equipment failed them. moreover, i would expect any competent force with air assault, artillery, and armor elements to be able to seize a lightly defended town 10 kilometers from their border.

so the iof is made up of a large number of uncoordinated small groups, and collectively has little sense of how to put these pieces together. and you might say, “well maybe they fixed some of that in the last twenty years”. i think the fact that modern merkavas have the trophy system answers whether or not that happened. it’s a very cool toy, designed to blow up an oncoming anti-tank missile mid air. strapping sensitive explosives to the front of your tank means that your infantry cannot be anywhere near it. so we see dozens of unaccompanied merkavas and bulldozers parked somewhere that a resistance fighter can run up to, unopposed. we also might see a hot shot intelligence officer cook up some pager plan, report it to his commanding officer, and have it approved without anyone thinking that operations are only effective in sequence and with support.

It’s essentially just a shopping list that right wing cranks have wanted since at least the nixon administration. the heritage foundation was founded in ‘73, and it is heir to a tradition that includes things like the john birch society and the federalist society. the american far right has been advancing a plan of judicial capture for decades, and it’s finally coming to a head. the democrats argue we can either have it in 2025 or delay it to 2029.

the democrats are broadly not wrong to say that the contents of the project are bad. they will kick a lot of protections down to the state level, where obviously the red controlled state govs will gleefully strip away everything they can. the reason the democrats are bringing it up so much is because, rhetorically, they only have fear and negative claims to support them. there is no democratic platform, or anti-2025 project, or coherent vision of the future, or anything. the only pitch they have is the same pitch they’ve had for decades, except now it’s more tired than its ever been: the other guy is really bad, this is an important election, you have to vote blue. hunter s. thompson wrote about being tired of holding his nose for unpopular candidates in the 70s.

it’s closer to the fascists telling us what to do then agenda 21, but they’ve been telling us for eighty years. the recent emphasis on it is a combination of it playing well on tiktok to young people who are critically looking at the character of USamerican civil society for the first time and the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the democratic party.

prior to a few months ago, openAI was nominally beholden to a non-profit of the same name that had a board with the mission to maintain safe AI, what ever that means. they tried to fire sam altman, sam didn’t like that, the board got dissolved, and now the nsa guy is there. this article talks about how the moral/ altruism board tried to stop the money for moral reasons, and ultimately lost out

my best guess would be that this weekend is the swiss peace summit where they invited like ninety countries but not russia. putting out the barest, most basic sounding demands is an easy play when you aren’t even invited to the current version of peace talks. it’ll make ukraine’s demands for crimea, belgorod, kaliningrad, and billion dollar annual reparations look ridiculous in a few days, if the talks even get that far. you’re right that the west isn’t done, but the west is the one cooking up this swiss conference