That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.

There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.

I’m shooting blind as I haven’t looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.

It isn’t that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.

Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending on using this blockade to cannibalise Europe’s economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don’t have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world’s population.

It seems these European intel agencies are awfully disorganized and disunited. Maybe they should all officially become subsidiaries of the CIA, that’ll help protect Europe. \s

Did some searching, it comes from CIA director William Burns in 2022-03-08, you can see it here. It was actually 2 days.

“His own military’s performance has been largely ineffective,” Burns said of Putin. “Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what his plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city.”

If you go a bit further back, you have “sources” from the CIA already spouting the 2 days line a couple weeks earlier. Here’s an example from the day after the start of the SMO.

US intelligence officials are concerned that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days, according to two sources familiar with the latest intelligence.

It goes like this, US Intel are worried it could happen -> report it as Putin hinging his whole plan on it happening -> if it happens it’s because it was a massive gamble and “unfair” in some way, if it doesn’t happen it was an utter failure and Putin threw away his whole country.

A week later, business insider reports it as though Russia failed in the war and practically lost, and actually, it’s Russian intelligence which is bad for wrongly predicting their victory. Which the US intel also predicted. Go figure.

Narrative created. Consent manufactured. Redditor fooled.

P.S.: is there a Ukrainian civil war megathread I could read and contribute to somewhere? It’s fun to look up these little lies but it’s been 2 years now and there’s just too much stuff to hold on one’s head.

In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums on compensation to the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (729km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.

“Lavishing” on pensions. Imagine trying to paint that as a bad thing. Wonder how Yankees feel when they find out that the country they’re blowing hundreds of billions on to wage useless wars has free healthcare too.

Although I don’t think this is going to change the result (Trump is still going to win, USA will remain a stagnant imperialist country), it’s going to be very fun watching the chaos unfold within the blue party.

It’s not even clear if Kamala is actually going to be selected candidate. As entertainment, I love it.

link to article.

I don’t think it’s good to normalise images as “news” in this comm. It is true this time, but is less convenient to verify, and could be abused in the future.

Biden has been providing some great quotes lately:

“I convinced myself of two things. I’m the most qualified person to beat him, and I know how to get things done,” he stated.

They never change.

This graph is golden. How I’d long for a time machine to show this graph to every annoying redditor talking about how Zelensky would march on Moscow with their “spring counteroffensive” 8 months ago.

This other one is also a great visualization. I’ve been in small cities with less than 1 million inhabitants with more territory than that.

If anything, this makes Russia’s new gains sound very unimpressive, if one can only think of war in terms of Paradox game map painting. Clearly that’s not how it works, but I won’t opine on how the war really is going because I haven’t done enough research.

Could this war perhaps be over this year? I wonder how it’ll affect USA elections or the inevitable riot upon Confirmation Day if it ends before then.

Found a new emoji.

The USA is the leading tiktok-using country, I’ll give them that. But according to this statista page, the following three countries already double the total of USA users.

That means ByteDance stands to lose way more by divesting themselves of TikTok than losing their USA audience. Not only are they isolating themselves diplomatically and economically from the rest of the world, now they’re backing down in hubris culturally as well.

Although I really dislike the TikTok business model for obvious reasons, banning it on USA territory is going to be really nice for the whole TikTok ecosystem.

So, when poor oppressed Americans are going to start getting VPNs to escape their Great Firewall?

How long until liberals start saying that the ICJ is controlled by Putin’s ally, South Africa?

Italy has joined the “poor countries needing charity health work from Cuba”. Who’s the failed economic system now?

I’m also always impressed by how positive Cuban health workers abroad can be given the circumstances. Not only is their country being denied properiry by foreign powers, but in every country they go they are victims of demonisation campaigns by the bourgeois press, and they still manage to come out not hating the entire country they’re sent to.

My main worry is how they’d react if one of their capitalist allies (like BRICS countries) had their own proper revolution including the whole “topple the current China-recongnised government with deals with China.” I think it’d be within their economic and maybe geopolitical interests to be a bit wary of that, even if they have ideological solidarity with those revolutionaries. I wonder how something like that would turn out.