junebug2

the ukrainians haven’t meaningfully damaged the russian fleet, and their success in attacking naval targets is not because of the end of the age of the big boat (though i do agree with you that the age is over). the article you shared said a third of the naval assets in the black sea were destroyed. i can’t say i know every boat that’s been hit, but at one point the ukrainians “nearly destroyed a submarine” and “blew a massive hole in the hull of a destroyer”. both were fully repaired within two or three months. the ukrainians lie about the damage they have done, and the western press repeats it. but you know this, i just feel the need to correct the time article.

i think that ukrainian success in attacking the russian navy is because of three reasons. (1) the ukrainians are indeed the best or second best drone forces in the world, by natural selection if nothing else. they have material and operators that most navies would struggle to deal with. the other best or second best drone force is russia though, which leads into the second reason. (2) naval assets have not been relevant to the war since the rumors of marine landings in odessa way back in ‘22. as such, the russians are not going to put the best electronic warfare or antiair up to protect five tugboats and the black sea anti-smuggling task force. so the russians have no reason to put up much more than the bare minimum, which connects with the third point. (3) the black sea is an active theatre for nato operations. i don’t mean nato “operations” or special forces or trainers. there are regular flights of american (and lapdog) recon drones and awac planes carefully following international boundaries starting in nato bases in romania and turkey. any and all possible toys that the USA sees as too valuable or too fragile for the stupid ukrainians but still worth using against russia are being sent over and under the black sea. they’d be sailing on top it if they could too, because the US has been begging turkiye to let warships in since ‘22. there’s probably no part of russia that ukraine is getting better information on than crimea and the black sea coast.

all this combines with ukraine’s habit of PR-based warfare, and big ticket naval strikes seem to be easy (and yet further evidence of the inevitability of the brutal putler’s defeat). i’m also not sure that the rise of hypersonic missiles means the end of all naval operations. the PLA navy don’t seem to think so. they’re building up a big green water/ coastal defense fleet. in a somewhat similar vein, iran just launched its first aircraft carrier, a design based on a container ship mostly designed for drone launching. modern day fire ships, drones, and missiles are a factor that all discourage concentration of force, but they don’t discourage having force. if there is ever a modern naval war that somehow doesn't go nuclear, i imagine we will see the naval equivalent of russia and ukraine no longer fielding multiple tanks together because concentrated armor columns are just cruise missile bait.

i think you’re spot on about zelensky and the kursk adventure. i wonder who’s got more of thirst for russian blood/ nuclear war, the banderites screaming in his one ear, or the natoists whispering in the other?

i’m not a morocco expert, but that article reminded me of an article naked capitalism posted earlier this month. phosphate mining is critically important as a material industry for morocco. morocco has been engaged in ongoing warfare with and colonization of the western sahara and the sahrawi since 1975. the current king of morocco is the son of the king that started the invasions of the western sahara. one policy of USamerica during “competition” with china for critical resources is securing friendly governments over resources, like the bolivian coup. while that ultimately did not work in bolivia, the broad policy of authoritarian but compliant governments controlling resources is a US trick as old as time.

phosphate will always be relevant for mining and export for fertilizer. what’s interesting to me as armchair people’s secretary for electrification is how much longer phosphate will be relevant in modern batteries. lithium iron phosphate batteries are advantageous, especially for vehicle and utility applications, because iron and phosphate are cheap/ relatively abundant. lithium is not and never will be. there are a number of promising alternatives, both at an academic research level and in different manufacturers’ test cars. as soon as it is industrially viable to switch to nickel batteries or one of the more esoteric other options, everyone will do so. when that happens, the idea of phosphate as a critical material might no longer hold water. i’m sure morocco will be happy anyways to take land they’ve been after for fifty years, but it seems like if that happens it would sour relations with algeria. i’m sure one of our comrades from algeria could say much more about that.

