Idk about a trend, but perhaps a necessity. The Trump government is flinging around so many tariffs and sanctions that it may no longer be practical to hold USDs in reserve for anything. Also doesn’t help that Americans aren’t producing a lot of products people want to buy. Angola and China do $24B in business annually. By comparison, the US and Angola do $3.2B and a healthy chunk of that is just us selling their refined oil back to them.

This guy used to be a minister of foreign affairs, so he had access to critical, secret information from inner circles of the EU.

Critical secret info like “Europe is running out of fossil fuel power” and “the auto industry is lagging the globe”, certainly.

I’m sure he’s also got all sorts of contacts with port and rail administrators, regulatory admins, and dealership networks, such they fast tracking import, license, and sale becomes significantly easier

Sucks that the EU makes foreign imports so devilishly complex that you need a guy on the inside just to get a phone directory. But that’s European politics in a nutshell for centuries.

joining the Chinese carmaker BYD, after helping it – as a minister – to get a firm foothold in Hungary and thus avoid EU’s tariff wall.

You know… Hungary might have imported EU-built electric cars if they were willing to build any.

Carmakers across Europe and beyond are now reassessing their electrification timelines, as weaker-than-expected demand and shifting policy signals complicate the transition.

Several major manufacturers have already softened or delayed their targets. Companies including Ford, Stellantis and Volvo have adjusted their timelines for going fully electric, while Honda has stepped back from plans to fully phase out combustion engines by 2040. Mercedes-Benz has also signalled a more gradual approach than previously outlined.

So much of this seems like Fossil Fuel agitprop, fixated on keeping Europe pegged to the petrodollar for another decade.

Signing with BYD means entering the service of the Chinese Communist Party …

BYD, a company founded just west of Hong Kong, listed on their stock market since 2002, and enjoying western capitalist investments from no one less than Warren fucking Buffett? BYD, a company that built its brand as an international outsourcer of battery parts to a host of Japanese, Korean, and American electronics firms? BYD, a company that rapidly expanded its commercial base through private development of capital, labor, and sale into a highly competitive international automotive market? THAT BYD?

Is buying gasoline from Exxon equivalent to supplanting yourself to Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman? Is purchasing a Microsoft License the same thing as becoming a QAnon fantastic? Fuck off with this Red Baiting bullshit, already.

It really seems that most Russians think this is a manpower intensive occupation with some occasional violence.

Well, the first part is kinda true. The second is wildly off.

These are reasonably well-off Moscow people who didn’t seem to understand that this war is more like world war 1 than like Afghanistan.

I’ve heard more than a few of the big advances described as Battle of the Somme, especially with regards to how the reporting diverged from the reality on the ground.

I don’t think anyone really does. If they did, proper war journalists wouldn’t exist. No sane person would stick their necks out like that if they understood the gory details.

As to the “curtain of media propaganda”, we’re all suffocating in it. That’s part of what has dragged the conflict out for as long as it has. Everyone’s fed this false narrative that the other side is on the brink of internal collapse. Russians get deluged with media about their glorious impeding victories, with every European economic hiccup or American military stumble presented as a final desperate gasp. Westerners are inundated with “Putin on death’s door! Russians out of toiletpaper, insurgency imminent! Ukraine scores critical war-defining victory with latest long-range strike!” news updates, suggesting just one more big push will crack the entire Russian socio-economic system like an egg.

This, combined with any hint of diplomatic resolution squashed under a wave of “You can’t trust their government! Only total victory will assure your safety!”

And so we’ve got this systematic terror bombing all the way from the Polish border to the Serbian wilderness, with people convinced the end of the war is just around the corner for year after year after year.

Iran’s conflict with the US is shaping up the same way. We scream bloody murder while we’re firing off another volley of cruise missiles, then publicly announce “Peace negotiations imminent” while our batteries reload.

We were burning over ten billy a month during the Iraq War.

Ukraine has open enlistment.

