“The Royal Navy is ending its century-old tradition of having Chinese servants on warships amid fears that they could be forced to spy for Beijing. Hundreds of Chinese laundrymen have worked on Britain’s warships since the 1930”

Nepalese Gurkhas will replace them due to fears that Beijing could threaten the servants’ families in China to make those on board ships pass on Royal Navy secrets, The Sun has reported.

my honest reaction to this policy

anglos thinking they are so important they are going to be spied on by a major power and are not seen as a minor satellite of another power

as a centrist, I condemn both the IOF and Hamas for not abolishing the state of israel yet

A missile fell on a major electrical transformer in the eastern Tel Aviv area, leading to a widespread power outage.

a dozen more lucky shots like that and then we might be really getting somewhere

God I hate this conflict so much. It's all one sided negative news. I don't feel the energy to read it because it's so depressing.

Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard: If the Zionists launch a ground attack in Gaza, they will be buried there

we really need to come up with a better expression than "braver than the troops" because most (Western, at least) troops are utter cowards who piss themselves if they aren't backed up by frequent bomber raids and dozens of various high-tech gizmos. it's sorta like saying "warmer than liquid nitrogen." not a hard bar to pass

2913 dead Palestinian children in 18 days, 5 times more than dead Ukrainian/Russian children in 20 MONTHS. This is insane.

Praying that the IDF gets fucking crushed

An Israeli army spokesperson has said that Israel has attacked more than 400 “targets”, including Mosques, in the Gaza Strip in the last day.

The spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that the Mosques were being used by Hamas as meeting places, in a post on X on Tuesday morning local time.

Hagari also said that Israel had attacked Hamas’s “operational headquarters” and that it had killed three Hamas deputy commanders.

He specified several Gaza neighbourhoods that Israeli warplanes had attacked, including Jabalia. Thirty people, mostly women and children, were killed when Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp was bombed, the civil defence unit there told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

what number was this on the list? "yeah we're attacking mosques, but they were hamas mosques"

Eternal solidarity to Palestine in their struggle against Amerikkkan subjugation

Bear with me on this one news heads.

The first time I used marijuana and actually got high was a long time ago when I was a teen. I was with a couple friends of mine and we walked to a little cove on the beach, a ways down into a public park. We smoked a joint at the cove, chilled for a few, and then walked back home. Walking back, it really hit me. I vividly remember the feeling of being high for the first time. I felt as though every single moment I was waking up from a dream, like every step and heartbeat was spent piercing the veil between sleep and waking life. It was a feeling of constant transition, where the past was only ever a flicker out of the corner of my eye, and any future, even just 10 steps down the path, was unimaginable. I could focus only on the singular instant in which I existed. It wasn't that the past and the future were hard to fathom, it's that they did not exist.

I am describing this feeling now to the news thread because I believe that this way of being that I experienced as a minor using weed for the first time is a close analogue for how liberals experience and understand history. Just an infinite sequence of individual, disconnected moments, no past or present, only smooth vibes.

Feeling a little good this afternoon seeing all the solidarity out there for Palestine. It really feels like the only thing the zionists have control over is the narrative put out by the msm, which very few young people give a shit about. More and more people are coming out as anti-capitalist and anti-israel which gives me some motivation to go on. Does it help the people on the ground being bombed in total darkness rn, no, it doesn't, but hopefully whatever aid people like Hasan and Shaun are doing can make somewhat of a dent. I really don't want to give in to despair. If Israel genocides these people the entire fucking world is awake and will see.

Reuters, citing US officials: US forces at Al-Tanf base in Syria are being attacked by drones.

There is a huge situation allegedly happening in Dagestan Russia right now where large crowds are attacking the airport and trying to get to an airplane that they believe Israelis are on board.

https://streamable.com/pulzxm

https://streamable.com/a71qix

The video doing rounds about empty aid trucks from Egypt entering Gaza, is a video from 2021 during the 11-day war. It’s important to remain factual, despite that the aid right now is almost nothing anyways.

