Image is of the Germany coal power plant Staudinger, taken from this article.
Germany has closed down its last three nuclear power plants, after decades of protests against them in the wake of Chernobyl and then Fukushima. They were going to be shut down last summer, but then some obscure event happened in Ukraine or something, and that kept them alive for a little while longer as energy uncertainty mounted.
Now with the assurances that their natural gas supply will be healthy and sufficient, as their pipeline to Russia that supplied much of their gas is now gone, and new renewables will be sure to fill the gap, as Baerbock does everything in her power to anger China (the dominant renewables and rare earths manufacturer on the planet) things are looking bright for the German economy and energy sector, making this the right time to finally shut down those pesky nuclear power plants, which emit orders of magnitude less pollution and less radiation than coal power plants.
The European environmental movement is going swimmingly.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we’ve collected.
April 17th’s update is here in the comments.
April 18th’s update is here in the comments.
April 21st’s update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources. Beware of chuddery.
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 journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). 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 ~ Another 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’s army.
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.
Part 2
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Jacobin: The Trudeau Liberals Can’t Stop Themselves From Selling Arms to Antidemocratic Gulf States
In spite of the frequent lip service they pay to human rights and peace, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have yet to find an antidemocratic Gulf state to which they won’t sell arms. Qatar is the newest potential client being wooed for Canadian-made weapons of war.
Latin America
TeleSUR: Venezuela Invites Russia To The 2023 ALBA Games
TeleSUR: President Nicolas Maduro Reaches 10 Years Leading Venezuela
TeleSUR: Record Alert: +100 000 Refugees On Panama-Colombia Border
TeleSUR: Chile Celebrates 40-hour Law Enactment
This Friday, the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, enacted the law that gradually reduces the working day from 45 to 40 hours per week.
Geopolitical Economy: Peru’s coup-plotting congress has 6% approval, 91% disapproval (but full US backing)
As we know from western countries, the lower the approval rating, the more democratic the country. The ultimate liberal democracy would be one where there is a 100% disapproval rating of the leader in office, because that means that those people have the freedom to disagree, unlike in communist countries like China, Russia, and Iran.
The War Against The West
Geopolitical Economy: BRICS Bank de-dollarizing, promises 30% of loans in local currencies, new chief Dilma Rousseff says
Naked Capitalism: The Increasing Number of Trial Balloons for Polish Intervention in Ukraine
Nothing TOO concerning yet - calling them “trial balloons” is about right I think. It’s not hard to joint dots into a trend line though, and that trend line will lead to a lot of body bags going back to Poland if NATO isn’t careful.
TeleSUR: Ecuador Willing to Send Arms to Ukraine, US Leaks Reveal
Earlier this year, General Laura Richardson, the leader of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom), asked six Latin American countries to donate Russian weapons to Ukraine. In return, Washington would provide donors with modern U.S.-made weaponry.
When analyzing the U.S. leaked documents, NYT journalists found that the Lasso administration considered the possibility of sending Soviet-made MI-17 helicopters to Ukraine.
Analysis
Retrospectives, History, Theory, and Technology
Michael Roberts: Well founded pessimism
Only last February, I posted that there had been a burst of optimism about the state of the world economy in 2023. The consensus view then was that the G7 economies (with the sorry exception of the UK) would avoid a slump this year. Sure, there will be a slowdown compared to 2022, but the major economies were going to achieve a ‘soft landing’ or even no landing at all, but just motor on, if at a low rate of growth. The international agencies like the World Bank, the OECD and the IMF upgraded their forecasts for global growth.
However, all that optimism has proven “unfounded” as I suggested then. Even in the best performing G7 economy, the US, a recession (ie ‘technically’ two consecutive quarters of contraction in real GDP) now seems probable. Even the US Federal Reserve accepts that a recession is unavoidable. At its last meeting, its economists agreed that there would be a ‘mild recession’ in US economic activity this year.
And according to economists at the Bank of America, there are plenty of signals that suggest a recession in the US has not been avoided and they provide several charts to back that up. First, there was the significant decline in manufacturing activity. “March ISM was 46.3, lowest since May 2020. In past 70 years whenever manufacturing ISM dropped below 45, recession occurred on 11 out of 12 occasions (exception was 1967),” BofA said. Indeed, globally there appears to be a manufacturing recession.
