Image is sourced from this article depicting the 28th ASEAN Plus Three Summit, which took place at the same time as the 47th ASEAN Summit.
Last week concluded the 47th summit of ASEAN in Malaysia as well as a swathe of concurrent summits surrounding ASEAN. For those unfamiliar, formally, China is not a member of ASEAN, but is part of the ASEAN Plus Three (as part of the “Three”, alongside Japan and Occupied Southern Korea). And while not really ASEAN, there is also a yet wider organization, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which tacks on Australia and New Zealand to the group of countries that are currently in ASEAN (which is the single largest trade bloc on the planet). At the summit, Timor-Leste was officially introduced into ASEAN, making it the 11th country to do and the first since Cambodia in 1999.
Many important figures throughout Asia, as well as Trump, Ramaphosa, and Lula, attended the event. As you can imagine, Trump’s appearance was not exactly positive - signing four rather coerced bilateral deals there, including with Malaysia, which forced those countries to buy American goods in exchange for certain exemptions from Trump’s high tariff regime. The US is currently in a bit of a panic due to China restricting access to rare earths, a critical component of many weapons technologies (and electronics in general) and is looking around for countries to help supply them. After the summit, the US and China signed a deal related to tariffs and rare earths, but it seems very unlikely that this is the end of the saga; the US politically, economically, and militarily cannot tolerate China’s existence as a sovereign actor and will try to overcome them until the American Empire topples.
Meanwhile, China did as they ordinarily do, and urged higher regional integration and trade without high tariffs, as well as adherence to the Global Governance Initiative (which, as we here never tire of noting, is an interesting thing to try and encourage while the US only more feverishly violates the sovereignty of nations everywhere). One hopes they’re supplying a bit more than just speeches to Venezuela, Cuba, and beyond, as the US prepares to start bombing.
Last week’s thread is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
Update on developments in Venezuela:
The US Air Force and Marines posted a bunch of new photos of F-35 operations, mid air refueling, and pictures of the B-52 operations. F-35 pictures show nothing new, same armaments as before: GBU-54 500lb laser guided JDAMs to hit mobile surface targets, AIM-120D AMRAAM for long range air to air, and AIM-9X on stealthy external pylons for short range air to air.
The B-52H pictures do show something new though: unlike last time where the bombers flew in a “clean configuration” with no external pylons or targeting pods; this time they flew with the external hardpoints and pylons on both wings (but no weapons/unarmed), and with a Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod FLIR/IRST. This is notable because the external pylons increase the amount of stations for cruise missiles or 1000/2000lb class bombs on the B-52 from 8, to 20. The Sniper ATP also provides reconnaissance capability, notable because of how close the B-52s flew to Venezuela, with the coastline of the Paraguaná Peninsula visible in photos. Videos from 14 years ago show tracking of individual vehicles/cars and individual hotel windows at ranges in excess of 40nmi/75km using the Sniper ATP. So with how close the B-52s flew, they could map out extensive parts of Venezuela’s coastline. This has likely been happening already though, with F-35 and P-8A flights, and other reconnaissance aircraft/unmanned aircraft.
Venezuela have also increased the amount of flyable F-16 fighter aircraft in their possession from 2, to 4 now. A new video of 4 Venezuelan F-16s flying appeared on social media. Doubling the amount of flyable airframes with no access to spare parts or official maintenance from the manufacturer is an impressive feat.
Perhaps a silly question, but were the F-35s mounted with lumberg lenses, and did any of the aircraft have their transponders on?
No Luneburg lenses or transponders for the F-35s, they were stealthy. The B-52s were tracked and visible on flightradar24. You could even see the contrails on live webcams from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao.
Lied der Hakenkreuzler by Ernst Busch
Sorry for the naive question. But doesn’t google earth and the various subsidiary/related technologies already provide things like maps of coastlines? Surely there is no place that has been continuously covered by clouds for the last 20 years…?
They don’t necessarily want to map the coastlines geography itself, but what’s on it. What military equipment has Venezuela deployed? Where are their air defence systems located? Where are the radars? What military movements are taking place? What units being deployed where for say costal defence. Thus the US wants to build a map in that sense. Outside of optical sensors, there’s also radar. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery which can be done by aircraft like the F-35, B-52, P-8A, RQ-4, etc. Basically a 2D or 3D image/terrain mapping. Think of it like a CAT scan, but of the terrain and anything emplaced there. The advantage of radar is it works regardless of weather or time of day, you can see through the clouds. With optical sensors, at night only infrared works and clouds and weather can obstruct even infrared to a degree. Disadvantage of radar is that it’s not passive like optics, radars put out a lot of noise in the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s also why Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA), also called low probability of intercept radars sometimes because of the techniques they employ, are becoming more important. The B-52s old mechanically scanned array radar is being replaced by an AESA radar in the future, for example.
Can satellites do this too? Yes, but you’re not always going to have a satellite over the area, and the fidelity you can get with sensors that are much closer will be higher and you can monitor in real time. Again, just with the optical sensors like the Sniper ATP on fighters and bombers, and EOTS on the F-35, the US military can track moving vehicles and make out individual windows of a skyscraper from 40+ nautical miles away, and that was 15 years ago. If you search up F-35 EOTS test footage or Sniper ATP test footage on YouTube you’ll see that. So they can see further into Venezuela, not just on the coast. Line of sight is an obstacle though, you can’t see through mountains or anything like that, it’s not X ray vision from the movies.
Most anti-air is not stationary, you fire your payload and you move. Satellite reconnaissance is not useful against anything mobile that is frequently moved. This kind of recon can fly hundreds of miles away, outside the range of the AA, while monitoring for infrared, upon detecting it the information will be passed to assets that have the mission of destroying AA who will then immediately carry out the action. Then what will follow is whatever mission was planned using a safe corridor created by the destruction of AA.
I would imagine the kind of accuracy one can get in person close up with military hardware is far better, and that kind of stuff matters for bomb guidance and targetting.
Why do they want to bomb the beach?
Joke answer: revenge against the Fisherman Brigades for repeatedly owning the CIA.
Actual speculation: probably high-resolution images of a certain depth of the coast. It must be covering more than just the beaches, otherwise it seems kind of pointless.