There's a possibility the trucks at the border are empty or nowhere near capacity, Egyptian grifters have done this before, it's likely they've doing it again

Regardless Death to Sisi's regime

Reposting a @[email protected] bit to remind us to stay positive, collected, and hopeful during this critical moment

A world away, further than any place you'll ever go, a young boy sits outside a crumbling, concrete apartment block. Sea spray and smoke swirl through the air together, salty and acrid, coating the world in a shade grayer than usual. He sits and stares up at the sky, at the planes carrying missiles overhead, and he listens for the sounds of catching powders and marching footsteps. He sits with two million siblings. None of them may make it to tomorrow. The sufficiently old and sufficiently able take to the streets. The shelters and tunnels curling beneath them like veins tremble against the tension.

Have they given up?

No. They haven't. And that means neither can you.

Wealth disparity between white and non-white families in America has accelerated under Biden (from the Federal Reserves):

Figure 2. Wealth Gaps Persisted and Widened Slightly in 2022, Despite Faster Growth in Wealth for Black and Hispanic Families

Figure 9. Especially Non-White Families Said Their Income Is Unusually Low

Now don’t get me wrong Trump wasn’t any better (it was actually worse for everyone), but Biden’s austerity has really intensified the socio-economic disparity between white and non-white people in the country - as white families saw economic gains post-Covid, black and Hispanic families are actually bearing the brunt of the austerity measures (especially in the form of interest rate hikes), and when the recession finally hits, they’ll also be the first ones that are hit the hardest.

(archived) really interesting article about how the much-vaunted lightning-fast invasion of Iraq was nowhere near as impressive as portrayed by American propaganda. How do these paper tigers keep getting in my imperialist militaries?

The US invasion of Iraq, begun almost exactly twenty years ago, on March 20th, 2003, is often sold to us as a gloriously flawless campaign, where heroic US forces valiantly marched forward, vanquishing hordes of elite Iraqi Fedayeen numbering in the hundreds of thousands. ... But there remains one important facet to the image that has continued to endure the test of time, despite the general acknowledgment these days that the war was an egregious mistake. And this facet is the actual view, the historiography of the war itself from a militaristic, rather than political or social, perspective. Despite acknowledging the war as a mistake, most people still vacuously adhere to the vision of the war as some resounding, exemplar achievement of military science par excellence.

The most obvious thousand-ton elephant in the room must first be swiftly gotten out of the way: There was no actual ‘war’. ... What was once oft-discussed in those days, but is now conveniently buried in the memory-holes of American alt-history is the fact that almost every Iraqi general was paid off by the CIA and various US intelligence services to lay down their arms, along with the men under their command, and surrender. ... Even the US Army Supreme Commander for the war effort, General Tommy Franks attested to the fact:

General Tommy Franks, the US army commander for the war, said these Iraqi officers had acknowledged their loyalties were no longer with the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, but with their American paymasters. As a result, many officers chose not to defend their positions as American and British forces pushed north from Kuwait.

Like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, the MI6/CIA teams even carried cold hard gold bullion in briefcases to effect the bribes ... And a Salon article from late March 2003, on the eve of the war also lifted the lid on the secret, massive CIA effort to completely denude the Iraqi army of any resistance whatsoever. They go on to explain how, as bombs were already devastating Baghdad in the ‘shock and awe’ portion of the conflict prior to the full-on ground invasion, the Iraqi Defense Ministry headquarters was left standing. The reason was self-evident: the CIA had already established quite a rapport with the Iraqi military leadership, and was busy successfully bribing them to lay down their arms.

As the American columns continued to leisurely drive down the highways toward Baghdad, they faced the occasional light small-arms resistance. However, even with such paltry opposition, they were experiencing massive problems. They go on to outline how the Marines continued driving into Iraqi territory for two weeks (with little to no resistance, mind you) in their AAV’s (Assault Amphibious Vehicle), which began to break down en masse ... So they lost a whopping, unheard of 1/3 of their vehicles in the first week or two of the road march just from systemic break downs?

