My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
To start briefly with Iran, there’s been two significant developments over the last week. First is that Iran is now beginning to put into practice its policy that allows preemptive strikes - a policy which was authorized by the previous Khamenei a while before his death but has so far gone unused - to strike at Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan without a corresponding American aggression immediately beforehand. The second development is that Iran is now taking a firmer stand against the US Navy in the waters of the Arabian Sea, beginning by testing anti-ship ballistic missiles against the US fleet - so far without confirmed hits as of me writing this sentence - as it is obviously disadvantageous for Iran to simply not do anything against the blockade even with US logistics under strain. The US has attempted to dissuade these new strikes by striking Iranian oil tankers, to which Iran has responded by striking oil tankers aligned with the West. This is very much not a shooting war that the US wants to get into as oil stockpiles continue to decline and diesel prices are at all-time highs (though if adjusted for inflation, we still have a little more time before we hit absolute highs). The overall picture is of an Iran growing in confidence.
There’s also been some encouraging news out of Yemen, where Ansarallah has been conducting a ground offensive weaken the enemy occupation of the western coast, including some breathtakingly precise drone-drop operations combined with using recon drones to guide ballistic missiles at enemy formations. As far as I’m aware, the blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb to Saudi tankers has been very successful, although stopping Saudi tankers from heading north towards Suez has been understandably trickier. I suppose if push comes to shove, they can continue to strike the very immobile coastal oil facilities rather than trying to hit moving ships at a great distance.
The news out of Russia/Ukraine has been quite miserable for particularly Ukrainian civilians over the past month or two, with Ukrainian strikes on Russian civilian logistics and warehouses being met with much greater Russian responses on Ukrainian civilian logistics and warehouses. Ukrainian ports are now effectively blockaded, making exporting agricultural products in the same quantities as before essentially impossible, and within the cities including Kiev, food suppliers are scrambling to find smaller warehouses to place goods in so that they aren’t as easily destroyed like the larger warehouses have been. I find it sincerely upsetting that the war has progressed to this point, though it’s always worth noting that, first, Ukraine had a few opportunities to sign pretty good negotiating terms with Russia; and second, in comparison, Western wars begin at the step of making a conflict about hurting civilians, even to the extent of it being a detriment to strategic goals by not solely hitting military targets (most famously in Gaza, but also e.g. during Obama’s term by bombing weddings and hospitals).
I will confess to not being as up-to-date on the situation in Europe, and especially Germany, in regards to the Ukraine War as I would like, but as a general statement, nothing I’ve seen over the last few years has demonstrated to me that Europe is capable of fielding a conventional force which would provide a formidable, let alone existential, threat to Russia at this stage. There’s been lots of embarrassing stories about European missile, drone, and shell production being well below standards in both quality and quantity. My thoughts are now that I think the age of the US/NATO posing an existential conventional threat to China, Russia, and probably Iran (and perhaps others like the DPRK?) is now conclusively over, with Western bases proven to be indefensible with existing missile defence programs, their logistics very vulnerable to disruption, and their aircraft not being safe to use over airspace at least as well-protected as Iran’s. The US can still do cataclysmic, nation-destroying damage to smaller, less defended countries like those in Latin America and Africa, but for the anti-US squad in Eurasia, the vast majority of the threat from the US is now a combination of financial/debt offensives and covert intelligence. We still have a long way to go on both those fronts, however - a minimum of a decade or two, I believe, even with Trump’s inadvertently anti-imperialist accelerationism.
Lastly for this preamble, the annual SCO summit took place on September 1st in Bishkek, with the leaders of China, Russia, Iran, India, Türkiye, Pakistan, and others in attendance. A lot of the usual statements were made: down with hegemonies, down with militarising space, down with unilateral sanctions, up with local currency exchanges, up with cooperation, up with peace, etc etc. The big proclamation this time around was the Bishkek Declaration, which reiterated all those points I just mentioned. Overall, it’s one of those documents where the content is mostly cool and indirectly jabs a lot at the US, but I find that paper is a generally ineffective barrier of protection against bombs and missiles, which is a pretty major avenue of… let’s say, “international communication” in the current day. And I would like to see some real contenders to the World Bank and IMF taking shape soon if we’re gonna truly start fighting hegemonism, but I digress.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
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.
