Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
Alright, I’m personally thinking that we should do a different continent for each subsequent COTW, so like Africa - South America - Europe - Asia - North America (including Caribbean and Central America) - Middle East/Western Asia. Not necessarily in that order, it could vary depending on relevant news events.
So I think that Chile would be a nice one to do next week, on the 50th anniversary of Allende’s death. But we could also do something a little closer to home for several of us like Finland. Or follow along on Blowback and do Afghanistan.
sounds like a good idea, if you could also do it by regions, i normaly use a site called onthisday for megathread ideas you could maybe use it for ideas on COTW
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Possibly pedantic given the intent for your comment, but… Central America is not part of NA. The population never considered itself part of it either.
America is a single continent divided in 3 parts. North A., South A., and Central A. plus the Antilles.
PS. Some people make it a point to say US citizens instead of Americans, as everyone from this continent is American.
I’m aware, but if we’re doing the whole “every week has to be a different region until we run out of regions and then it repeats” thing, and we don’t lump in Central America with North America, then we’ll have Canada, the US, and Mexico each like twice per year because there’s no other countries in North America unless we count the Caribbean. And we get very close to running out of Central American countries too as there’s only 7.
There is a way to salvage the idea of North America, Central America, and the Antilles being separate, and that’s to subdivide the previous continents even further. So we could do:
North America
Central America
Antilles
South America
Western Europe
Eastern Europe
Western Asia
Central Asia
Eastern Asia
Oceania
Northern Africa
Western Africa
Eastern Africa
Central Africa
Southern Africa
that brings us to 15, meaning we only have to repeat one of the United States, Canada, or Mexico once per year (52/15 = a little over 3)
Where’s South Asia and Southeast Asia?
I would replace Oceania with South East Asia (incorporating Australia, the oceanic islands and NZ)
Two of the countries that are typically put in South Asia (on wikipedia; the UN geoscheme even puts Iran in South Asia), I instead put in Central Asia (all the -stans plus Russia, and Belarus gets to come along because I don’t want Lukashenko to be lonely, grouped in with the chihuahua countries in eastern europe). That leaves 6 countries in South Asia.
I implicitly put South-east Asian countries in with my definition of Eastern Asia.
We’re really opening Pandora’s box here though because if we’re going by geographical regions defined on the UN geoscheme, then we have to consider North, South, West, East, and Central Europe, as well as subdivisions of Oceania, leaving us with 22 regions. God help us if we start getting into subregions.
At this point I’d rather just go two steps back, to my original definitions, though with Central America and the Antilles conjoined, and away from North America, and mandate that the US, Canada, and Mexico can only show up once a year each.
It feels silly to be like “Oh, sorry, we can’t return to West Africa for half a year even though there’s a bunch going on there because of The Rules.” Then again, it also feels a little silly to say the same but for 7 weeks. Maybe we’ll just make it up as we go along instead and have no weird rules, but generally try to pick different regions every week.
So, by Western, Central, and Eastern Asia, you’re just splitting Asia down into thirds. I guess India would be under Central Asia then.