Image is of the drying Canelon Grande Reservoir in Uruguay as the country battles three consecutive years of drought, its worst in nearly a century.
Quoting every country and region that is currently suffering under unprecedented climatic conditions and posting every graph showing extremely concerning things happening would make this preamble way too long, so I'm gonna keep it short and merely say that, holy shit, the consequences of fossil fuel executives' actions are looking real fucking bad.
Hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, are currently enduring higher than average temperatures sometimes reaching up 48 degrees Celsius or 120 degrees Fahrenheit or even beyond. Drought is putting pressure on water supplies basically everywhere around the world. And El Nino is activating, which will only do further damage.
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 and third update have done the Dragonball Z fusion dance and created this long-ass thing that took me... a while to get done.
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 US regressing to anti-freemarket, anti-globalist, mercantile protectionism as soon as their position at the top is challenged is funny. The fact that their diplomats can't figure out how to do their jobs after China removed their ability to lie and downplay their actions by simply disconnecting private phone lines is also funny.
the fact that positions in the US government are essentially rewards for loyalty (or, in the case of people like Elliot Abrams, a continuation of the deep state status quo) rather than those people being chosen for having even a vague amount of merit also is not helping things I imagine. like, there's a lot to criticize about technocracy but maybe there would be slightly fewer catastrophic incidents in the transportation sector if it wasn't being run by a failson who got where he is by essentially getting third place in an Obama impersonation competition.
I have to imagine that a similar thing is happening to American diplomats. it would be one thing to pick them for their hostility rather than their ability to peacefully negotiate and respect other countries, that's kind of just a "cocky empire that believes it can do whatever it wants" thing, but it also seems like they're not even really good at doing that either. like, why on earth is John goddamn Kerry the climate ambassador or whatever the fuck he is? why didn't he do what 99.999% of people would have done after his embarrassing presidential run and just hide in a sewer for the rest of his life?
If the US appointed ambassadors on merit we wouldn't have comedy gold like the good man Gunter, who was a dentist or something who generously funded the Trump candidacy.
Here he is:
Tweeting about "china virus"
Crying fake news
Saying "tremendous" three times in a short farewell tweet
Being later accused of damaging relations between the countries, the one thing ambassadors should not be doing
He also claimed to be in danger, in Iceland, and wanted armed bodyguards and to be driven around in armoured cars.
there is a lesson there about how to deal with hostile manipulative people tbqh
China is grey rocking the USA
Was my first thought.
From what I understand, the same thing happened to the British Empire by the early 1900s. But only briefly. The free market ideology was so powerful as a way of life that protectionist industrial policy didn't outlast the cabinet that tried to implement it. If anything it made more sense for the British to change tack. They were a straightforward empire built on early adoption of industrialization and the financial overlordship of India. The Americans' resource curse on the other hand is being the world's financial landlord. The insanity is that they are the ones hurting that bottom line, not China's rise or Russia's relative recovery.
Your comment just made me realize that American liberal/right wing think tanks defend and propagate the free market so feverishly only because the US always comes out on top due to dollar dependency - ultimately, every country is trying to get dollars, and only america can provide it. I wonder how things will go as the world tries to drop the dollar eventually