Western wunderwaffe strikes again, expect this time it isn't even some kind of fancy ultra-amazing tank, it's literally troop transports breaking down from the arduous task of... transporting troops, on a fucking highway, not even trudging through mud or anything

At 15:27 of the NBC Nightline special, they even groan about how badly the supply situation deteriorated, the commander explaining how ‘nervous’ he got when they had to ration down to two meals a day for four days straight. ... Here again, at 57:11 of the NBC doc, they describe completely running out of supplies during a sandstorm, where US troops were rationed down to 1 MRE per day, and almost no water. ... In fact, this was a well known occurrence for US forces even back to the 1991 Gulf War conflict. ... They go on to mention the systemic normality of this problem, highlighting how US ground forces virtually ran out of fuel on only day 3 of the 1991 hostilities.

YOU RAN OUT OF FUEL ON DAY 3

Something that Western military "analysts" never bring up when heaping praise on their wunderwaffe and shitting on Soviet/Russian stuff is the logistical footprint - it doesn't matter how amazing your tanks are if they just run out of fuel a few days into the goddamn offensive. I've wondered previously if Western countries' obsession with lightning-fast wars is because deep down they understand they simply have no capability for sustained warfare...

At 44:37 of the NBC documentary, they report an incident where a US serviceman ‘traitor’ threw a grenade into a command tent, killing and seriously wounding ~15 American officers. And this was in the famously elite 101st Airborne division. ... a US Marine Corps Major being run over by a bulldozer, and an elite 101st Airborne command tent being blown away by grenades thrown by a disgruntled US soldier shows what, exactly—exemplary martial spirit? The famed American Esprit de Corps?

lol. lmao. get fragged assholes

At one point, the correspondents describe one of the most eventful parts of their war march toward Baghdad being an incident in Al Kifl—about at the haflway mark—where they came under fire of ‘four mortars’. And scary 105mm mortars at that. Yes, you’ve read that right, a grand total of four mortars and a light drizzle of sniper fire led to an entire US Army unit relocation under major alarm.

When they finally did enter Baghdad, they admit that the only minor skirmishes that flared up were against ‘small teams’ of lightly armed men in civilian clothing; i.e. typical insurgent, light guerilla squads—and not even well armed, trained, or numerous ones at that. Notice how you’ve never seen any footage of real ‘battles’ as we know them from the Iraq invasion, despite the fact that it was billed as the first truly ‘televised war’, and had hundreds of embedded journalists with cameras literally riding along with the US force convoys? ... And notice how, despite several of the so-called key ‘battles’ revolving around capturing critical bridges in approaches to Baghdad, not once did the Iraqi ‘forces’ even attempt to blow up a bridge to hamper the US advance ... There are myriad other ways the US experienced shortages and problems during the invasion. Here, Harper’s DC editor Andrew Cockburn explains how “families of US soldiers in Iraq had to go into debt to buy them adequate armor, nightvision goggles, and other critical gear” because their command was unable to supply them.

The actual enemy combatant losses during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion and capture of Baghdad, which were officially “observed and recorded” as per wiki, were 4,895–6,370. ... And it should be mentioned that, while the US and coalition suffered a ‘celebrated’ total of ~5,000 KIA in the entire Iraq war (including insurgency period), the actual total Allied Force losses (which includes the Iraqi militia that did the heavy lifting) is listed on wiki as: Total dead: 25,071 - Total wounded: 117,961. This is compared to the estimated total dead enemy combatants of: 34,144–71,544. Viewed from that perspective, especially if we assume for argument’s sake the lower end of that range, the war wasn’t as ‘lopsided’ of a victory as it seems—25k Allied vs. 34k enemy dead. After all, it also falls upon the merit of US military skill and prowess if their own militia which they used as cannon-fodder was killed under their watch, does it not? When the US forces work in tandem with them, operating from their ‘rear’ with the overwatch of various systems (artillery, airpower, etc.), it reflects on the US’s military capabilities, if they can’t keep the total forces under their purview from suffering nearly as many casualties as the completely outmatched (no airpower, no artillery, no heavy weapons) enemy. Not to mention, as others have pointed out, these figures don’t count the likely thousands of secret US contractors/mercenaries (Blackwater/Xe, etc.) killed ‘off the books’. ... The fact of the matter is, had US faced even an Iraqi Army (much less a far superior Ukrainian one) that had the same conditions imposed on Russian forces (not taking bribes, for one, and being armed, supplied, aided by a coalition of other major countries), and had the initial invasion therefore stretched out over a longer period, you would have seen those same pratfalls and foibles already outlined above, but at an exponentially greater scale.

