Image is from this Reuters article.
This week marks the one year anniversary of Honduras ceasing to recognize Taiwan and instead only recognizing China. Over that time period, China and Honduras have gone through several rounds of negotiating a free trade agreement, with trade expanding. Additionally, they have just signed a $275 million cooperation agreement, providing education infrastructure for Honduras.
The other major news piece relevant to Honduras is the battle against Prospera, a US-based crypto libertarian firm that sought to buy a private island in order to create an ancap paradise, in which Bitcoin would be legal tender. In 2022, Honduras killed the island's special status that made the deal possible, and so Prospera is seeking $11 billion in compensation.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Honduras! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
a mere crypto pleb: buying some hexcoin to get 100 %
a cocoa
patrician: buying cocoa beans futures with 6x leverage
tl:dr buy chocolate now lol, jesus christ
how can someone start investing?
Part of me is disgusted by the thought of investing and making returns based on pointless market fluctuations or other people's surplus labor, but I also feel like I have some money that I can afford to invest and that I am missing out on a better quality of life by not investing. The thought of investing and getting a 1.5x, double, or trouble (or even larger) return in a year or two sounds life-changing. I have money in one of those safe "investment" accounts or whatever, but I don't even know if the amount of interest its accruing is even keeping up with inflation
Like, am I shooting myself in the foot by not investing spare money? I feel like my disgust with investing stems from being a filthy commy and not being financially savvy, and when I see stuff like this I wonder if I am "socialism = no iphone"ing myself out of a better financial situation
1,000% No. I’m telling you from someone who used to work in that industry, if you try to play the market you might as well just go to the roulette wheel, you might have better odds and at least that’s fun. I could go into all math and financial theory if you want, but the reality is that most of the people who devote their lives to this stuff aren’t making any more money than they would just putting everything in an index fund.
That said, if you have money set aside and you don’t need it until many years in the future, I mean as long as global capitalism doesn’t collapse there’s a good chance that by investing in broad passive index funds, you’ll do better than having your money in a checking account. But that’s on a long time horizon and it assumes you won’t need this money if you lose your job or something (because the worst investing you can do is to buy in conditions as they are now, the market goes down, you lose your job and need the money so you sell those index funds when they were low after you bought high.
i went to a casino one time when i was 18, immediately lost $20 on slots, and have never set foot in a casino ever again
yeah, i feel like slow and steady is really the best play. obvs stories of cashing out big give me a crumb of dopamine, but i don't have the material or emotional means, nor the market knowledge (if that's a thing) to be gambling my money like that
Investing in stocks, futures, etc without knowing what you're doing is basically gambling. With a commodity like cocoa you probably won't lose everything like a typical stock might (it's easy to buy a single stock at $2/share and see it tank to $0.01) so it's less scary.
Usually people just get an index fund and hope "line goes up" and it usually does because we live in a terrible place.
That is a bubble and you should not invest in cocoa beans ffs
lol, to my credit, one of the three things I know about investing is not to invest after stonk spikes or bubble inflates
I've got like 3 boxes of chocolate bars ready to sell
Oh, i was joking. commodities are unpredictable (somewhat). I've heard speculation that cocoa will explode like half a year ago due to el nino, but at the same time, heard the same about copper due to renewables and it is steady 0 percent change in a year. Or that gold will collapse due to interest rates, but its growing lol. At the same time gambling on futures seems somewhat more honest
you don't take money out of surplus labor (well not directly), you gamble against and with porkies.
As for how to do it, depends what incentives your work has, idk american shit with 401k matching contributions etc, but there are etfs which track commodities prices for plebs. Or you can cocoon in stock market etf
(i think its sus idea at current ai bs at s&p500, but what do i know)
Gambling is highly dependent on your personality as well, if you are gambling person, buy stock market etf and don't look at it. With 90 percent chance you will lose and get health issues due to stress with gambling. As for the no iphoning yourself, you can either see it as pascal's wager on communism (either it happens and your investment not important or it wont) or just buy t-bills like a boomer and be subversive about it by going to cuba when 5 percent interest accumulates
.