the oldest possible zoomer was roughly 10 for ‘Hope’ round 1. some people have to touch the stove before they know it’s hot. the optimistic takeaway is that there are a lot more leftist resources compared to 15 years ago for them to turn to when kopmala doesn’t actually make policy based on taco jokes

the utilities are squeezing people while they’re still allowed to. after the camp fire (the one that the power company caused and then killed 90 people a few years back in northern california), the state legislature has passed several laws about power companies and wildfires. one of them mandates that utilities offer a flat rate based on income, with the highest tier being $85 a month for households that make more than $180,000 a year. for pretty much everyone, even people with full solar, this will mean the power bill goes down. the plan is still moving through bureaucracy, and it’s scheduled to start in early 2025 (fingers crossed). so long as our power and gas come from organizations with executive boards and benefits packages, they’re going to rip the copper wire out of the wall until their business model collapses.

there’s a theory out in the world, I think mostly among radlib economists, that the recession of 2008 has never ended, and we are in a decade-plus “long recession”. the core of the argument for this is that the solution for the recession, quantitative easing, was not only a band-aid that can only be used once, but also essentially putting the foundations of the economy on a sand pit that the federal reserve promised to keep filling forever.

quantitative easing is the printing of money to provide constant liquidity. liquidity is important because one consequence/ aspect of USamerican financial imperialism is denominating debts in US dollars. this means that most every country needs constant dollars to even service debt, let alone pay it off. one possible crisis of ‘08 was a massive, international run on the dollar because everyone needed to pay their debts. that’s why a lot of banks were affected by the crisis even if they didn’t actually own mortgage backed securities. this was avoided by printing a lot of money forever. this manifests in 0% interest loans, created from whole cloth by a central bank.

the Japanese central bank followed suit in policy, and the relative difference in value between the yen and the dollar has allowed for the ‘carry trade’. this is buying Japanese bonds at 0% interest, and then buying US Treasury bonds for the profit and the dollars. treasury bonds are separate from the federal reserve, so they aren’t a part of the 0% interest thing. so it’s true that some people, as you said, were scheming with this to make a profit, but many countries and foreign companies used the carry trade to generate dollars. the elimination of the carry trade is of some global significance, because dollars are that much harder to get if a country has a debt crisis. does this mean quantitative easing is over, or even under threat? no. but the system can’t last forever, and in the past the fed has shown that sometimes they make decisions for the stock market instead of long term financial imperialism.

nvidia announced that the next best AI chip was delayed for production snags, which led to some tech companies sliding. the intel stuff is worse than just a bad quarterly. they don’t make any AI chips, because they didn’t get involved in design a decade ago. the fabs they’re building in USamerica are all behind schedule or failing. every 13th and 14th generation CPU has a chance of having a computer ruining defect (i think they melt at certain temperatures/ length of use), and intel has chosen not offer a recall or a solution. arm holdings now makes better laptop and data center chips. they also laid off 15k people last week. the long and short of it is that they spent something like $150 billion on share buybacks in the last 30 years, and a lot less on research and factories. there’s a good chance intel gets splintered up and bought by various competitors or simply catastrophically fails in the next two years.

This is a brief roster of my impressions of the current main groups within the mono-party. It goes without saying that only people above a certain net worth get their opinions heard. The categories do overlap a bit. The red team historically has more bourgeoisie at its back (at least in public), and the blue team historically has the ability to mobilize more “mass” support. I put mass in scare quotes because not only does bourgeois democracy provide false choices to the people, anywhere from half to a third of voting age USamericans don’t vote for president at all. The centrality of abortion in the Harris messaging and the chance for the first woman president will likely give them the grassroots edge, for whatever that matters.

Blue Team

Bidenists: People materially, ideologically, or opportunistically committed to Ukraine or “israel”. This includes a number of defense contractors, investment firms, and intelligence people.

Silicon Valley: The contradiction of tech’s desired reputation (change, progress, etc) with the excess and corruption of the tech boom resolves itself in massive donations to the democratic party, at least from the usual CEO’s (Alphabet, Microsoft, etc).

