A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi (below) and Iranian Speaker of Parliament Ghalibaf (above, right) in the Iranian parliament in 2024. These two figures have played a major role in the war so far.

My summary of the situation as I understand it is in spoiler tags below.

summary

After many long weeks, Iran and the US have agreed that they’re going to begin negotiations on certain topics in a process lasting at least 60 days. Due to America’s perfidy during previous negotiations, trust has broken down so far that Iran demanded $12 billion of their frozen funds and several other promises, such as the end to the naval blockade, to even return to the table, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Iran also demanded that negotiations take place in two stages, and that nuclear issues will only be discussed in the second stage, which will be several weeks from now if everything goes as planned.

The terms of the MoU have themselves been a big source of confusion and suspicion, for me and many other pro-Iranian spectators. Getting the wording exactly correct is important, because the US really is like the devil - leave room for any possible interpretation in the contract that favors them more, and they’ll insist that this was the only interpretation up for discussion. Additionally, the US might be historically bad at winning wars, but they’re very, very good at winning peaces: they set up the post-WW2 order to best suit them by playing the European powers off each other; the DPRK might have survived the Korean War politically intact but existed for nearly the next hundred years as a sanctioned pariah; Vietnam was soon forced to economically engage with the country that had dropped triple of all the bomb tonnage of WW2 on them; and so on. It is no exaggeration when I say that the negotiation phase will be the most dangerous part of this war and it could lead to the most death and destruction without a single missile impacting Iran.

However, there’s one little genocidal colony in the region that could stop this whole process from even beginning, as the US appears to have promised Iran that the Zionists will stop the war against Lebanon (and perhaps Gaza too? I’m a little unclear) and even withdraw entirely from southern Lebanon, including all bases set up since this broader conflict began. Apparently, the US promised this in return for Iran not striking the Zionists in return for their most recent strike on Beirut on June 14th. Now, the issue with this whole situation is that the US greenlit the Zionist strike on Beirut, and they knew that Iran would respond to it because they did in response to an earlier strike. If the US made such major concessions to Iran in return for this response strike not occurring, then why authorize the Beirut strike at all? Why make their position worse? Right now, I can think of two reasons. First is that they attempted to create one final embarrassment for Iran, under the assumption that Iran was so desperate for a deal that they wouldn’t risk responding. Second is that this is all one big ruse or misdirection; the US does not intend to follow through with the MoU and subsequent negotiations anyway, and so the terms they’re “agreeing” to don’t really matter.

With the MoU signing apparently set for June 19th, we’ll know for sure soon.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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:

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.

  • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    43·
    7 days ago

    The Pink Planet Mystery Deepens With James Webb Observations - Telesur English

    Article

    Scientists detect possible salty clouds and complex chemistry around distant object GJ504b. The so-called “pink planet” was discovered in 2013 and orbits a Sun-like star located 57 light-years from Earth. Now, astronomers have discovered “salty skies” surrounding it, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.

    This data appears in a study carried out by scientists from Northwestern University in the United States in collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

    Despite its nickname, astronomers are not sure it is truly a planet. With a mass approximately 25 times greater than Jupiter, GJ504b, or the “pink planet,” lies near the diffuse boundary between giant planets and brown dwarfs. For this reason, experts refer to it as a “planetary-mass companion,” meaning it is a planet-sized object that orbits a star.

    To complicate the mystery further, repeated attempts to study it with ground-based telescopes have failed. While most directly imaged exoplanets have temperatures ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, GJ504b barely reaches 550 degrees, roughly the temperature of a bread oven.

    Its age is responsible for its low temperature—the new work estimates it is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old. It is one of the coldest planetary-mass companions ever directly imaged; the elusive object, the university details, is too faint for its light to be analyzed from Earth.

    However, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal an atmosphere filled with exotic chemical compounds and salt-based clouds unlike anything seen before.

    These also provide some of the first direct evidence of salt clouds in the atmosphere of a cold object, a phenomenon scientists theorized more than 15 years ago. The discovery also marks an important step toward studying increasingly cold objects that are too faint to be examined with ground-based telescopes.

    To reach their conclusions, Aneesh Baburaj and his team captured, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, the faint light of GJ504b. They then used advanced data-processing techniques to remove the glare of its much brighter host star.

    This combination ultimately revealed the spectrum—the decomposition of light into all its colors to extract data. The results showed a rich mixture of substances, including water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and other molecules.

    The spectrum also suggested that GJ504b is unusually rich in heavy elements or metals, the study notes, which also used an astrophysical model and simulations. Despite these findings, the mystery of how the object formed persists, as current data suggest it could have formed either as a planet or a small star.

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      7 days ago

      These objects that blur the line between star and planet are intriguing. It stands to reason that some weird physics might happen that doesn’t fit neatly into a standard story of accretion followed by either ignition or dud. For those edge cases, perhaps ignition can start and then choke, given some external impulses from the neighboring star, for example. That might explain the metal-rich composition, kinda similar to a car burning “rich” when the engine is not maintaining good combustion. Not basing this on any hard science, just daydreaming a bit

    • theturtlemoves [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      While most directly imaged exoplanets have temperatures ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit

      Isn’t that very hot for a planet’s surface?

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        The methods we have for detecting exoplanets tend to select “hot Jupiters” which are very large and orbit close to their host star.