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 depicts a destroyed Saudi pipeline pumping station.


My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

If last week has had a geopolitical main character, it was Ansarallah in Yemen. In under 24 hours, they managed to seize a very large amount of territory to their west from Saudi-backed mercenary groups. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers fled, thousands more were captured, and hundreds of combat vehicles and all sorts of military equipment and ammunition are now in Ansarallah’s hands. The entire Red Sea coast of Yemen is now under their control, as well as some of the islands in and around the Bab el-Mandab, which is the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which then goes on to connect to the Arabian Sea.

While Ansarallah had a pretty good grip on the Red Sea beforehand and could blockade it to the extent that traffic through the Red Sea plummeted in 2024 and 2025 and remain subdued to this day, it is now capable of much more direct control. And the strait is considerably narrower than Hormuz, meaning there is little hope for any covert operations like those of which the US regularly tries and fails to do over there. The only alternatives for the enemies of Ansarallah both now and in the future are the route all the way around Africa, which becomes even less attractive than usual as fuel prices rise into daily record highs, or the newly inaugurated Northern Sea Route under the firm control of Russia.

While Ansarallah is likely to continue their territorial acquisitions to an extent - with Marib looking like an obvious target - how things will continue from this point seems likely to be increasingly diplomatic. Yemen was once divided between North Yemen (which is, really, western Yemen) and South Yemen (which is, really, eastern Yemen), and this division reflects several genuine historical differences between the populations. Ansarallah has repeatedly stated that they have no intention to militarily occupy the south, and indeed, they ended this most recent offensive at approximately the historical border. Nonetheless, the government in once-South Yemen’s capital of Aden is considered the sole internationally recognized government of Yemen, which doesn’t sound sustainable for the future, so we’ll just have to see how the situation develops geopolitically from here, even if it’s unlikely to be militarily in the case of the southern and eastern territories.

While all this has been going on, Ansarallah was additionally applying major pressure on Saudi Arabia itself, by bombing their military airfields and, even more critically, their oil transportation and production facilities. These strikes were mostly limited to the port facilities in e.g. Yanbu and Jazan, and the Western air interceptor famine has meant that these strikes were mostly unopposed and caused substantial losses. However, Ansarallah has now destroyed some pumping stations for the East-West pipeline that spans Saudi Arabia, bypassing Hormuz for some (but not all) of Saudi Arabia’s oil production to the tune of around 4 million barrels per day, which is, in a happy numerical coincidence, about 4% of pre-2026 oil production. I’ve seen several wildly varying estimates for how long it might take to repair the stations, with some saying a few days and others stating at least a month; the damage does look pretty gnarly on the images. Of course, it might not really matter, because Ansarallah can easily just fire another missile at a station once it’s repaired, unless and until the Saudis give in to Ansarallah’s demands and end the war.


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:

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.


    • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      15 days ago

      first would be ai companies defaulting on construction (e.g. slowdown), then some local bank going bye-bye on loans, then that would start shaking confidence of investors, so stock market will tank a little bit, then something big would default on debt. (or usa will just inject money and nothing will happen)

      alternatively, whole ass countries not resisting pressure of carry trade and imploding on debt/fuel prices.

      • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        15 days ago

        AI companies probably still have lots of cash on hand (relatively speaking) and they love to not tell the truth, so they can probably get by for months or even years by quietly slowing down datacenter construction and wait & hope for a government bailout. But it would be kind of funny if one of them decided to tell the truth and it wrecked all the others as well. Some of them also protected themselves by offloading their shitty loans on pensions funds & private debt & life insurance companies (at least capitalism can still innovate!). IIRC Trump just illegally took $200bn earmarked for research and a bunch of other stuff and said that it will be used for an “AI innovation fund”, that should keep them running for a while.

        More likely that the Yen carry trade blows up and/or rising bond yields explode a couple of big banks, Silicon Valley Bank style. Saudis might also start running out of cash real quick, their best source of cash is selling their investments in the US.

        • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          15 days ago

          depends though, total blackbox of venture funds is around 500-700 billions i believe? nvidia gets 500 billions a year already, so it’s a question if the mou they signed to buy millions of blackwells are real and enforceable or not (well, and if general ai malaise reaches other profitable sectors of the economy, they do 4 trillions per year, then money is nearly infinite)

          • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            15 days ago

            There is so much shady stuff and a huge combination of enforceable and non-enforceable circular financing going on everywhere that it is almost impossible to tell. IIRC Nvidia still has warehouses full of GPUs even tho they are supposedly sold out for years ahead of time. I think we will all be amazed when we find out what deals were made and what assumptions the people in charge were making. The Big Short will looks so innocent and straightforward in comparison.

            But I do think they still have a lot of tools to fake it for a while. I think that the AI industry will try everything possible to make sure they are not the first to go, they want to fake complain about how others caused the crash that also took down their innocent beautiful ‘world-changing-general-artificial-intelligence-was-so-close’ companies.

            • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              15 days ago

              i do believe they are selling them tbh (and microsoft is the one sitting on piles of gpus no?), cause local ai bros now paying 5k for 5090, so obviously they see value in them.

              well, if the deals are too complex, it’s better to abstract away that there is a blackbox (ai industry) that eats money (venture funds, private equity, microsoft and google profits, almost exclusively) and produces data centers (the final number of them isn’t important), multiplied by two for permits/construction/power*. the closest proxy for how much money it eats are nvidia sales. by lots of accounts total ai revenue is around 30 billion, so that part isn’t important (they did get spacex ipo injection though soviet-hmm )

              *internal machinations of blackbox - circular deals, buyouts, press releases, new announcements are not important in that way.

              **but the orb pondering is whatever, if usa stealth creates demand for 100 billion of revenue (say by department of warcrimes), they can continue spinning plates for another 2 years and even appear profitable for ipo, the implosion, if it happens will be somewhere in the debt part.

        • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          14 days ago

          nah, i think it might be if the downstream effect happen, but them heming around slowdown could be anything, from machine talks to me to china bad to whatever else