news

Chinese scientists have created 3D optical disk technology that can store 1.6 petabits (~1600 terabits) on a DVD-sized disk.

The disks should also be longer lasting than current tech and only use power when data is being written or read. The language of the article makes it sound like the current cost makes it more in the realm of data centers than consumer use, and they say that ease of manufacturing is the next priority.

Hearing the fucking spin on the US' counter proposal of a fucking temporary ceasefire is just so hilarious. "The US is afraid that the original proposal would interfere with its effort to negotiate its own peace deal" or "The temporary ceasefire will help us negotiate a more permanent peace." Absolute comedy considering all the support the US is providing to Israel's ongoing genocide campaign

vice.com shuttering is heart breaking for anyone living in 2013

Under fire with Azov Battalion - Russian Roulette Dispatch 76 the Vice journalist gives no pushback when the Azov fighter explains away his Black Sun and claims he's not a nazi. The journalist gives no commentary to other obvious Nazi symbols

President Lula da Silva on Twitter:

"Just as I said when I was in prison that I wouldn't accept a deal to get out of jail and that I wouldn't trade my freedom for my dignity, I say: I won't trade my dignity for falsehood."

"I am in favor of the creation of a free and sovereign Palestinian state. May this Palestinian state live in harmony with the State of Israel. What the government of the State of Israel is doing is not war, it is genocide. Children and women are being murdered. Don't try to interpret the interview I gave. Read the interview and stop judging me based on what the Prime Minister of Israel said."

I have a theory that the reason a lot of IOF members post themselves with unfunny tiktoks and images is that they're trying to reach the level of funny Hamas did by breaking into the most advanced securities on the planet using paragliders and motorcycles then kidnapping a commander in his underwear.

It’s always weird visiting Upstate New York and having a good relationship with the police there because we all went to the same school for troubled kids. A lot of them saw it as a good alternative to what they were doing in their personal lives and liked that it didn’t take them out of the country like the military did. At the same time it’s unsettling knowing what I know about the police force they work for.

Lula won't apologize for criticizing genocide in Gaza, says Amorim. :chad:

On Sunday (18), the president compared Israel's action in the Gaza Strip against Hamas to the mass murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party) will not apologize for criticizing the genocide in Gaza, the president's special advisor for international affairs, Celso Amorim, told CNN.

"We've always treated it in a very respectful way and defended the two-state solution, but there's nothing to apologize for. Israel is putting itself in a condition of increasing isolation," said Amorim.

"What is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people is like nothing else in history. In fact, it existed when Hitler decided to kill the Jews," said Lula.

Today, Israel's foreign minister told the Brazilian ambassador that Lula would be declared a person non grata in the country until he apologized.

Lol, good on Lula. Isn'treal supported Bolsonaro until quite recently, THEY invited HIM, A LITERAL NOBODY with no political rights and a CRIMINAL, but not the fucking PRESIDENT of Brazil. Really hope Lula breaks of relation with israel.

Of course the Liberal Party (Bolsonaro's Party that is currently being investigated by the police) asked for an impeachment but they lack all 150 seats to do that, and so they decided ask the Supreme Court Judges for help, the same Judges that Bolsonaro attempt to kill and are close with Lula.

Celso Amorim, who I believe was the advisor of every goverment in Brazil besides the Bolsonaro one, basically said that no one cares about what Israel thinks or says, and that Lula and Brazil will continue their trade and diplomacy normally with all other countries.

From a Norwegian tabloid, "Russian shrimp salad changes name [to 'rustic' salad]" (22 Feb 2024)

it's so joever for putin

Chinese car manufacturer BYD is launching a new version of its hybrid sedan, retailing at around $11,000 USD.

Shame they don't/can't sell them over here

Danish government media is running a story about how consumers "risks paying money to Russia" when they buy goods from Asia. Yemeni sanctions against zionist-related shipping in the Red Sea means that more Asian goods gets transported to western Europe on rail through Russia. Even under the EU's attempts at economic warfare against Russia this practice is still perfectly legal but now the media is trying to whip up a frenzy against it.