Deep Party: Obama keeps decently quiet about who he pulls which strings for, but Kamala did not kick out Joe. She’s an unpopular but available figurehead, and I don’t really know enough about who’s behind that beyond vaguely saying something about the Clinton Foundation.

Finance Capital: Biden has led a great intensification of wealth away from poor and middle class minorities and to the financial bourgeois. Many of them are smart enough to see that.

Hollywood: They are louder then they are significant, but they do have some amount of money and some amount of soft power/ voter appeal. As a Californian from the area, I’d say most of them are just excited Biden is gone. Kamala was a bad AG, and most of us hate Sacramento people by default. Kamala could mess this one up in a number of ways.

Red Team

Small Industry Capital: The jetski dealership owners, the ranchers, the farmers, and the small factory owners are still kicking around USamerica, and they control a lot of local jobs and clout. These people have been locked in with Trump since ‘16, because racism, tariffs, and tax cuts are exactly what they all want.

Crypto Valley: Silicon Valley is not cleanly sticking to Kamala; this is especially the case in newer and more speculative industries. AI, crypto, and some venture capitalists want Trump. Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk, and the Bitcoin conference all have shown support for Trump, I believe in hopes that he will deregulate crypto. Kamala is making similar promises though, and these people haven’t wavered in their support for Trump.

Thielites: Thiel represents both the recent trend of the Valley and the MIC working hand in glove and also spending a lot of money on elections. A chunk of Republican bourgeois greatly support both. This is distinct from the Crypto people because Thiel owns the VP and Palantir.

Finance Capital: Trump cut a lot of taxes, and he’s smart/ dumb enough to guarantee rate cuts if he wins. Some bolder/ dumber finance capital people want even more than what Biden is offering.

Resource Extraction Capital: The shale oil boom accelerated massively under Trump. This is especially worth thinking about if geopolitics causes the price of oil to spike. Additionally, Shell and Chevron were set for coal and gas exploitation in Ukraine before the war, so they count as part of the people “left out” of the Ukraine cash cow.

Christian Nuts: These people have so much money it’s unreal. The dog that caught the car with abortion, now it has too much influence and no target. In my opinion, this is the main source of “weird” messaging that dips into white/ Christian nationalist stuff too much. The hogs must be sated.

the recent NATO summit asserted that Ukrainian membership was inevitable. i believe they added the caveat that they would only get in once they were not under threat. while he is a problematic favorite, i think simplicius has rightly articulated that putin wants a brand new/ re-defined security architecture, in europe if not the world, in order to get peace in the Ukraine. the west has lied too many times for anything else. so there can’t be a real peace with the current version of NATO policy.

i think it turns on who is it that you think is speaking there when NATO says ukrainian membership is inevitable. if it’s Joe Biden/ Bidenist Americans, then he’s toast in 6 months, and you can keep up the current level of pressure on the hopes of a better negotiation with a new president (winner doesn’t really matter). if it’s the European Council or NATO/ US military speaking here, then either they or their public facing statements are delusional, and russia has every incentive to maintain the slow and steady screw turning until they realize. never interrupt your enemy while making a mistake and all that.

i agree that your description is the inevitable outcome of the actual war in ukraine, but you and i have known most of that since 2022. i think the slow war/ fast war thing has an impact on how involved NATO is in the conflict, not the actual military result against the UA. if you go too fast, then NATO goes nuclear (bad) or sees it as a lost cause and stops sending free equipment to burn (bad). i’d be happy to be proven wrong by either someone else or reality, but i don’t see any benefit to accelerating the war. more dead russians, minimal change in western posture (they’ve been rattling sabres at defcon 1 for 2.5 years), and possible nuclear conflict in exchange for potentially fewer dead ukrainians is not a good deal, cruel as it might be.

comrade, i want to preface this saying your analysis was thought-provoking, and i enjoyed your perspective. i hope this doesn’t come off as aggressive or attacking you.

