A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of a Khorramshahr-4 medium range ballistic missile, which has a range of about 2000km.

As I said in the last megathread, trying to figure out what exactly is happening is becoming ever more difficult. The gist of things is that Iran has, very justifiably, refused to negotiate (assassinating their leader and striking their country with hundreds of missiles in the middle of negotiations causes some reluctance to return to the table, I suppose). Censorship across the Middle East has further ramped up, with reportedly extreme punishments for posting footage of Iranian strikes online. From what I can gather, Iran’s number of strikes have stabilized at a comfortable daily rate, with strikes into both the Gulf monarchies and Occupied Palestine continuing apace. Official charts of these strikes over time seem very disconnected from reality on the ground, but again, it’s hard to really get at the specifics.

The messaging on how long the war is expected to last is rather muddled on both sides. The Trump administration fluctuates more than daily - and even sometimes in the same speech - on whether the war is already won or whether it’s going to last months longer. The US seems to be coming up a new possible scheme every few hours: a ground invasion with the Kurds? A ground invasion without the Kurds? An amphibious assault? A series of commando operations to steal Iranian uranium? A massive parachuting operation into Tehran? Fuck it, let’s just send the Navy into the Strait of Hormuz? There doesn’t seem to be a coherent plan for continuing hostilities beyond firing more and more of a limited stockpile of cruise missiles into mostly non-military targets, hitting easily replaceable drone and missile launchers with a limited stockpile of drones, and burning a limited stockpile of interceptors at an astounding rate (and, in the process, disarming every other Western-aligned country of their interceptors).

Meanwhile, from Iran, I’ve seen rumors and reports from classic anonymous “senior IRGC officials” (no doubt some invented by Zionists to sow confusion), that I don’t know how to substantiate, ranging anywhere from “If the US pulls back their forces now, we will restart negotiations,” to “It doesn’t matter what the US or the Zionists do or say, we aren’t stopping until every last trace of Zionism in the Middle East has been extinguished,” to a few positions in between those poles. Despite the damage to infrastructure in Iran, it doesn’t seem like there has been any political or social fracturing. Not to speak too soon - perhaps the West will start earnestly trying to overfly Iranian territory to drop their very plentiful bombs soon - but every indication is that there will be no regime change nor societal collapse in Iran in the short and medium term.

The US is desperately trying - and mostly failing - to keep a lid on the economic firestorm they have ignited. There has been much ado about oil prices and oil futures and indexes and what all the myriad Lines going up and down signify and things like that, which is befitting such a financialized empire which is so disconnected from the actual physical flows of materials and much more attuned to vibes and speeches. The only thing I’m personally paying much attention to on the economic front is the drones and missiles slamming into fossil fuel infrastructure, the Hormuz blockade, and the resulting global shockwave of shortages, stoppages, closures, bankruptcies, and force majeures spreading out from the epicenter that is Iran.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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 the Zionists’ 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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

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.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    13 hours ago

    Urea: The Overlooked Catastrophe

    Of the three commodity shocks, the disruption of urea exports from the Persian Gulf may be the least immediately visible — but could prove the most enduring in its consequences. Urea is the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertiliser. It is synthesised from natural gas via the Haber-Bosch process, and the Gulf states — particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman — are among the world’s largest producers and exporters, collectively accounting for a significant share of global urea trade.

    The dependency of modern agriculture on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser is difficult to overstate. It is estimated that roughly half of the nitrogen in the human body today passed through the Haber-Bosch process at some point — meaning that artificial fertiliser now sustains approximately half of the world’s population. A collapse in urea supply would threaten crop yields on a global scale.

    Crop yield decline. Without adequate nitrogen fertiliser, yields of staple crops — wheat, rice, maize, soy — would fall dramatically within one to two growing seasons. The effect would not be uniform: wealthy agricultural nations with domestic fertiliser capacity or large stockpiles (the United States, Canada, parts of Europe) would be more insulated. The developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, would face acute shortages.

