Image is of Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom, giving a speech (parodied below) about how - gasp - America sucks. But in a patriotic way.
And you - general megathread poster - yeah - just in case you accidentally wander into the news megathread one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest megathread in the world.
We're seventh in citations, twenty-seventh in accurate predictions, twenty-second in effortposts, forty-ninth in non-mainstream article posting, 178th in guessing when wars will start, third in powerusers, number four in dialectics, and number four in megathread exports. We lead Hexbear in only three categories: pointless infighting, number of adults who believe Putin is based, and copium manufacturing, where we produce more than the next twenty-six lemmy megathreads combined, twenty-five of whom are full of delusional liberals. None of this is the fault of any Hexbear user, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest megathread in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Jokes about whether they got a Zionist's semen in time?!
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. 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.
not seen anybody mention the news of China banning the export of gallium, germanium, and antimony to all but a few trusted known civillian sources that they will be keeping tabs on to stop it flowing to military uses; it's a small market where everybody knows everybody so it's easy to trace back illicit trading of these materials from verified civillian contractors to millitary ones. they have also banned sales to known European traders that resell during times of high demand. these materials are very key for modern military assets and Washington has not found a new source of them. China produces well over half of the worlds germanium and almost alll of the gallium, there are not just alternatives that can fill that demand. lots of big names on the ban list like boeing, lockhead, raytheon, BAE ect
https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/panic-in-global-metals-markets-as?triedRedirect=true substack article I read on it https://www.ft.com/content/85c875f7-f7c7-41d6-b635-fd7a51074a34 FT copium about how they can totally solve this
knowing the luck of the US, they'll stumble upon a massive reserve of the metals somewhere in Idaho or some shit under a farm in 2 weeks
Rare earth metals are not rare, they are present all over and are even often in other mine wastes (such as bauxite red mud, as noted elsewhere in the thread). The bottlenecks aren't availability in the ground, it's 1) extractive metallurgical know how for how to recover and purify these metals into high grade, saleable and usable product and 2) timeline and economic willpower to develop and implement suitable processes at what are often remote mine sites, and 3) integrating all of the above so that everyone knows what actual spec metal refiners need to reach and what spec metal buyers can expect for using in production of other goods.
All of these are significant, but especially 1 imo. The west has lost its knowhow as rare earths generally haven't been produced in the west in reasonable quantities for 30 years - that is a generation or more of technical staff that have aged out, retired, or died. Further, the west doesn't really value material science like China, so there isn't a class of suitable technologists waiting in the wings.
A further issue is that any rare earth mine that does look promising will absolutely not be economically feasible against the mass economy of scale of established Chinese production, so it will require government subsidy or ownership. Neither the mining ecosystem or governments in the west are set up for government ownership of mines. And private capital is not a fan of R&D to solve 1 - it would be hard for them, and in the 10 years it could take to figure out 1, relations with China could thaw and then western rare earth projects would be financially stranded.
The pollution aspects of rare earth production is overblown. It's a high intensity industry that generates waste, but it's not so different from other mining projects. The "Chinese environmental laws are weaker so that's why people do REE processing in China instead of the west" is chauvinistic cope, not based on logic.
The Californian mine whose name escapes me has been dumping toxic waste for ~50 years without much issue
Australia has significant sources of most rare earths and some been putting some dollars towards starting/restarting production with US encouragement and Chinese encouragement, selling to Malaysia and China respectively.
There's some interesting work using hyperaccumulator plants to "mine" tailings sites.
The entire rare earth supply chain is subsidised by other mining infrastructure and government support, and is tiny compared to its criticality - the global market for processed REEs is only ~3 billion
Our Supreme Poster 72T made an effortpost some years back about rare earth minerals. IIRC, there is already a rare earth minerals mine in California that could fulfill America's needs (and then some), but it's not economical to use. The last time America invested heavily there and started producing, China flooded the market and destroyed the investors.
So, America could easily get around this if its government could stop being a neoliberal monster for five seconds. However, that will never happen.
What will happen is that Trump will use this as an excuse to eliminate environment protection and regulatory laws in the US in the name of “competing with China”.
The industrialization is not the priority here, what matters is that capitalists get to maximize their profit by waiving these additional costs imposed upon them.
I’ve got this gut feeling that the Chinese have timed this just before Trump gets back in office because they expect they can negotiate a more reasonable stance while letting him grandstand what a great deal maker he is.
IDK, we are in a new mode of economic nationalism and this is defense related. I could easily see federal money being shelled out for this, even if a lot more than necessary goes into shareholder pockets.
Here is the link if anyone is interested. As always from 72T, it's informative, thorough in so far as its intent and length, and a well written analysis.
Thats true, europe will likely be screwed but there are spots in the americas where the us could throw money into the pit to get them.
iirc theyre not actually rare, theyre actually everywhere in relative abundance, its just that they are conventionally obtained as byproducts of stuff like zinc and aluminum processing which the us is not known for doing as of late
maybe a meteorite of pure germanium will hit dc next week though, one can wish
I live in this shit hole, but I'm willing to take one for the team
Raw material for gallium isn't necessary difficult to source - it's produced from bauxite, which is pretty abundant (PDF). The issue is that the concentration of gallium in ore is very low, recovery is difficult, and the refining process is expensive and hard to make profitable given the important but niche applications. Only China has really invested in the processing capacity recently, which is how they were able to dominate the market.
My initial take with this news was to assume that the US would just end up paying more by importing from a middleman, but if China is serious about tracing sales, it might have to try to find alternative materials instead.
The numbers as they currently stand are definitely a big oof for Uncle Sam.
There is a lot of historic bauxite production in Australia so I suspect those wastes could be tapped for gallium
Someone's going to have to put up the cash to build out the refineries, though.
yes my point is that the table above shows very minimal reserves in countries friendly to the west. that table doesn't represent what gallium is actually floating around in the world, particularly in western/NATO/US aligned countries. australia definitely has a bunch and is friendly to the west, hence interest in recovering these as byproducts from other metal producing activites .
True, and China wouldn't be able to crash any nascent attempts to develop industries in those countries with competing imports unless they want to defeat their own ban, so it may amount to a delay more than a defeat, but I guess we'll see how long it takes to get that infrastructure in place.
China's government has learned from the USSR government's mistakes. The US covertly bought USSR-sourced titanium for the SR-71's construction.
It was posted here when the news first broke but didn't garner a ton of discussion as I recall
Edit: guess it got a lot more comments after I saw it: https://hexbear.net/post/4028138