Cyclone Freddy has been a record-breaking and disturbing storm.
After first forming on the 4th of February, it moved across the entirety of the southern Indian Ocean, only one of four cyclones to have ever done so; the others were in 1994 and 2000.
It made landfall in Madagascar, weakening overland, but survived, hitting the Mozambique Channel, the body of water separating Madagascar from Africa, allowing it to once again intensify. It then struck Mozambique and weakened once again - but again survived. On March 1st, it emerged back over the Channel and struck Mozambique a second time on March 11th.
It has broken the record for the longest lived tropical cyclone on record - the last one being 31 days long in 1994. It has had the highest accumulated cyclone energy of any tropical cyclone, the last one being in 2006. It is the first cyclone to have undergone seven separate rounds of rapid intensification - anything more than three times in a storm's life is considered exceptional.
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.
March 13th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
March 14th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
March 15th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
March 17th's update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
American anti-war rally on March 18th by left groups!
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.
Folks, Credit Suisse is beyond beyond fucked. $50 billion cash injection yesterday, but that has absolutely no asset backing. This basically indicates that it’s there to cover investors, and it’s deeply fucked. To explain this as simply as possible:
There’s a thing called basis points, which is essentially a credit score by insurers for banks. Credit Suisse peaked at 1287 basis points yesterday, which is just… astounding. 100 basis points = 1% yearly cost to insure investments (A score of 100 basis points is pretty decent, but if you do a little digging you’ll find that almost no bank has that score right now haha this is fine.) 1287 basis points is a 12.87% yearly cost to insure investments in Credit Suisse. This is insurers essentially betting that within 5 years, there is nearly a 2/3 chance Credit Suisse is completely sunk (64% chance) and this is only compounding the fact that large investors know this and are more likely to move large and SAFE investments from Credit Suisse, since it is unlikely these are appreciating in value at a rate greater than 12.87%. This is so fucked and there’s almost no way to show just how fucked this is. When Lehman collapsed in the Great Recession, it peaked at about 600 basis points. Credit Suisse posted losses of $7 Billion already last year, and the cash injection from the Swiss National Bank is deeply troubling considering the Swiss National Bank also lost like… $150 Billion last year. Also to combat inflation as a rule you want less money to be circulating in the economy, so it looks bad in that regard as well since people do not think their money is safe in the bank and governments are handing out billions of made up money to said banks to pay back people who are taking their money from the bank.
So tl;dr in regards to the status of banks and the economy: keeping money in bank cost more than not keeping money in bank, but bank need money in bank to pay back people with money in bank
deleted by creator
I haven't heard of that but I also don't frequent the kinds of circles that'd discuss those things.
If I had to guess however I don't think that's true considering the most pro-ukraine party is the FDP which are marketliberals/neoliberals and if something were to threaten them they'd drop it in a heartbeat.
CS has been fucking up over the last I want to say 3 years, so even before Corona they've been slowly bleeding and my guess is Corona as well as the SVB thing just made things progress much faster. Also as far as the SNB 'losing money' goes. It's a the national bank and switzerland has their own currency so it really doesn't matter imo worrying about it is debt hawk nonsense.
This makes sense and I'm sure it's probably right, but then again nothing about how the European political elite have responded to events in Ukraine (and the economic fallout) has made sense. They are getting de-industrialized by the US in real time and they seem almost happy to let it happen just to give Ukraine false hope in winning this thing.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator