Bulletins and News Discussion from November 4th to November 10th, 2024 - This is a Giant Problem
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 4th to November 10th, 2024 - This is a Giant Problem
Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.
The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country's largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine's 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.
There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn't take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn't until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.
The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill's smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife's water supply.
Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management's demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.
Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn't changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.
After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
@carpoftruth@hexbear.net is hosting the news megathread this week while I'm busy irl!
Make sure to head to the US electoral containment thread for everything to do with the election on a domestic level, as we don't want too much US-centric news to flood this thread. Discussion of Harris' or Trump's potential geopolitical impacts is still perfectly fine here.
There was a youtube link in my recommendations about the beginning of the disintegration of Israel, by Ilan Pappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgkbhEzwd-8
How plausible is his argument? He seems rather certain.
So what's the over/under on Iran launching Operation True Promise 3 before the election tomorrow is called? My gut tells me they don't give a shit, and the attack will happen regardless of who's elected and neither Trump nor Harris will meaningfully change US policy in West Asia so who cares, but there is always a chance Iran decides to do something Extremely Funny, not an October surprise but a November surprise.
Robinhood stock trading app now offering election gambling seems a bit on the nose. Reuters
On this sad day the Lenin museum in Finland is closed.
The warmongering nation and it's revisionist bourgeoisie will reopen the museum at a later date as "the museum of eastern relations", the name will be Nootti which refers to the diplomatic note the Soviet Union sent Finland that was used heavily as an anti-communist propaganda tool that coloured for example my childhood and the discussions around finlandization (the CIA term that is now being plastered on Ukraine and Georgia, searcing for this term nowadays is eye-opening)
The museum was the birthplace of the Soviet Union.
Edit. Adding that the statement of the new museum (that you can find in the link) claims that there was no external influence in this decision. This is absolutely not true. There has been media discourse, opinion pieces and the curator of the museum is a turbolib who was first in line to say sorry about the museums name when the ukraine crisis started. They have also removed statues of Lenin and renamed places with his name in them in the country in the last few years.
The word "nuance" is used a lot in this explainer of the new museum, it doesn't take a genius to see this for what it is.
The possibilities of a US civil war lies in one place only, the factional rifts (potential and actual) among armed Federal agencies and the true identities of their capitalist suppliers, backers, investors and patrons; the 18 intelligence agencies of the United States would obviously form the nexuses of new leadership castes, absorbing or leveraging the 3,000 or so private intelligence companies active in the US
It's a path of least resistance that flows towards whatever government entities has the most guns, and these new power blocs will scramble to absorb the various branches of the US military (assuming of course the various officer corps of the US military don't somehow overcome the combined pull of 18 intelligence agencies)
The police will obey, or they'll be branded foreign infiltrated rogues and destroyed (this may have the unfortunate effect of confusing certain leftist radicals who may form incorrect assumptions about the new "cop-killing federal government")
Militias will either be absorbed a la Azov battalion-style or suffer a similar fate to the more uppity pigs
This picture is likely to emerge by the mid 2040s
Moldovan elections final results: Sandu 55.33% to Stoianoglo 44.67% with a 54.34 voter turnout
Diaspora came to the "rescue" again,it seems. My initial prediction of it being a 10% diff seems to have come true, mostly based on the fact this happened last time: initial opposition lead,only for the diaspora to quash it.
So yeah, Eastern Europe is a diasporacracy,where the voices of those who don't even live there matter more than those who do. By the way,if you're tired of American electorialisn,you may have to look forward to me doing some Romanian electorialism come the 24th,seeing as we'll have our own presidential elections.
We're a semiparliamentary republic,so these don't matter as much,but the prime minister does have to be approved by the president,so it's still not insignificant. But I should warn you, it'll be a shitfest of pro-NATO bootlickers,but maybe some useful analysis will come of it,who knows?
My hope is that I'll give a good enough overview and maybe even show you all a bit of the circus going on (we had a local tv station,that was bought by CNN some years ago do "town hall" style debates with the candidates and then a debate where each contender sent two supporters to debate with the other person's picks,it was a circus,with the journos trying to mimic actual journalism but failing,the most pointless questions and more,I'll see if I can find a way to make them accessible to the English speakers here) and show you a glimpse of the hellscape that is Romanian politics
The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain
- WW3
- Ukraine as a failed state
- Negotiate
Beebe says the West has an erroneous idea as to the very nature of the conflict. The US and the Europeans defined the Russian invasion as a “deterrence model problem” rather than a “spiral model problem”. In the former, the adversary is a kind of Hitler that must be stopped at all costs.
“We have internalised that model as a universal truth in international relations. We believe every problem that we’re facing is that deterrence model problem and we can’t possibly negotiate.”