trump will not fumble US imperialism so much as point it in a different direction. the difference between trump and biden represents a historic tension within the american bourgeoisie. you rightly point out that the factories of old were removed in the interest of finance capital, and true on-shoring would undo that economic trick. however, there are at least two sorts of bourgeois still around that have contrary interests to that. first, members of the military industrial complex and anyone who seriously wants a USamerican hot war wants/ needs industrial production in order to wage war. this is not going very well, as we can see with efforts to bring chip fabs to USamerica and in failures to scale up 155 mm shell production. the economic incentives for these bougies, as newsheads are well aware, encourage massive boondoggle wunderwaffe in order to shore up profit margins, not actually taking on the dirty work of making weapons.

the second group is the still existing national bourgeois of the US. while they don’t necessarily produce 80% of the world’s steel anymore, they are much more likely to be seen and heard in a community. a five person private equity firm can nominally produce most of the world’s seat belts, but local fields and factories provide jobs that feel more real to the common person, even if they don’t make as much money. additionally, the agriculture and manufacturing interests broadly support trump. to give an example local to me, a comrade of mine has been working software at Haas Automation for a few months now. the management and ownership support trump. they cannot produce machine tools that are price and quality competitive with chinese competitors, because of supply chain inefficiencies in southern california, the rising cost of materials, and radical shifts in the immigration and labor arena that mean they can’t pay assemblers minimum wage anymore. trump is offering to fix that, somehow. we know it won’t work, but the pitch is being made to people who really want to hear it.

if the cost of capital inputs in the US goes up in order to encourage offshoring out of the US and brain drain into the US, there are still bougies with an interest against those capital incentives. could the average cattle rancher or drone manufacturer explain this process? no, USamericans lack education and curiosity. while i agree with your analysis that finance capital has a dominant role in the US, it is not irrational for a group of bourgeois who feel they are being left out to try and break in. it’s unlikely they’ll succeed, but the resolution of the contradiction between financial and industrial interests will come to a head in USamerica if we keep playing chicken with china.

to your first point, i think you could more easily explain most of the BRI with china’s repeated commitment to win-win diplomacy and the real issue of producing more stuff than their domestic market can handle. if your nation’s company uses your excess steel to build essential infrastructure that you get to collect partial income from while the country you’re doing it in thanks you for it, then that’s in your self-interest. i will say i’m broadly skeptical of the idea of biden as a savvy operator, but specially how do railroads in laos and ports in kazakhstan build USamerican supply chains? i could be wrong about the numbers here, but i believe the reason 70% of the loans are in dollars is because the serious use of loans denominated in national currencies didn’t start until 2022, and the BRI started in 2013.

to your second point, educated immigrants are the cause of a labor crisis for some bougies. yes, finance capital sees the college educated coders of the worlds and wants them in SF and NYC. for decades, most of the states bordering mexico have in some way or another built parts of the economy on the assumption of cheap, readily available, fairly skilled labor. people expect to be able to hire latinos who are fully qualified, do not complain, and work for less than minimum. it’s a reflection of the deep seated entitlement and white supremacy of our culture. now, the real cause of the decline in this availability was a combination of labor organizing amongst migrants and improving material conditions in mexico. see the above about the education and curiosity of the USamerican people.

to your third point, i think you are completely correct about the actual long term consequences of lowering interest rates. to trump and the average USamerican and the average USbougie, the rest of the world does not exist and they miss cheaper mortgages/ loans for their companies. did biden meaningfully differ from this? i mean i know there’s the veil of ignorance between the fed and the president, but i think the USbougies, finance and otherwise, are legitimately split on whether to lower interest rates or not. the firehose of free money was really nice, even if some naysayers keep saying you can’t have infinite money forever.