The Br*tish are having a fucking day, it seems.

The SNP used their Opposition Day to submit a motion calling for an immediate ceasefire and opposing the collective punishment of Gaza.

This reflected their longstanding position, unlike Labour, whose leader backed war crimes and which has repeatedly either justified or failed to oppose Israel's mass slaughter.

Labour then gutted the motion, blackmailed the Speaker into breaking Parliamentary protocol and prevented the SNP's motion from being heard at all.

In sum, the Labour leadership deserve nothing but total contempt.

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1760371182350520572

https://nitter.cz/OwenJones84/status/1760371182350520572

So Starmer apparently threatened the Speaker into breaking long established procedure and then completely gutted the SNPs ceasefire motion (which includes accusing Israel of war crimes) to make some meaningless "temporary ceasefire but Israel has a right to defend itself and also Hamas is bad" motion instead. The Speaker is claiming he wasn't blackmailed but rather said that he's trying to protect MPs whose family are "being threatened" (from who or what I am unsure). The Tories and SNP have now tabled a motion to remove the Speaker and Tel Aviv Keith and Co are doing everything possible to claim they didn't actually just threaten a government official.

It is important to remember that this motion from the SNP has no actual force behind it. Motions brought by the opposition on opposition day don't have the legal force of government behind them, even if passed. It was rumored that 80 members of Labour were going to "rebel" and vote for the SBP motion, including some members of the shadow cabinet, against Keith's orders. So Tel Aviv Keith did all of this to get out of Labour having to take a stand on a meaningless gesture that would have showcased the actual divisions in Labour.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-floats-possibility-inviting-russia-peace-summit-2024-02-25/

Ukraine floats possibility of inviting Russia to peace summit

i saw two hot air balloons outside of dallas today. there must be a chinese spy base in plano.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/02/20/7442833/

Reddit loosing it's mind over this one lol

Alright question time.

My adventures on bluesky have led me to realise that an absolutely massive number of people, including soft-left who would otherwise usually be susceptible to what MLs have to say, are blocking me on sight for being a visible "tankie" now (openly ML and positive of lenin/soviet union being the main indicators).

So the question is under the climate that is being produced do MLs get more done by hiding their MLness so as not to trigger this insta-block behaviour? I could quite easily switch over to DemSoc mode and mostly saying pretty much anything and everything I already say when visibly ML.

I'm still leaning towards visibility, I think that hidden-ness of communists hasn't helped in the past and that something similar to the "pride" approach that helped lgbt people get normalisation has value. The anti-tankie atmosphere being generated is essentially a de-normalisation of communist openness in society and the counter to that seems to me to push normalisation even harder so that the approach fails. I am however interested in others' thoughts.

​Behind the front-line reports about the liberation of Avdeevka and the gradual squeezing out of Kyiv terrorists from Rabotino, news from the no less significant industrial front passes unnoticed. Although in the current context it is more correct to call it the economic and legal front.

Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the transfer of the Ulyanovsk Machine Tool Plant, owned by the German company Gildemeister Beteiligungen GmbH, a subsidiary of the Japanese-German DMG Mori, to the temporary management of the Federal Property Management Agency. The plant produces turning and milling machines for mechanical engineering. However, after the start of the SMO, German owners stopped production for geopolitical reasons. Now the plant is back in operation.

In Ivanovo, at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office, the Arbitration Court seized the shares and property of the Ivanovo Heavy Machine Tool Plant as an interim measure. The prosecutor's office demands that the plant be returned to state ownership. The privatization of the plant in the 90s, according to the supervisory authority, was carried out with violations and caused damage to Russia's defense capability. The plant produced machine tools for the aerospace, defense, automotive and energy industries. This is the city of weavers and brides - with surprises.