In reality, Beebe says, the conflict conforms to what Robert Jervis defined back in the 1970s as a “spiral model problem” – where you have one state that attempts to enhance its own security by taking measures (for example, Ukraine joining NATO) that another state (Russia) believes are threatening. You get into a dynamic of action and reaction that can spiral to the point where you get into a conflict.
“When you attempt to deal with a spiral problem by refusing to negotiate, you make the problem worse on both sides. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire,” Beebe says.
The former head of the CIA’s Russia desk argues that if we are to think our way out of the disaster that is Ukraine, the West needs to rediscover diplomacy and the ability to negotiate with geostrategic opponents. US triumphalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall led, he says, to the US feeling it could abandon statecraft.
“We no longer felt that we had to engage in normal diplomatic give-and-take, attempting to balance interests as well as balance power – the kinds of things that statecraft has involved for thousands of years. We thought that wasn’t necessary. Number one: we know we’re right.
And number two: US power was just so disproportionately greater than any other country’s power, we could simply impose our views, whether they liked it or not.”
The Ukrainians face a terrible dilemma. Most seem to realize the war is lost. Any attempt at negotiation with the Russians, however, would unleash internal pressures inside Ukraine that could lead to a coup, assassinations or other upheaval. The US won’t want the war to end before President Biden leaves office in January 2025 – and may prolong the agony, loss of life and the ceding of yet more territory to Russia for US domestic reasons rather than the best interests of Ukraine. Where is all this leading?
George Beebe sees three options. NATO escalates and becomes directly involved in the fighting – action that could have unspeakable consequences. More likely, Ukraine could suffer a collapse – a combination of military and political failure as the ability to put an effective army in the field is lost.
“If I am wearing my analyst hat, I would say the more likely scenario is Ukraine collapses and becomes some sort of dysfunctional ward of the West. We then have more or less a security black hole in the middle of Europe that causes real problems.”
Absent an agreed framework, other hot spots could flare at any time – including Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Kaliningrad.
The third option, and clearly the preferable one for Beebe, is that the West changes course and “picks up the phone”, ending its refusal to negotiate.
“The West has got to recognize that it is important for us to find a negotiated settlement,” Beebe says.
“We can’t simply say to the Russians, let’s freeze the conflict in Ukraine, and someday we’ll get down to talking about broader European security – ‘trust us’. That’s not going to work. We’re going to have to indicate that we understand that these issues are important and that it is in our self-interest to address them in a way that accommodates Russia’s core security interests. The Russians are not going to get everything they want out of this. Neither will we. Both sides are going to have to get their most vital interests protected in all of this. That’s a truism in diplomatic agreements.”
And that is how grown-ups talk.
POV you just called gamers a bunch of gammons in a mod sticky:
Algerian domestic news
Over 100,000 housing units distributed nationwide https://www.aps.dz/en/economy/54914-70th-anniversary-of-revolution-outbreak-over-100-000-housing-units-distributed-nationwide
Presidential decrees granting pardon to over 4000 prisoners https://www.aps.dz/en/algeria/54847-president-abdelmadjid-tebboune-signs-two-presidential-decrees-granting-pardon-to-over-4000-prisoners
"israel" Ministry of "Justice" is proposing a prison sentence up to 20 years for anyone advocating for boycotts or sanctions against the Reich.
Sources: Africa4Palestine, JNS, Mondoweiss
Infinite red triangles on "israel"
https://en.irna.ir/news/85648949/Sinwar-his-men-had-not-eaten-for-3-days-before-assassination
Sinwar and his men had not eaten for 3 days before falling in battle
Been reading a lot more about his history lately, he wasn't as much of an omnipresent voice for me as Nasrallah was. These people are legends.
Ah I see this was already posted. Good, I will add something else.
https://en.irna.ir/news/85648898/Israel-arrests-4-regime-staffers-over-leaking-secret-information
4 Zionists arrested over leaks
https://lemmy.world/post/21581078
Just a reminder of how ignorant the defederated sites actually are. Blocking is GOOD, blocking conserves your patience for people who deserve it
New
just dropped:"In South Africa, the government forces you to buy Halal-certified meat. The SANDF just raided my flat, armed with Vektor R4 rifles, going through my freezer."
going to apply for the SANDF's "Halal Enforcement Brigades", who wants to join
https://xcancel.com/TameeOliveFern/status/1853136289144459387
Remember all that talk about Hamas “stealing aid”?
As it turned out & via Israeli media: Hamas chief Sinwar didn’t eat anything in his last three days alive.
I hope raising a comically large Israeli flag was worth getting BTFO by a Hezbollah ATGM:
https://xcancel.com/political_aya__/status/1853176982282158490
