Image is a ball-and-stick model of a molecule of CL-20, alternatively known as hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, taken from Wikipedia.
Much of this preamble is taken from this article.
CL-20 is the most deadly non-nuclear explosive that humanity has yet discovered, capable of generating detonation velocities and pressures higher than other military explosives like TNT, RDX, and HMX. If you have a more powerful explosive, you can make your missiles travel further and/or make them smaller. It also helps the creation of nuclear missiles, as to start the nuclear chain reaction, you need a powerful shockwave to get all the atoms in there to mingle. The problem is that it's a little too explosive, making it exceedingly difficult to not only manufacture, but transport. I mean, America can hardly transport some chemicals across the country without poisoning entire towns. Thus, it isn't really used in many known military applications.
In 1994, in China, Professor Yu Yongzhong synthesized the first CL-20 compound in his laboratory. America came along and said 'Actually, we did it first, in 1987.' The US team said that despite it being such a powerful explosive, the cost of making and testing it was too high, and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that there wasn't really much interest in that kind of weapons arms race anymore. Production therefore fell to the wayside, while China kept at it, investing in its production and testing.
China has recently found a way to synthesize it to make it five times as shock-resistant. This shock resistance is essentially measured by dropping an object onto it and measuring the height you need to drop it from to make it explode. The previous record was 13 cm / 5 inches, whereas now it is 68 cm, or about 27 inches. US military experts already fear that China has designed its weaponry to use CL-20 and thus this will give them an advantage in missile technology.
(Also, fun fact, CL-20 is called that because it was developed in the China Lake facility in California.)
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.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third 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.
The people complaining about "tankies" should be relentlessly compared to the people that complain about the "woke". The behaviour is two sides of the same coin, one performed by conservatives-only while the other is performed by both of them in unity against the only anti-capitalists.
Both are functionally meaningless, being undefined in any given situation so they can be thrown around in all places.
The liberals saying "tankie" will not like being compared with the conservatives in this way, and they certainly will not like tankie + woke being compared as the same thing. The interesting thing here is that "to be awake" applies more to the people getting called tankies (and I mean that for all in the anti-imperialist left) than to the nato lovers saying it.
I really feel inspired by this like it's exactly the right way to go about undermining it.
Time magazine: "How Ukraine's dam collapse could become the country's 'Chernobyl'"
Americans are the fucking worst at geography.
ermmm 🤓 technically 🤓 the chernobyl nuclear disaster happened in the USSR, which is a different country than the current sovereign state of Ukraine 🤓 I give you 3 pinocchios and how's the weather in St Peterburg
Already had a lib tell me exactly that :agony-minion:
How the I-95 bridge collapse could become America's 9/11.
I thought it was a bit and clicked on the link expecting ppb. It wasn't a bit.
Taxing the rich is bad actually
Once again :parenti: :parenti:
I read this blog post about a UKer's experience of blocking all American IP addresses, which made the Internet mostly unusable.
https://www.nthbrock.com/posts/americaless-internet/
Select quotes:
Nine out of the ten most visited websites in the United Kingdom are those operated by US organisations. The same cannot be said for the flip side. There are zero UK-operated websites found in the US’s top 50.
A large chunk of the Anglo-speaking sphere I experience originates and is operated by American organisations. Within this sphere, we all feel any disturbances or changes made by the major players. We are all affected when an AWS data centre goes down. Our combined productivity goes down when Google publishes an enticing doodle. Any dint to Facebook’s SLA and we all find out as it hits the mainstream media.
One of the few constants in life is change. We can’t assume the internet as we use it today will last for the foreseeable future. The Internet is the most impressive distributed networks of our time. Yet its fragility isn’t in the technology itself but in the politics, geography and laws that encompass it. [...]
(emphasis mine)
The author's experience shows why the Great Firewall of China (GFW) is an essential economic protection measure. Without the GFW, the Chinese internet would be dominated by American websites, leading to Chinese social and economic dependence on American corporations and infrastructure. Mature American tech companies would occupy most of the space in the local market, stifling the development of an indigenous tech industry.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Berboc is asking people not to call the Leopards German.