In the Chelyabinsk region, the Prosecutor General's Office also discovered violations during privatization in the 90s and damage to Russia's defense capabilities. To stop this long-term crime, prosecutors, just like in Ivanovo, demanded that three plants be returned to the former owner - the state: the Serov Ferroalloy Plant, the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant and the Kuznetsk Ferroalloy Plant. The plants produce 90% of ferroalloys in Russia. The owners of the plants, Yuri and Lyudmila Antipov, are, among other things, charged with transferring assets abroad and selling to a potential enemy ferroalloys used in the manufacture of high-quality steel for military equipment, heat-resistant aircraft engines, shock-resistant weapon barrels and armor-piercing projectiles.

The Antipovs are outraged and shout that ~~“the moped is not mine!”~~ “Everyone did this in the 90s.” “This is not a violation, it was a common practice in the regions.” But prosecutors remember very well the words of our President, spoken when he was serving his first term: “I am for the dictatorship of the law.” And the law states that for the privatization of both the machine tool plant in Ivanov and the Ural ferroalloys, permission from the Russian government was required. There was no such permission. The privatizers instead organized for themselves the decisions of local regional regional governments. As the Antipov family tells us, there are quite a few such factories scattered across Russia.

By the way, the Ulyanovsk Machine Tool Plant was also privatized in 1992. I have an assumption that in this case there was no order from the Russian government. Just like in the case of the Ulyanovsk plant of heavy and unique machine tools, which is now partially owned by the Czech Skoda (read German FW).

Prosecutors have a lot of work to do. After all, as you know. Russians always come back for theirs.

Better late than never.

Came across a “war analysis” substack while trying to find on the ground information about recent developments. It’s run by the chubby American dude with glasses you often see on YouTube analyzing different Ukraine-Russia shit

Anyway, one of the recent articles is a “correction” about the identification of a gun from a war video. The thing that disturbed me is that the video is a field execution of some Kurdish woman, likely a civilian. I don’t know the context. I didn’t watch it, but something about feeling the need to correct yourself for identifying the wrong gun model in a video of a war crime as if it matters in any capacity is just… something. Inhumane.

I think I’ve done enough reading about war for today.

jacobin printed a silly article

The state of the analysis of russian politics, where the guy with the platform "privatize everything" gets shiny thinkpieces as based friend of the left.

"have our sanctions worked yet? no? thirteenth time's the charm!"

Meanwhile, on the Sahel.

The West African regional bloc is lifting most sanctions imposed on Niger over last year’s coup, in a new push for dialogue following a series of political crises that have rocked the region in recent months.

A no-fly zone and border closures were among the sanctions being lifted “with immediate effect”, the president of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, Omar Alieu Touray, said on Saturday.

I've just seen an unsourced statistic online that a third of the people arrested for antisemitism in Germany as of late are Jewish. Obviously, I can't find anything on this in the media or on Google, though I regularly hear of individual cases. Does anyone have a real source on this or is it just a rumor?

the guy who self-immolated, Aaron Bushnell, died. there's a video circulating on twitter of it (apparently he streamed it on twitch), really horrifying stuff. I can't imagine a worse way to die. it's confirmed that he was active duty Air Force. this seems to be getting much more coverage than the last one.

I think a good way of re-framing the global multipolar conflict happening for scared left-liberals is to show that the multipolar bloc is not a red-brown alliance, it is in fact a red-blue alliance (the national bourgeois of Russia and China and Iran with the proletarian CPC, DPRK, Cuba, pink tide leftish Latin American nations, African de-colonial forces, the axis of Resistance). Putin is not a fascist, he's a Liberal like Merkel or AMLO. Iran, Syria and Hamas are not fascist, they are secular and progressive relative to the area they're in and the western-backed fascist opponents they face in their homelands - they fight to liberate oppressed people internationally despite having domestic issues they need to address.

The west is a blue-brown alliance, NATO is a blue-brown alliance, the anti-communist cold war system is a blue-brown alliance. They cheer for Nazis in Canadian parliaments, they send weapons and money to Azov, they back fascism worldwide, they promote ISIS and jihadist scum & now they are exterminating the Palestinian people. What squishy libs should hate most is their own governments if they truly hate fascism.