Awoo's comment with the Palestine protest in Roblox has fucked me up. Obviously I support support for Palestine, but... This is one of those moments in 2023 that has me completely checked out of reality. Imagine trying to explain this to Marx. His brain would explode: "So the American revolution you wrote about in which everyone in the North called themselves 'essentially a socialist' actually resulted in the largest capitalist state in the history of the world lead by an demented octogenarian and it created vassal states everywhere across the globe including the middle east and the one there is committing genocide against a muslim country with many semitic people but supporting them in the real world is considered antisemitic so we have to hold protests in the virtual computer world of a children's video game. Oh and the revolution never came to Germany or Britain first like you thought, but to backwater Russia, who built the largest socialist project ever and a global superpower spanning a quarter of the landmass of planet Earth only for it to collapse because of Baltic nationalism and the socdem dreams of a reactionary called Gorbachev who opportunistically infiltrated the party and quite literally hit the 'collapse' button once elected to the top post. Those countries are essentially backwaters again now, and there's no real hope of ever having a revolution again because capitalism is global and armed with nuclear bombs."

Well. I sure hope Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, et al. weren't bluffing.

Joy Behar: Rashida Tlaib ‘lies like Trump’ on Israel, Hamas conflict

Sorry in advance on the psychic damage. Doubling down on the same day the failing NY Times basically comes out and says the Israeli/US govt story doesn't hold up (that's as close as they will ever get to saying it wasn't a Hamas rocket, no matter the evidence).

All you need to know about Behar is in one sentence on her wikipedia page: "Behar resides in The Hamptons. She also owns a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She is a Democrat." She is also an old as shit reactionary white American who has no knowledge of anything but lots and lots and lots of opinions.

New banger by Slammer in BlueSSkkky

No alt this time

Another banger by Slammer on BlueSSkkky

Israel apparently intend to try to stop Musk from providing Starlink to aid agencies in Gaza.

Wishing idf lots of friendly fire and general unhappiness

It's so cool how the zionist government of israel is just this rabid dog that murders everything and the USA is it's demonic handler.

bro WHAT

After seven hours of debate, EU leaders agree to weakly worded joint statement

It took them around seven hours of what we understand was quite a heated debate on the exact wording of this communique that they have just released and agreed on.

The debate was basically on the humanitarian “pauses” – just one word – but it made a big difference for some countries, especially Germany, who is very much unconditionally supporting Israel.

They said that if it’s a humanitarian pause, it sounds too much like a ceasefire, and they really didn’t want to call for a ceasefire. They say that hampers Israel’s right to defend itself.

So there was this compromise at the end. The wording is very weak. I think a lot of people would agree on that. And it’s all about getting humanitarian assistance in, but we don’t know when or how.

Nazi country

Large scale nationalization is happening all across Russia. Saw this on telegram and decided to look them up:

The court returned the Dalnegorsk GOK to the state, September 27, 2023

Dalnegorsky GOK is the only producer of boric acid in Russia. According to the authorities, the enterprise is one of the leading industrial enterprises in Primorye. In the first half of the year, more than 480,000 tons of ore were mined here, which is 36% more than in the same period in 2022.

The Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit against the Fininvest company to declare the results of the privatization on August 2 illegal. On August 8, at the request of the prosecutor's office, 100% of the shares in the authorized capital of Dalnegorsky GOK LLC were seized as part of interim measures.

The main stake in Perm-based Metafrax Chemicals will be transferred to Russia, September 8, 2023

The Arbitration Court of the Perm Territory satisfied the demands of the Prosecutor General's Office to seize in favor of the state the main stake in the Perm enterprise Metafrax Chemicals, which was privatized in the 90s, producing methanol, said regional arbitration judge Tatyana Morozova.

The defendant pointed out the incomparability of the Soviet plant, the cost of which was estimated at 370 million rubles before the denomination, with the modern complex in Gubakha, its price is 116 billion rubles: “the objects are incommensurable in quality and cost terms.” The defendant drew attention to the statute of limitations: the prosecutor’s office had the opportunity to declare the illegality of “privatization” from 1994 to the 2000s. “The state has been saying for 30 years that everything is fine. Well, you can’t say after 30 years that the cow has fed up the bull,” the defender of the Metaholding company concluded his speech.

NOOO YOU CAN’T JUST SEIZE THE PLANT THAT I BOUGHT OFF CHEAP WHEN THE USSR FELL, YOU NEVER SAID IT WAS ILLEGAL BEFORE AND NOW THAT IT’S VALUED AT HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF RUBLES, YOU JUST CAME IN AND TOOK IT AWAY!!!

The Federal Property Management Agency became the owner of 100% of Volzhsky Orgsintez, September 21, 2023 (Volzhsky Orgsintez is one of the largest chemical factories in Europe)

Information about the new owner was entered on September 20. Previously, 100% of the shares of Volzhsky Orgsintez belonged to Alexander Sobolevsky.

In August, the Arbitration Court of the Volgograd Region satisfied the claim of the Prosecutor General's Office against Sobolevsky to claim 100% of the company's shares in favor of the state. In favor of the state, ordinary shares of the joint-stock company with a par value of 0.2 rubles each in the amount of 2,344,925 were to be credited.

The contract for the sale of the bankrupt Perm defense plant was terminated, August 22, 2023

The agreement was concluded on May 22, 2023, the transaction amount was 725 million rubles. The new owner of the defense enterprise announced plans to modernize the plant's production . The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation challenged the results of the auction by filing a corresponding application with the court as part of the bankruptcy case. The courts of first and appellate instances rejected the claims. As a result, the contract between the defense plant and the Moscow company was terminated pre-trial.

Concern "Pokrovsky" confiscated for corruption proceeds of its beneficiary, October 25, 2023

At the suit of Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Igor Tkachev, the property of Andrei Korovayko, Arkady Chebanov, as well as related structures of the Pokrovsky concern, one of the large agro-industrial holdings in Russia, was confiscated. In total, 94 enterprises with a total value of 100 billion rubles were donated to the state. The case concerns shares and shares of JSC Concern Pokrovsky, agricultural firms Rus, Dolzhanskaya, Urozhaynaya, Rassvet, Mostovskaya, Rodina, the Kanevskoy meat and poultry plant, and the Pavlovsky meat processing plant. and "Tikhoretsky", Kanevsky, Timashevsky and Kurganinsky sugar factories, Albashsky, Stepnyansky and Staroshcherbinovsky elevators, as well as numerous trading and service companies.

——

At first I thought this smells like election season, but the weird part is that none of these moves were advertised loudly. Dozens of news like these are silently happening in the background.

Russia is such a weird country. It’s almost as if two separate factions are running the country.

You have on the one side the willingness to nationalize industries under state control, and on the other side you have the libs preparing for privatization of state assets to patch up the budget deficit.

You have a government that is willing to spend a huge amount of money to keep the economy going, and on the other side you have the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank that doing everything they can to reverse all these efforts by raising interest rates at the snap of a finger.

It’s such a weird country I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.

the latest mass shooter in is a troop, i am shocked

⚡️BREAKING: #Israeli army spokesman told ABC News: The expanded operations underway in #Gaza now are not the official ground invasion

I call bullshit. They could say this every single night while continually making it bigger and bigger until they're effectively in an operation that's normalised without ever saying it. Salami slice escalation.

Other actors need to act, and act now.