“Understand, it doesn’t matter where it’s made. You don’t say about your iPhone that it’s American or Tim Cook. You say that it’s yours. It’s the same story with tanks ... German in Germany, and this is "Ukrainian. And what they do with them does not apply to us. Thank you!"
She was previously one of the big drum-beaters for sending German Leopards to Ukraine.
Source: https://twitter.com/vicktop55/status/1668280297417261056
And what they do with them does not apply to us.
Didn't you train them?
I kind of want to keep an internal tally of how often this clip gets referenced during the counteroffensive. So far its been twice.
You don’t say about your iPhone that it’s American or Tim Cook.
The Iphone: made somewhere, designed in wherever.
You don't say about your iPhone that it's American or Tim Cook, but you definitely do say about your Chinese phones and apps that they're Chinese, and it very much matters where it's made in that case
seeing them in a scrapyard is bad for the German brand and arms manufacturers
:please-clap:
My friend's cat just died and I happened to be at the house helping clean/garden and he meowed at me and there was a bunch of blood on his arm and mouth and nose and I had to run around the house and tell everyone. Vet has been called to euthanise.
He was a very good cat, social and outgoing, even as his health has been deteriorating over the last year.
Ain't doing great.
the first and most important rule of counteroffensives is to have fun and be yourself
The prick who choked a homeless man to death got indicted today
Preparing for him to get acquitted and everyone to shrug their shoulders, talk about how the justic system needs to be reformed only for the conversation to stop. Then repeat once another high-profile unjust murder gets traction
Etc repeat until I’m dead
Russia just hit something enormous in Odessa
Huge internet and power outages being reported. This explosion was seismically detected 600km away in Romania. Zero live webcams in the city are currently working. Whatever Russia hit, it’s big
Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, has said that the counteroffensive has not yet begun and all that has happened so far is probing attacks.
Dubai has projected the Russian flag onto the Burj Khalifa. Personally I don't give a shit but the Ukrainians seem pretty mad about it
The seethe on twitter is quite funny. I was in the Middle East a few months ago and visited both Damascus and Beirut, and literally every single person that I talked with about the war was pro-Russian. That includes my Russophile communist uncle, a random Lebanese coffee shop owner, a Syrian taxi driver, Iraqi tourists, a Saudi instagram vlogger and the woman complaining about prices at the local supermarket. The overall feeling in nearly the whole Arab and Muslim world is pretty much the same, let the chicken come home to roost. Let the fucking Europeans be swallowed by America's flames, like we were swallowed. Let the West understand that the East can also declare wars to protect interests outside of fake national borders. Any Ukraine flag emoji twitter person who seethes about the Arab World being pro-Russia better read some history and understand that Arabs will simply not just follow the imperial projects anymore.
Maybe the Ukrainian government shouldn't have endorsed the use of pig-fat dipped bullets against Muslim orcs if it wanted to be friends with Muslim countries? I'm no diplomat but that feels like a diplomatic no-no.
Wiz Khalifa about to be mistakenly added to an Azov kill list
Ukraine is getting hammer hard right now. Like, seem like the Russian using big boy after Putin speech and all that escalation, even rt started talking about nuke, uh oh, we’re in for a ride, the escalatory ladder keep going up without any way to go back down
In more pleasant news from an on the ground perspective, I've heard scuttlebutt about how a whole platoon of Ukrainian soldiers, probably conscripts of their territorial guard militias, managed to defect to Russia because their platoon leader got in contact with the Russian unit commander closest to them and organize a surrender.
Apparently the Ukrainian platoon had wounded men in it that their commanders refused to evacuate, or even supply field aid equipment with trained medical personnel to stabilize them.
I can only hope that this story reaches more Ukrainian conscripts to let them know they still have a choice to avoid being pushed into slaughter houses by their fascist rulers.