Red-brown fears is overblown crap from scared Liberals who called me Assadist for years while quoting bellingcat and Jacobin at me. There is no global red-brown alliance of note, nothing significant. The Trumpists weird fixation of going slightly against the imperialist grain will be corrected soon, they will never go anti-America and pro-global South so their current quirky position is not of consequence. If they are so corrupt Putin and Xi bought them out then cool, I think that's rad. Better than whatever the GOP were doing before, maybe they'll be the American comprador class and fifth column to sell us out if we're lucky, but more likely they'll just stay being neocon chauvinists like always.

Israel escalates bombardment against Lebanon in the Ghaziyeh region close to the heart of the country. Video footage captured massive explosions which were verified by Israeli military radio.

Israel's northern war front has increasingly escalated with the withdrawal of some troops from Gaza, and the massive military deployment to the border region in preparation for a looming Israeli ground invasion against Lebanon's Islamic resistance group.

Local media report Lebanon's resistance groups have already responded with counterattacks on the occupied Al-Samaqa region. Since October 7, fighting in the border region has intensified in response to Israel's war of annihilation against Gaza.

Recent polls by the Israeli newspaper Maariv show that 71% of all Israelis are in favor of an all-out war against Lebanon.

From theredstream on Telegram. Israel was not prepared to fight Hezbollah all-out before Oct 7th. If they think they can take on Hezbollah after the Resistance has dealt them so much damage, that is insane. It would be a fitting end to the Zionist entity if it’s the hubris of their fascistic genocidal population that ultimately does them in.

Taking bets one what this video is about

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), confirmed at a press conference that he had released the phone data of New York Times journalist Natalie Kitroeff on purpose, out of "political authority"

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published allegations of possible links between AMLO's 2006 presidential campaign and drug trafficking, specifically with the Sinaloa cartel. AMLO rejected the accusations and said it was irresponsible of the newspaper to publish them.

After a few days, he published Natalie Kitroeff's private number on his social networks. Today, when questioned, he said that moral authority is above all else, and asked who would repair the damage that had been done to his image.

lmao

A popular center left leader got term limited and his successor is a fascist?!

Looks like term limits are working as intended.

What it looks like to find out (CW)

Get fuckin wrecked

I want to type up a proper post that will refer to many books and articles detailing Indonesian history but I will be quite busy so I don't think I'll manage to finish it within this week's COTW.

But as for now instead I wrote a quick retrospective that can be served as the "primer" for the eventual post (whenever I'll finish it).

Many westerners has some knowledge of Southeast Asian history but it typically only focuses on Western actions in the region and it never goes deeper. "the Vietnam War", "the Phillipines recolonisation" and "the 1965-66 Indonesian Genocide" gets mentioned but it never is discussed within the 3 millenia of Southeast Asian history but especially within the last 500 years of colonization.

This is especially true for the Islamicate in Southeast Asia.

Do Westerners even know the colonial origins of the exonym of the "Malay Archipelago"? What about the Islamic and Socialist internationalist movements that sweeped across the "Malay-Islamic" civilization that consists of modern-day Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia? - and how Phillipines relates to this wider "civilization"?

Do westerners even know the major maddhab that most Southeast Asians muslims follow? Do they even know anything about how Islam spread across a sub-continent as wide as Lisbon to Tehran? Can they even discuss one thing about the richest company in history - the Dutch East India company? Do they even know anything about the political economy of colonial-capitalism in Southeast Asia?

This lack of knowledge stems from two faults, the rampant Orientalism and chauvinism that has penetrated the subsconcious of Western observers and even many Southeast Asians today, but also the failures of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements in the region. Southeast Asian history to this day is being written by the oppressors. We can't breathe nor think for ourselves.

Can you imagine that? 700 million people, with more than 1300 indigenous languages (accounting for more than 50% of all indigenous languages spoken in Asia), without any voice!

But as materialist dialectics informs us, things continue to evolve and change. Now, ASEAN is experiencing larger economic growth (relative and absolute) than Europe. Under imperial domination for 500 years (and counting) - and still growing faster. Decolonization is not over yet.

The transcription of the talk called Dialectics and Indonesian specificity at the time of imperialism's agony - Humanity (Indonesia) captures this emotional essence quite well.