Image is of General Abdourahamane Tiani, leader of Niger (left) and Ibrahim Traoré, leader of Burkina Faso (right).


The Alliance of Sahel States (ASS) formed on September 16th in the wake of the coup in Niger in late July, in which Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso created a military and increasingly economic alliance in which attacking one would result in the other two joining. This was initially most relevant militarily, as ECOWAS was threatening an invasion of Niger if they did not restore civilian rule. Nonetheless, due to a mixture of a lack of real strength in ECOWAS due to Nigeria's internal problems, and the influence of Algeria, a very strong regional military power who negotiated against a war which could further destabilise an already destabilised region, and the vague promises of future civilian rule, the external military threat seems to have mostly dissipated.

However, internal threats remain. Burkina Faso is fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda, which commit regular massacres of civilians; the government controls only 60% of the country. In Mali, the government is fighting against similar groups as well as the Tuareg, which inhabit the more sparsely populated north of the country - the government is in the process of kicking out the UN mission to Mali, and in the process retaking rebel stronghold cities like Kidal, which is raising some eyebrows as to what exactly the UN was doing all this time; and Niger is fighting against similar Islamic groups too, and is kicking out the French for being exploitative motherfuckers. Combine this with the sanctions against Niger which are crippling the country, disease outbreaks in Burkina Faso, and just the general shitty state of the world economy, and the situation is not looking very good currently.

That all being said, economy and trade ministers from all three countries have met this past weekend in Bamako, the capital of Mali. There, they recommended that the countries: improve the free movement of people inside the ASS (don't laugh!); construct and strengthen infrastructure like dams and roads; construct a food safety system; establish a stabilization fund and investment bank; and even create a common airline. This is all attracting foreign attention too - Russia has signed a deal to build Africa's largest gold refinery in Mali, and China is the second largest investor into Niger after France, ploughing money into the gold and uranium industries there. And, of course, the Wagner group is in the region - though I'm unsure if they're having a major or minor impact on events there.


The weekly update is here on the website.

Your Monday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.


The Country of the Week is Burkina Faso! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

The bulletins site is... up!

RSS feed here.

Last week's thread is here.


Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists

Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

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. Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

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 Telegram Channels:

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.


  • WashedAnus [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I should do an effort post eventually on lasers and laser weapons, but suffice it to say that there are some significant issues with them just on the conceptual level. I will try to list them in order of severity (most significant problem first):

    • The critical technologies to run a laser weapon system don't really exist yet. You need something like a 50MW laser (I don't remember where I'm getting that figure from) to reliably blow up a supersonic missile (not even going to get into hypersonic lol). High power industrial lasers are still in the low hundreds of kilowatts, the best the military industrial complex seems to be capable of (according to wow-cool-robot pop science articles) is promising to get to 500 kW soon.
    • Lasers fucking suck to work with and work on, and the parts burn out really quickly, even on 5W lasers. Laser optics have to be kept in semiconductor manufacturing cleanroom conditions, like <1 particle per cubic foot, to prevent burnout, and that's just lasers over 1W. You drop a skin-flake on a mirror while the laser is on and that mirror is smoked out and totally fucked. Ask anyone who does calibration work on lasers about "collimation" and listen to the gripes. It's difficult, precise, tedious work and there's no way an 18 year old soldier is going to be able to fix one in the field under fire.
    • Lasers use a lot of power. Like, you see the "50MW" figure? That's just what's coming out of the final lens. It's going to suck down several orders of magnitude more power to get to that figure. "Oh, just turn it on when you need it" I hear you say. Good luck shooting down a missile when it takes the laser like 10 minutes to warm up to operating power. Laser weapons capable of shooting down missiles will be restricted to ships and fixed land-based installations for the first several decades at least.
    • Lasers emit light, and that light doesn't fall back to Earth. The weapons will have an "effective range" listed, but they will still cause significant damage along their vector for several times that distance. Any aircraft or satellite in the line of fire will be hit, and, at the very least, the optics on it will be permanently fucked.
    • The missiles you're trying to shoot down are moving through the atmosphere. Air does a very good job of wicking away heat, and the primary effect laser weapons have on their targets is creating heat. In fact, it would be easier to shoot down a missile moving laterally (with regards to the laser's point of view) than approaching head-on, as the heat-sync effect is most pronounced at the front of a projectile.
    • Lastly, I'll list weather, because it's honestly not as big of an issue as a lot of people make it out to be. Laser weapons will almost certainly operate in either the infrared spectrum or the green spectrum, and in two very specific wavelengths (one green, one IR), as those have the lowest Earth-atmospheric attenuation of any EM radiation, and they would only run into operational problems in severe weather conditions when aircraft and missiles can't fly.