Japanese 10-year bond yield hits 3%
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/government-bond-yield
3% is (it is known) a tipping point at which holding domestic bonds yield more, after accounting for the cost of hedging foreign currency risk, than foreign sovereign debt.
This means two very important things:
Massive currency market flows expected to ensue because the only way Japan has to prevent interest rates from sending it into a recession is to support the currency by selling foreign bonds. Probably Japan begins, continues rather, dumping US treasuries - already down 5% last month.
Which absolutely fucks the US which must sell a mountain of bonds this year, representing around 1/3 of total US debt since the Trump admin has preferred to issue short term debt instead of long term debt.
Huge currency and bond market shenanigans are going to happen. The timing of this situation is crazy and very bad for Japan and the US, and the US has already demonstrated it is much more than willing to dump EU assets to force the pain onto the EU.
An interesting development, but at the same time the Bank of Japan holds the majority of those 10-year bonds and the Japanese government owns 55% of the Bank, on a consolidated balance sheet (Government + Central Bank), the JGBs held by the BoJ are an internal transaction: the government pays interest to the BoJ, and the BoJ remits its net profits back to the government treasury, can’t really be insolvent against yourself
And since it’s a 10-year bond, it doesn’t automatically dictate the borrowing cost of short-term carry trade positions (where the US higher-yielding foreign assets lay), as carry trades are funded using short-term and overnight borrowing
Sometimes you have to give them credit, the capitalists are smarter than they typically let on, at least the Japanese ones are
Yes, however: if these financial instruments have been used for so long it is because they’ve proven effective in abstracting more complex economic mechanisms through the financial system. If they’re forced to dissolve that debt there’s no telling what consequences it’ll ultimately have because something has to give, whether it be some sort of devaluation, an inflationary crisis, reneging on private debt, a crash in the stock market, etc. There’s no way to get out of this truly unscathed, they’re just gonna have to choose through their response which leg they’d rather get broken.
My money is on them raising rates, because at the end of the day they’re a US client state and Trump REALLY wants them to eat that 100 billion US oil importation “deal”
They’re definitely going to raise rates but the political pressure will be against that, which is why the most likely situation is they raise rates less than they “should” and compensate by selling foreign assets.
I see a widespread selling of assets in a currency / bond yield war.
And if a recession (AI bubble pop?) suddenly hits while this is going on, then we’re in for it.
They intervened in our precious YEN markets twice today!
The chances of that happening are low because the Japanese economy seems to already naturally be heading into a recession. Crisis averted!
That is like $3 trillion in (mostly US) stocks and $1 trillion in US bonds. I imagine if that much is pulled from the US stock & bond markets, nothing weird or unexpected will happen. The system is known for being stable and never crashing. Interest rates rising has also never blown up a bank holding a lot of treasury bonds, that has never happened (the last time it happened, Genocide Joe was president). The unwind happening very slowly could avert a sudden crash, but that is if the yen carry trade reversing was the only thing that was happening.
Recent conspiracy theory dropped.
It says that the OpenAI ‘breaches’ will be blamed for a forced conversion of the dollar into a digital currency backed by short term debt. That means the US public will be forced to buy US gov’t debt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZpobX6MQVA
Stable coins backed by US treasuries are considered by some to be pretty likely.
$1 of stable coin is backed by $1 of US bonds.
It wouldn’t even be a weird thing to do. Owning the stable coin is just a proxy for owning the bond. Very very nearly the same thing as a stable coin backed by actual dollars.
I don’t even see it as a “conspiracy theory”.
From a government policy point of view, it’s not even really a bad idea. Just another way to own a treasury.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: