Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.
The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.
Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.
I don't know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.
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Last week's thread is here.
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.
Mengzhou is the next-generation Chinese crew vehicle in development. There's been two uncrewed test flights, both successful. If all goes well in development it could see regular service within a year or two. It's about equivalent to a Crew Dragon in capabilities. It's a big step up from the Soyuz-derived Shenzhou in terms of life support duration and crew comfort. Soyuz/Shenzhou is incredibly cramped. Here's what a Soyuz looks like inside in launch configuration:
Soyuz was never really intended as a long-duration vehicle like Apollo, Crew Dragon, or Orion. It's fine as a quick taxi to and from space stations, but fuuuuuuck going to the moon in something that cramped. Even the Soyuz orbital module (the "ball" at the front) which provides additional living space doesn't help much.
Russia has their own Soyuz replacement called Orel in development but they've had funding issues. R&D is way behind schedule.
Also, India has a similar vehicle called Gaganyaan which is almost ready to fly orbital uncrewed tests in the next year or so. There's been some test flights but they've mostly been boilerplate models for aerodynamic tests.
Cool stuff. Wow that Soyuz does look quite stuffed, as reliable as it has been.
is going to have some competition pretty quick.
Soyuz's design is reliable, but there's been a lot of QA issues in the past decade with new-build vehicles. It's frankly systemic within Roscosmos. The Salyut-derived space station modules have also have major QA issues. For example in 2021 there was a new ISS laboratory module called Nauka which malfunctioned after docking to the ISS. The attitude control thrusters used for docking somehow turned on after docking, and kept firing until it was out of fuel. It sent the whole ISS into a slow tumble. for almost an hour until the station could be brought back under control.
Going back to Soyuz, there was the hole in in the orbital module of crewed Soyuz MS-09 that happened during construction. Fortunately real-world space doesn't work like movie-space. No-one is going to be sucked out into space through that hole. ISS's has plenty of air reserves to counteract it. And that orbital module is jettison before reentering atmosphere, so it was never a safety issue for the returning crew. But the fact that it happened at all, that it wasn't caught during inspections, and that Roscosmos tried to blame the American astronaut that rode on it for the problem with very misogynist language are all troubling.
There was a booster separation failure of crewed Soyuz flight MS-10 due to mishandling of a Soyuz-2 side booster by ground technicians. Fortunately Soyuz has an excellent emergency-abort capability. Both the Russian cosmonaut and American astronaut on board safely landed on Earth after an emergency separation from the tumbling rocket.
Crewed Soyuz flight MS-22 had a coolant leak (there's a great animated GIF in that link of it) of the same type that happened to uncrewed cargo flight Progress 82, and Roscosmos had to launch MS-23 uncrewed as a replacement to bring the MS-22 crew home safely. Progress is basically a disposable Soyuz modified for delivering cargo up. It's also the way ISS crew disposes of trash. They just swap cargo for trash over the course of its stay until there's no more cargo to unload. Then it undocks and burns up in the atmosphere. Progress uses the same type of docking port and autonomous flight and docking system that Soyuz does.
I don't mean to sound like I'm disrespecting USSR spaceflight history. I really do have the utmost respect for what they accomplished. First satellite, first animal flight, first crew flight, first spacewalk, first space station, first multiple-segment space station, first (and only!) landings on Venus of all hellish places, the list of USSR space accomplishments is incredible. I celebrate Yuri's Night every year! My beef is just with the underfunding and mismanagement of Roscosmos which directly impacts QA on new builds. Both are issues we can lay squarely at the feet of post-USSR-fall liberalism.
I won't give any credit to King Shithead of the Shithead Kingdom who owns SpaceX, but I will give the engineers and technicians there, the ones who do the real work, credit for their QA approach. Since they re-use as much hardware as possible flight-to-flight, they have what is probably the most extensive and thorough QA process in the whole aerospace industry. Nothing goes up without ridiculously detailed inspections. The worst thing that happened on any Crew Dragon flight is that one of the toilets on ~~Polaris Dawn~~ Inspiration4 (I remembered the wrong mission, Polaris Dawn was this year's private flight with the spacewalk, it went properly, it was the prior Inspiration4 mission that had the primary toilet issue) didn't work properly, so they had to use one of the backups for the rest of the flight. Aside from that there's never been any problems.
I uh may be a bit of a space nut. Didn't intend for this comment to be so long!
No need to be sorry. I really appreciated the write up. Love space fact dumps.
Really interesting to read through that. Problems and all like any. Nothing is perfect. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
That's wild, like jamming three people into an oversized bullet
looks cozy
The dirty little secret of Soyuz is that it was really designed for two. But there started being space station missions that required three people, and various political squabbles prevented the timely development of larger crew vehicles on par with NASA's Apollo command module, let alone the larger rockets that would be needed to launch them. Soyuz (the rocket) and Soyuz (the crew vehicle) worked so reliably that there was a sense of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Cosmonauts tended to be short kings. Yuri Gagarin himself was 157cm tall (5'2") down here, but for almost two hours, he was literally above everyone. (We need Yuri Gagarin emojis! If I make them who should I ask to approve/implement them?)