Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
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.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here.
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.
Would that dump a bunch of nuclear fallout? I don't know how this stuff works
Probably not as much as you’d think.
Like, you didn’t want to drink milk from Sweden when Chernobyl happened but these days you can visit Chernobyl as a tour guide on a fairly regular basis and it’s roughly equivalent to flying at 30000 feet in an airline in terms of the radiation dose you get.
Plus I would guess the thing is encased in a a lot of concrete. So it would probably take a very very big bomb just to crack the thing open. At least, you’d hope they had the foresight to build it that way and given the mindset of Israel I would imagine they planned for it getting bombed.
More likely you could substantially damage it to the point of putting it out of action for generating power. I’d picture more like causing billions of dollars worth of damage and not, eg, making Israel or even the nearby area uninhabitable.
The bigger concern would really be if they’re storing waste for processing onsite in water tanks. Typically spent fuel rods sit there for at least several years to burn off the worst of the radioactivity. But even then that’s more likely a localized environmental disaster rather than anything existential.
it likely also has a lot of air-defense for this specific reason.
Spent fuel rods likely aren't a huge risk. afaik they mostly sit in sealed drums inside big pools of water. I'm just armchair generally but I think it'd be hard to damage them with most explosives.
If I remember correctly based on OPEN-RISOP, nuclear power plants/spent fuel is one of the targets for countervalue nuclear attacks - basically salting the earth over a large area through dispersal in the wind. I imagine conventional attacks won’t have the same effect as the boom isn’t big enough.
if a nuclear warhead detonates, possibly. but without that extreme heat and pressure you won't get all the debris way up high in the atmosphere where it gets widely dispersed
I don't know anywhere near enough about warhead design to speculate how failsafe they are to that kind of scenario
A nuke detonating unintentionally is almost but not entirely impossible. The way nukes work requires extremely precise detonators to slam the nuclear core together with extreme precision. If it isn't detonated perfectly you usually just end up with a hot jet of molten plutonium. Not ideal, but far from a nuclear explosion. Basically - If all the components of the nuclear core don't hit each other at precisely the correct moment, with all the components of the bomb intact, the fission or fusion, mostly fusion these days, reaction can't reach the critical point it needs to become a true nuclear explosion. The core just gets really really really hot really fast.
Certainly seems likely
destroying Israel
destroying Palestine as a consequence
the somewhat good news is that Dimona, and the Negev nuclear facility, are in the desert quite far away from any big settlements. even if we get Chernobyl 2.0 (and I don't see why we would necessarily), Be'er Sheva is over 30 kilometers away from Negev, which was the approximate radius of the Chernobyl exclusion zone
Depends on what happens. Chernobyl sent a bunch of fallout up bc the melting reactor created a super-heated steam explosion and launched parts of the reactor damn near in to orbit. Then the radioactive graphite burned for a long time, sending even more radioactive matter in to the air. IDk what happened at Long Island but i think the concern was radioactive material getting in to the water.
Probably not unless they somehow scored a direct hit into the reactor itself. And even then, the fuel rods are typically under several meters of water while in use, which would probably absorb a lot of the blast.
Depending on how the reactor was designed, there is a chance that the damage could somehow lead to a runaway fission reaction a la Chernobyl. But imo, the more likely worst case scenario of a direct hit (or even near miss) to the reactor is probably that the foundation gets cracked and radioactive water starts leaking into the soil, which would obviously be pretty bad if a significant amount of that can find its way into a nearby aquifer.
Maybe then if theres a way to precisely target the functions that allow the firing of nukes I suppoet shooting the plant. If there's a chance it could contaminate groundwater, I oppose it
I doubt the controls for launching nukes are at Dimona tbh. It's main function seems to be research and the production of nuclear warheads (also maybe power generation, but I couldn't find anything saying that it's being used as a power plant).
In terms of groundwater though, the facility does seem to be sitting right on top of the southern tip of the Mountain Aquifer. The silver lining is that the groundwater seems to flow into the area rather than out of it, so the contamination would likely be at least somewhat contained to the southern end of Israel, which is largely desert and thus doesn't have many people living in it.