Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.

After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.

There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.

The weekly update is 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.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.

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

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is 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.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

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

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.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M
    ·
    10 months ago

    Big exaggeration here.

    It cannot destroy the tunnels. A quote further down said that they would use "thousands of cubic meters of seawater", which sounds impressive if you don't know how big a volume that actually is.

    The Gaza Strip receives an average of 356 mm of rainfall every year over every square meter of the strip. This means that the whole strip receives an average of 130 million cubic meters of water per year, or 360,000 cubic meters of water per day. This is actually the most pessimistic way of calculating it, as the rainy season is in autumn-winter and so most of the rain is concentrated in that time, making the challenge of getting rid of water even more difficult for Hamas outside of wartime - and yet, they do so, and have for many years. The Viet Cong were able to prevent their tunnels from being flooded with water despite the US trying, and living in the fucking monsoon rains for years. This isn't some advanced concept that Hamas hasn't unlocked on the tech tree yet, it's been known for decades.

    As for salting the land:

    The amount of water that reached feeding basins rates was estimated up to 222 million cubic meters of water of groundwater in the West Bank which accounts for about 32% of the general rate which is about 688 million cubic meters annually. While the amount of rain water that reached the basin feeding the underground water in the Gaza Strip was estimated at 33 million cubic meters of water, which accounts for 60% of the general rate which is about 55 million cubic meters annually. The need for more rain remains in order to reduce the water deficit in some aquifers, particularly in the southern area of West Bank in light of the growing demand for water and continuous control of the Israeli occupation over the Palestinian water sources.

    There is nothing that Israel can do that compares to the natural rate at which water (and seawater, for that matter) is infiltrating into the Gaza aquifer. This is - pun intended - a drop in the bucket.

    Regardless, much of the water in Gaza was provided by desalination anyway. Also, I'm not entirely sure it matters anymore - this war isn't going to end with Gazans being let back into northern Gaza and allowed to farm and so on. There will either be featureless desert and mounds of rubble where the city once stood, or Israel will collapse and families will be free to leave Gaza and return to territory outside the strip. There is no possible return to the pre-war status quo. Most of the 2 million Gazans will either be dead, scattered around the world, or victorious by the end of the war.

    • the_kid
      ·
      10 months ago

      something that's always confused me is a few passages from Finkelstein's book where he seems to think it is possible to flood the tunnels, but Isntreal just isn't doing it for some reason?:

      As it launched the ground invasion, Israel abruptly recalibrated its mission from destroying Hamas’s “rockets” to destroying Hamas’s cross-border “terror tunnels.” Yet, of the 32 tunnels Israel reportedly discovered and detonated, only 12–14 actually passed under the border. It was cause for perplexity why Israel couldn’t have sealed them from its side, just as Egypt after the July 2013 coup sealed some 1,500 commercial tunnels passing from Gaza into the Sinai. Later, when Egypt flooded the still extant tunnels (allegedly to preempt weapons smuggling), Israeli energy minister Yuval Steinitz praised it as a “good solution.” Why was it a “good solution” for Egypt but not a “good solution” for Israel? Perhaps Israel couldn’t on technical grounds duplicate Egypt’s modus operandi.

      this is the citation, what do you think about this?

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M
        ·
        10 months ago

        Individual smuggling tunnels are much less developed than the rest of the tunnel networks inside Gaza. You aren't gonna build vertical shafts to move water underground and let it percolate away into the sand for a simple smuggling tunnel.

      • carpoftruth [any, any]M
        ·
        10 months ago

        Norman isn't a hydrogeologist

        If you just start pumping water underground it'll go down the tunnel but you won't know if it's percolating into ground someplace or actually filling empty space. It could work, or it could be kilometers of pipe and a bunch of pumping to just be a waste of time