One thing that's quite interesting is the willingness of those on the right to signal boost leftist activism, even far leftist, when it suits them. If a significant enough split in the right occurred on a domestic issue it would open the door to the vanguard theory even with a weak left as a result of all activists with any ability to quickly mobilise people being on the left.

Deadliest period for Palestinians in the West Bank in 15 years

Israeli forces and settlers have killed 95 Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, Palestinian health officials said, a surge in what was already a deadly year there. An Israeli soldier was also killed in clashes.

archive.today • Maps: Where the Attacks Are Happening in Israel and Gaza - The New York Times

President Biden said he had “no confidence” in the claims by Palestinians about the number of civilians who have been killed in Gaza during the last two weeks. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza said more than 6,500 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since Oct. 7, a number which could not be independently verified.

“I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said. “I’m sure innocents have been killed. And that’s the price of waging a war.” He added, “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/25/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news/4cbfd597-2e43-5a81-b7da-496479c309aa?smid=url-share

Germany: Wagenknecht & company officially announced they're going to split from Die Linke and do their own party. The party is going to be Keynesian, pro-welfare, nationalist, anti-immigration, soft EU-critical, non-interventionist and "anti-woke". This will hurt Die Linke, but they seem more-or-less done regardless, plus much of the leadership would like to go full imperialist lib in order to be allowed to govern.

The new party has good potential according to the polls, filling a niche not covered by the other parties. Some say that niche is some sort of fascism, but if you apply that standard (and you probably should), something like 98% of Germans are fascists, most of them worse than this new party. My disgust at this new "social-conservative" (O-Ton Wagenknecht) party is somewhat dulled by the fact that a bunch people I know that are very angry at this are somehow far less outraged at the Greens or SPD, who are currently materially supporting multiple genocides and are literally handing weapons to Nazis.

With it seeming like the Ukrainian counteroffensive is basically over now, this is my final bingo grid. No lines unfortunately; Russia did much better than I expected.

It's time to move on to the next offensive, and this is my bingo grid for Israel:

In a talk with Seymour Hersh, an Israeli official said that Israel is considering what he described as the "Leningrad" approach, referring to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in WWII

Which, for the record, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians but still failed.

An image of Hamas fighters geared up like IOF.

Love to go on and see people argue that "In an ideal world Hamas and Israel would be equally opposed because they are both moral black holes."

Not that in an ideal world, Hamas would not exist because Israel would not be ethnically cleansing a population they put in a giant concentration camp, just that centrism would rule supreme in an ideal world.

And besides, who fucking chooses their degree of opposition based on "morality"? You wouldnt equally oppose the KKK and idk, the Manson family, because both want race wars, you oppose the KKK more because they have superior means and organization to perform actions in the service of that goal. Opposing the morality of a group is a thought exercise.

No offense to any Baltics posters here, but liberals from those countries are the dumbest motherfuckers I've seen in a while. Finland really is convinced that China and Russia are working together to keep the Baltics down with the pipeline accident, claiming that accidents like that just don't happen on such a common route.

Then again, America worshippers don't have the best critical thinking skills. An unfortunate side effect of consuming Marvel content exclusively.

Israel's own defense ministry: current population (adjusted) of Gaza would need 1150 truck loads of food alone coming in per week to supply the minimum number of calories required.

After 16 days of blockade and siege, they have allowed 34 trucks of any aid into Gaza total.

Nitter

Does coining “Genocide Joe” earn Hexbear a paragraph in the history books (if they exist)?

Telecommunications gradually returning in Gaza: Reports

We’re getting reports that telecommunications are gradually being restored in the Gaza Strip.

Several Palestinian media outlets are reporting the resumption of telephone and internet services.

Phone networks and the internet were largely cut off on Friday as Israel announced an expansion of its military offensive on Gaza.

thank you elon musk

"Make no mistake: what is, has or will unfold in Gaza is purely an Israeli decision." - USMC commandant Gen. Eric Smith told reporters.

Nitter

I hadn't heard anybody in the MIC express it so directly.

tie me to a missile and fire it at Washington DC, I am ready