The Great Housing Mission of Venezuela, launched in 2011 by Hugo Chavez, is the most ambitious housing project in the country's history. This week, the 4,600,000th house was built, with a goal for 5 million homes by 2024 and beyond. The program has built 1,255 residential complexes on a total of 9,837 hectares, an area equivalent to six times the Swiss city of Geneva.
The program additionally provides social infrastructure like schools, subsidized food markets, and recreational and green spaces. Over 70% of constructions are self-managed by communities, with financial and logistics support from the government. Communities also provide each other with materials - from each according to their supplies, to each according to their needs. Russian, Chinese, and Belarusian companies have helped supply the program over the years.
In Antímano Parish in southwestern Caracas, a group of predominantly women came together in 2015 and trained in construction, cleared land, and then built apartments while under the pressure of food and materials shortages and electricity blackouts due to the United States' sanctions campaign.
Claudia Tisoy, a mother and self-trained plumber, said “This goes beyond building homes for our families, we are also building the future of our country, with women leading the way. This is what the socialist horizon is all about.”VA
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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 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
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.
Is it me, or does these seem kind of dumb? Launching a cruise missile out of your big slow cargo plane doesn’t seem super useful. You probably aren’t flying these that far outside of your zone of control, where you could launch them normally, unless you have air superiority. And if you have air superiority, why again are you trying to launch cruise missiles out of cargo planes?
I think the biggest value of this weapon is that it means your opponent has to assume every cargo plane could be a bomber. This drastically increases challenges in risk assessment about what to immediately respond to and what to ignore when issuing orders to the units in your command.
Another factor here is that the C130 is used for air to air refuelling. They often launch squadrons with as many as 10 of these things in the air at once. You will not know whether these are for refuelling or for bombing.
This however is such a high tech weapon that I don't think it matters. In a peer war this tech will all be gone in the first 6 months and the US has no capacity to manufacture it, especially given it has chips and materials within it that are made in china.
And this itself is only an issue for your enemy if they don't have the resources and industrial capacity to create a bunch of (relatively) cheap anti-aircraft missiles, which I suspect does not describe China's current situation.
Hmm I'm not sure if conventional aa missiles work on aircraft that fly this high. Might need to check.
C-17 maxes out at around 45K feet. Modern long-range AA missiles max out well after that. It's only an extra ~15K feet above what MH17 was operating at, and that got shot down with a Buk.
EDIT: The logistical issue for China would be placing and protecting ships with AA missiles far enough out into the Pacific to be effective, since this Rapid Dragon system apparently has a range of several hundred miles.
It's less about the effectiveness and more about setting up future atrocity propaganda. When China inevitably begins targeting every cargo aircraft, the West can clutch their pearls and go "that aircraft was loaded with humanitarian supplies destined for a small village!" Which could absolutely be true, and now causes a choice: possibly let a cruise missile be launched from anywhere at any moment, or risk a major international incident.
Similar shit happened with Q ships in WW1 and 2, the Germans just began targeting every vessel, even seemingly unarmed passenger liners, because of how often arms were being smuggled in or the ships were being used as anti sub ships.
So that you need less stages in the rocket. You can have a glider with a smalker engine instead of the whole gizmo that lifts the thing to that heigt wich is often not reusable. And you can make it heavier if its a plabe that can load a lot of cargo.
Those are really just very small booster rockets. All they need to do is accelerate the main missile to about 300mph at a height of 500ft. This issue was solved in like the 1950s, it's not really a big deal.
Seems like more MIC money grifting to me. The USAF has like 50 different C-130 variants, all tailor-made for GWOT spec ops stuff that cost $500 million apiece and all basically useless targets in fighting over the Donbass.
I.e. the weapons have successfully achieved their primary goal