to your fourth point, donald trump’s claims of being anti-war are complete bluster. he tore up the intermediate nuke treaty, he tore up the iran deal, he droned more people than obama, and he stopped reporting civilian casualties from drone strikes. yemen, somalia, iraq, and syria experienced no lightening in US imperialism under trump. he moved the USamerican embassy to jerusalem. afghanistan got several years of no change before a half-assed negotiated withdrawal. what trump understands is that the people are tired of war, or at least of this war on terror. they are especially tired of the wars where US soldiers are really officially present, which was just Afghanistan. USamerica is now postured with a dozen little tripwire forces around the world to stir things up, with no major casualty causing commitments. in theory, that’s all so we can better transition towards the pacific. that aligns with a faction of the intelligence and state apparati. biden’s emphasis on nato and israel are commitments unique to him, and people interested in one or the other have aligned themselves with him.

to your fifth point, during obama’ second term, 15.8 gigabarrels of oil reserves began extracting in the US in megaprojects (producing >20k barrels/ day). that’s using the best probable estimates of some of the reserves. this was broadly seen as restarting american oil production. under trump’s term, 440 gigabarrels of reserves began extracting in megaprojects. the amount of crude oil USamerica extracted tripled from 2010-2020. the north dakotan and texan shale fields over bet on oil prices, started overproducing, and accidentally brought the price of oil down. trump happened to be president. in terms of signing off permits for exploiting public land and gutting the EPA, the trend line of evermore oil and gas in the US increased just as stably under trump as obama.

to your sixth point, you claim trump is an incompetent imperialist for trying to force NATO to spend more on the military, but biden is a genius imperialist for aiding the brain drain of europe and the dismantling of its infrastructure. are these not dual processes? increasingly bellicose rhetoric makes europe ratchet up spending, which forces cuts on social services. declining standards of living and the increasing risk of having to make or wield weapons leads to the people who can afford to leave leaving.

i’ll readily agree that trump seems to be less bloodthirsty about russians and eastern europeans. but doesn’t he more than make up for that with how heinous his rhetoric and actions are towards latin americans? in terms of preserving imperial hegemony, it’d be smartest to cut bait on the failed ukrainian experiment. depending on whether you think we need a war with china or not, the next step people within the state and intelligence agencies could want is double checking that the US grip is secure under the incredibly chauvinist monroe doctrine. i do not think trump is the dark horse anti-imperialist-by-way-of-incompetence some claim.

It’s essentially just a shopping list that right wing cranks have wanted since at least the nixon administration. the heritage foundation was founded in ‘73, and it is heir to a tradition that includes things like the john birch society and the federalist society. the american far right has been advancing a plan of judicial capture for decades, and it’s finally coming to a head. the democrats argue we can either have it in 2025 or delay it to 2029.

the democrats are broadly not wrong to say that the contents of the project are bad. they will kick a lot of protections down to the state level, where obviously the red controlled state govs will gleefully strip away everything they can. the reason the democrats are bringing it up so much is because, rhetorically, they only have fear and negative claims to support them. there is no democratic platform, or anti-2025 project, or coherent vision of the future, or anything. the only pitch they have is the same pitch they’ve had for decades, except now it’s more tired than its ever been: the other guy is really bad, this is an important election, you have to vote blue. hunter s. thompson wrote about being tired of holding his nose for unpopular candidates in the 70s.

it’s closer to the fascists telling us what to do then agenda 21, but they’ve been telling us for eighty years. the recent emphasis on it is a combination of it playing well on tiktok to young people who are critically looking at the character of USamerican civil society for the first time and the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the democratic party.

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i’m not a boat expert, but i think it’s a boarding dock. i remember getting one of those time for kids magazines during the iraq war showing marines launching amphibious tanks and trucks out of the side of an aircraft carrier in a space that looked a lot like that one. like, if you zoom in, it looks like the bottom half (ish) has a big lip keeping the water out

prior to a few months ago, openAI was nominally beholden to a non-profit of the same name that had a board with the mission to maintain safe AI, what ever that means. they tried to fire sam altman, sam didn’t like that, the board got dissolved, and now the nsa guy is there. this article talks about how the moral/ altruism board tried to stop the money for moral reasons, and ultimately lost out