    This seems to be the most interesting section. What is the crop yield difference of a field using urea vs not? What alternatives to urea exist? I know literally nothing about this.

    EDIT: A quick AI ask says anywhere from 50% to 120%, depending on crop. So we’re looking at some producers potentially halving their output.

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      9 hours ago

      What alternatives to urea exist? I know literally nothing about this.

      The thing to understand is the nitrogen cycle.

      Nitrogen usually makes 3 bonds, and can triple-bond with itself (and also with carbon). Triple bonds are even stronger than double bonds, which is why nitrogen gas (N2) is so inert. >70% of the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of N2. It doesn’t turn into other things unless you have a high energy input, or a catalyst, or both.

      As living things process nitrogen compounds, they generate ammonia (NH3), which is a toxic gas that must be disposed of. Ammonia has a higher enthalpy state (chemically bonded energy) than nitrogen gas does, and at a certain rate it will react to form the latter. Each “amine group” (NH2 on a branch of a molecule) from a protein or nucleic acid gets broken down into ammonia.
      Very small organisms can just have the ammonia “bubble” straight out of the cell. Most multicellular organisms need to manage it inside their bodies. To keep it from messing with the chemistry of cells, it gets turned into larger compounds and then those are what’s excreted.
      Urea dissolves well in water, and is the main solute in urine. It’s 2 amine groups connected to a C=O center. You can also have uric acid which is a double carbon ring with a bunch of nitrogens taking the place of carbons (DNA is one of the major instances of this), but it’s less water-soluble. Uric acid is often excreted by birds and reptiles.

      For growing things, you need carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, but the next big 3 are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Carbon comes from carbon dioxide in the air and oxygen and hydrogen come from rainfall. So fertilizers are usually N/P/K. Nitrogen is for amino acids and lots of other things, phosphorus is for stuff like ATP which is an elementary container for immediate point-use energy, and potassium is for things like salts/ions that regulate electric charges and electric or tonic (measure of how much stuff is dissolved in the physical medium) stability. P and K are their own cycles with imminent bottlenecks for industrial civilization.

      For the longest time, almost all of the usable nitrogen (amine groups) amongst living things came from nitrogen-fixing bacteria, with a tiny amount coming from lightning strikes and stuff. Those bacteria had found a way to break the N2 bond at a very slow rate, and make ammonia out of it. Some organisms, especially plants in the bean family, create ideal environments for these bacteria, so they can harvest the ammonia for amino acids. Other plants (and animals) then rely on the “nitrogen-fixing plants” as a source of amine groups and other nitrogen biochemistry. This is what yielded all the protein in the biosphere, for hundreds of millions of years. You’d rotate your grains with peas or beans to get the nitrogen back in the soil, because broadfields of grains would deplete all the available nitrogen compounds.

      Industrial urea (NH2-CO-NH2) is made from natural gas (CH4) and nitrogen gas, with a certain metal alloy serving as a catalyst. This was developed in Germany in the 1900s-1910s, and then quickly spread all over the world because while it’s energy intensive, it’s faster and more productive compared to the organic pathway. This allowed farmers to just buy a bag of chemicals to dust over their fields, instead of interspersing different crops or waiting an extra year.

      We could just go back to the organic way of fixing nitrogen, but we’ve been using the quick fix for over a century and all our consumption habits are built around it. We could also put our urine to use, instead of flushing and filtering and sedimenting it as waste.

      • Ildsaye [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        4 hours ago

        I’ve heard an issue with using modern human waste is salt accumulation in the soil. Human diets would either need to reduce salt intake, or the sewage would need to be desalinated without losing the urea.

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          This is analogous to problems with industrial fertilizers. They tend to be super concentrated, requiring dilution, and they still end up as runoff in the waterways that spikes the ecology off balance.

          But yes, pee is salty. Wilderness best practices include not peeing on trees, because when the water evaporates it leaves salt behind, and deer will chew salty bark off a tree.