Get out there and kill some rapists.

No no no. I was told that this would set off an economy-killing inflationary spiral.

You can’t honestly tell me that more working-class residents with a higher income might become the foundation for domestic economic growth. Why, that’s downright Fordist! And we disproved Fordism under Reagan, when we decoupled wages from growth and the economy was 100% perfect for all eight years with no exceptions.

Very easy to forget that the original, explicit purpose of NATO as an organizational entity was to prevent the state of Germany from reconstituting itself as a central European military power. The organization was co-opted by Truman and Eisenhower as a weapon of the Cold War. And its senior staff was jam packed with ex-Nazi commanders, dooming the vision of Pax Europa for another forty years. But it still ultimately served that purpose - keeping European powers from re-arming in any meaningful capacity, while the US gobbled up what remained of western colonial outposts.

A dissolved NATO, along with a financially prosperous EU, would put Germany back in the driver’s seat again. In the short term, that might not mean much. But with the Russian economy burning out and the Ukrainian states hollowing out, you’re talking about an enormous landmass ripe for re-colonization in a way the 1930s fascists could have only dreamed.

Every TACO Tuesday, sure. He’s also threatened to leave the UN, withdraw from NAFTA, and pull out of the ICC.

New Report on Honduras’s 2025 Elections Finds that Partisan Gridlock, US Interference, Procedural Irregularities, and Technical Deficiencies Undermined Their Legitimacy

Threats to the Guatemalan electoral process

Different branches of the Guatemalan State, including the executive, much of the legislature, the Supreme and Constitutional Courts, and the Attorney General’s office - all deeply compromised with organized crime – are using this period to prevent President-elect Arévalo from taking office. These measures include the disbarring of the Semilla party, actions against Guatemala’s Electoral Tribunal, the invention of legal cases and efforts to remove the legal immunity of the president, vice-president elect and congressional representatives from Semilla to try them under dubious charges, such as expressing support in social media for student pro-democracy protests.

If only Ortega had blamed the Chinese…

Ortega and Murillo’s government has been accused by the ​U.N. Human ⁠Rights Council of transforming the country “into an authoritarian state” and systematically violating human rights.

Glances at neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala

shrugs

Isn’t that just how we’re running Latin American countries now?

Typical piefed user.

NATO would be dissolved and replaced with a European alliance.

The US is never going to allow that to happen.

quietly

🤮

But otherwise cool. Thank you for the link.

glorious great leader Kim Jong Un

It’s so fucking bizarre to see a country on the other side of the planet catching strays because Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, and Palestinians are beefing.

The Westoid brain cannot comprehend a leader worse than the one running “Bad Korea”. Kim is up there with Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor as a cartoon-style supervillain.

More likely, it’s the same self-preservation instinct their Russian peers are experiencing when recruiters come calling on the east side of the front line.

Ukrainians and Russians had far more in common than in opposition. It took decades of depravation and tens of thousands of hours of warmongering propaganda to splinter them apart. Now they’re being feasted on by the oligarchs and their war machines as the territory is depopulated for the next generation of settler colonialists.

It’s been kept artificially cheap with a bunch of emergency stockpile releases used to manipulate the real market and supply chains. But even then, a bunch of our excess consumption is happening to power the AI boom.

We’ve had our foot on the accelerator on both ends of the pipe since COVID. Enormous expansion of production and consumption driven by state policies. Politicians and business executives both convinced that we’re speeding towards some kind of growth singularity and racing to get there first. Zero consideration for material resource limits, strain on the labor force, or the Climate Change elephant in the room.

It’s an enormous economic ship. And even as bits and pieces fail, we’re seeing accelerating economic activity driven by a handful of bullish private investors with state-sanctioned unlimited credit and no real regulatory oversight. I don’t really know what the future holds, though. As COVID proved, you can just as easily find yourself in a position where you’ve suddenly got too much gas in the pipeline and nowhere to send it as you can find too little.