Bulletins and News Discussion from August 7th to August 13th, 2023 - White Blows From A Black Hand
Image is of the American military during their occupation of Haiti at the beginning of the 20th century, taken from this NYT article from 2022: Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and his replacement by Western comprador Ariel Henry, the situation in Haiti is the most dire it has been in decades - by some metrics, even worse than the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake (CW: rape, violence including against children). Millions do not have enough food. Outbreaks of disease are rampant. The government - such that it still exists, which is becoming increasingly debatable - has only a minority control over the capital city, with some estimates putting the influence of armed groups at 80%.
America's search for somebody, anybody, to intervene in Haiti has ended, with Kenya answering the call. President Ruto has announced that he will send 1000 police officers to Haiti. Kenya's Foreign Minister has tried to sell this intervention as pan-Africanism. Other Caribbean states, like the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda, have offered to send police officers too.
I can't really say it any better than the Black Alliance for Peace's own statement:
Kenya has offered to deploy a contingent of 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police, ostensibly to “restore order” in the Caribbean republic. Yet, their proposal is nothing more than military occupation by another name; an occupation of Haiti by an African country is not Pan-Africanism, but Western imperialism in Black face. By agreeing to send troops into Haiti, the Kenyan government is assisting in undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Haitian people, while serving the neocolonial interests of the United States, the Core Group, and the United Nations.
There is an urgent need for clarity on the issue of occupation in Haiti. As described in a recent statement on Haiti and Colonialism, Haiti is under ongoing occupation. No call for foreign intervention into Haiti from the administration of appointed Prime Minister Ariel Henry can be considered legitimate, because the Henry administration itself is illegitimate. BAP has repeatedly pointed out that Haiti’s crisis is a crisis of imperialism. Haiti’s current unpopular and unelected government is propped up only by Haiti’s de facto imperial rulers: the unseemly confederacy of the Core Group countries and organizations, as well as BINUH (the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti), and a loose alliance of foreign corporations and local elites.
Henry and the UN have made a mockery of sovereignty by mouthing the slogan “Haitian solutions to Haitian problems,” yet finding the only solution in violence through foreign military intervention. After repeated failed attempts to organize an occupying force to protect their interests and impose their will on the Haitian people (including appeals to the multinational organization, the Caribbean Community [CARICOM] for troops), they have now found a willing accomplice in Kenya, an east African country with its own set of internal problems.
Indeed, what’s in it for Kenya? An opportunity to both train and enhance the salaries of local police forces and garner a patina of prestige, or at least bootlicking approval, from the West. And for Haiti? White blows from a Black hand and a further erosion of their sovereignty.
And, by the way, here's the Black Alliance for Peace's statement calling for no intervention by ECOWAS in Niger, calling the organization a Western comprador organization similar to CARICOM's role in Haiti.
Welcome to our friends throughout the Lemmyverse!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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/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/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.
When it was first conceptualised, it was thought the weapon would be like a biblical plague raining down destruction from above – hence the term “rods from God”. But although it has been proposed by the US military repeatedly for decades, there is no evidence that any country has developed or deployed such a weapon. Now, researchers at the North University of China in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, have had surprising results from an experiment they conducted to see what would happen if such a weapon hit a military concrete bunker. The team, led by mechanical and electrical engineering scientist Fu Jianping with the university’s intelligent weapon research institute, accelerated tungsten rods to extreme velocities up to 3km per second (1.86 miles per second), or nearly nine times the speed of sound.
When a tungsten rod projectile hits a military concrete target at an extremely high speed, it generates a high-pressure shock wave that compresses and heats the target material to very high temperatures and pressures. This causes the target to transition from a solid to a plasma state, where the electrons are stripped from the atoms and the material becomes ionised, according to Fu’s team. The plasma state of the target material is highly conductive to electrical currents generated by the high-pressure shock wave. These electrical currents can then create a magnetic field that interacts with the plasma, generating a force that accelerates the plasma to even higher velocities. This accelerated plasma forms a plasma jet that erodes the target material and contributes to the penetration process. However, the plasma jet also interacts with the tungsten rod, causing it to erode due to the high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, according to the experiment.
The remaining mass of the tungsten rod is reduced significantly during the process. At Mach 8, Fu’s team found an entire arms-length rod can vanish almost instantly after impact. “It is very necessary to study the penetration of tungsten rods into concrete at hypersonic speeds,” Fu and his colleagues wrote in the paper.
You're goddamn right it is. Dudes fucking rock.
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But China has taken the US military blueprints seriously. In a paper published in 2018, Chinese scientists reported a prototype experiment involving a hypervelocity kinetic energy projectile hitting a ground target in the Gobi Desert. In the unprecedented experiment, a 140kg (308lbs) tungsten rod was fired at a speed of 4.6km per second by a classified platform from high above the desert, resulting in a parabolic-shaped impact crater with a depth of 3 metres and a diameter of 4.6 metres. The tungsten rod had a diameter of 11cm (4.33 inches) and a length of 84cm. The target area was sand and gravel.
The data collected by Chinese scientists from the site suggested that the hypervelocity impact cratering effect was similar to that of a shallow-buried underground explosion, and that as the velocity increases, the effect becomes more like that of a surface-contact explosion. This means that a “rod from God” could have limited ground-penetrating capabilities.
Like many metals, China produces most of the world's tungsten, so if anybody's gonna crack the code and let us unlock the future where Xi is raining tungsten rods moving at Mach 10 on reactionaries from a vast array of satellites, it'll be China. This is a critically important part of socialism
The militarization of space is actually really bad because it means that in the event of war, space travel will be off limits for the following several decades due to the high velocity cloud of debris. China should be working on stuff like Earth-based laser de-orbiting and not this nonsense.
edit: also if you're going to militarize space, you have to build the orion battleship or you simply won't get my support
No matter what capitalism cannot be allowed to escape into space, its contradictions have to be contained and resolved on earth, otherwise we're potentially looking at an eternity of carnage and depravity