Common Dreams: Oxfam Shows US Billionaires Almost a Third Richer Today Than When Covid Hit
Wall Street On Parade: New Bombshells Filed in Court in the Jeffrey Epstein/JPMorgan Child Sex Trafficking Case
Monthly Review: OPEC+ and capitalism’s fight against inflation
…
World capitalism has been in a crisis for a long time, ever since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008. It is a hallmark of the crisis that attempts to resolve it in one form simply give rise to a crisis in some other form. The original manifestation of the crisis was in the form of a stagnation; even establishment economists like Lawrence Summers the former US treasury secretary have now started talking of a “secular stagnation”. But the attempt to overcome this stagnation by pumping in extraordinarily cheap credit to the system over a long period of time, and then by running enormous fiscal deficits in the wake of the pandemic, brought on the current inflation. The Ukraine war, a fall-out of the effort to maintain western hegemony over the world, accentuated this inflation. And now the effort to curb this inflation is threatening western hegemony over the world, as well as the control exercised by metropolitan capital over its domestic working class. What we are witnessing in short is a coming apart of the conjuncture that underlay the stability of neoliberal capitalism.
Monthly Review: History has its course and timing
…
This is as far as economy and finance are concerned, but as far as moral and human issues are concerned, Western neo-liberalism has attracted world disgust in a way that so many countries in the world are taking serious educational and cultural measures to protect their population from its destructive trends. In brief, the West has fallen as an example of freedom, democracy, and justice, and although history takes its time before any gigantic turn, the foundations of this change are being laid steadily in the East, which in less than a decade will make Western centrality a mere story we tell our children of a world that was but no longer exists.
Responsible Statecraft: The day the bombs rained down in Laos
…
Fifty years after the last bomb was dropped, we are still uncovering more about what happened to Laos. Today, U.S. involvement in Laos remains an overlooked part of American history, with the legacy of unexploded bombs continuing to threaten the lives of people in Laos. The U.S. should meaningfully recognize the history of the Secret War and the humanitarian efforts still necessary to solve this challenge.
President Obama made history as the first sitting president to visit Laos. There, he acknowledged U.S. military operations there and committed funding for humanitarian demining efforts in 2016. More elected officials can continue the life-saving path he paved by visiting Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam and support the ban on the use of these indiscriminate weapons. We can rely on American leadership to uphold a peaceful legacy moving forward.
Emphasis mine. lmfao.
Part 3
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The Left and the Right
TLB: “Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn?”
In the latest instalment of the “Jeremy Corbyn is a hideous racist Bogeyman who wants to murder your granny” saga, the Labour NEC have blocked him from being selected as a Labour candidate in the next general election. Corbyn is a hard working and popular MP of 40 years and, without this interference from the NEC and Starmer, he would easily have been selected by his local Labour Party and elected for Labour an 11th time.
The oddly bland motion put to the NEC by Starmer states that Corbyn should not be allowed to stand as he lost the last general election. There was no mention of antisemitism but the shadow cabinet were keen to insinuate that this was the real reason in media interviews. Wes Streeting, gleefully speaking to Times Radio, opined that if had properly accepted the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) verdict into antisemitism “things might have been different”. Starmer must rely on snide insinuation from his besuited attack dogs because putting it in writing might have negative legal consequences. All that smearing and it hasn’t come to much.
The trade union reps on the NEC were split, with the cowards in the GMB, USDAW and fucking Musician’s Union flinching and voting for the motion. The Unison delegate abstained and the Deputy Leader, former Corbyn ‘ally’ Angela Rayner, did not attend. For consistency the NEC should also prevent election-losing former leader Ed Miliband from standing for Labour, but I’m not holding my breath.
Corbyn remains an obsession for Starmer and his cabal of right wing sensibles. Socialists are being purged from the party and he is the big one; the dragon that must be slain by Sir Starmer. They remain horrified that he did unexpectedly well on a social democratic platform in 2017 and that his ideas about helping each other spoke to the future generation of voters. This was doing politics wrong. The adults were not in charge. How dare this upstart talk about ridiculous things like ending homelessness and funding social care and education so that no one is left behind?
Analysis of Western Countries
Monthly Review: So much lying from the International Monetary Fund: The Fifteenth Newsletter (2023)
Monthly Review: If the U.S. can’t boss the World, it will spitefully destroy it
Analysis of Non-Western Countries
Responsible Statecraft: US shouldn’t whine when Brazil does its own thing
U.S.-Brazilian relations have not improved much since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January. Despite hopes for a “new era” in relations connected with Lula’s visit to the U.S. in February, the first few months have not been very productive.
One major reason why relations have not improved more is that Washington has had unrealistic expectations that the Brazilian government would support a U.S.-led agenda. To the extent that Lula has disappointed the U.S. since returning to power, it is largely because many people in our government mistakenly assumed that Lula ought to fall in line behind Biden and became frustrated when he did not. Brazil under Lula charted an independent course when he was president in the 2000s, and it is certain to do so again now.
This is a problem for the U.S. only if Washington insists that every country must toe its line and do its bidding.
Climate Change
ZME: Underwater volcanic eruption in Tonga was most powerful natural explosion in a century
Might partially explain the wet weather California has been having? Would love to see a study to see if there’s any significant connection. Wouldn’t be the first time that a volcano has impacted global weather/climate.
Common Dreams: World’s 60 Largest Banks Have Dumped $5.5 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Accord
