Image is sourced from this article depicting the 28th ASEAN Plus Three Summit, which took place at the same time as the 47th ASEAN Summit.
Last week concluded the 47th summit of ASEAN in Malaysia as well as a swathe of concurrent summits surrounding ASEAN. For those unfamiliar, formally, China is not a member of ASEAN, but is part of the ASEAN Plus Three (as part of the “Three”, alongside Japan and Occupied Southern Korea). And while not really ASEAN, there is also a yet wider organization, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which tacks on Australia and New Zealand to the group of countries that are currently in ASEAN (which is the single largest trade bloc on the planet). At the summit, Timor-Leste was officially introduced into ASEAN, making it the 11th country to do and the first since Cambodia in 1999.
Many important figures throughout Asia, as well as Trump, Ramaphosa, and Lula, attended the event. As you can imagine, Trump’s appearance was not exactly positive - signing four rather coerced bilateral deals there, including with Malaysia, which forced those countries to buy American goods in exchange for certain exemptions from Trump’s high tariff regime. The US is currently in a bit of a panic due to China restricting access to rare earths, a critical component of many weapons technologies (and electronics in general) and is looking around for countries to help supply them. After the summit, the US and China signed a deal related to tariffs and rare earths, but it seems very unlikely that this is the end of the saga; the US politically, economically, and militarily cannot tolerate China’s existence as a sovereign actor and will try to overcome them until the American Empire topples.
Meanwhile, China did as they ordinarily do, and urged higher regional integration and trade without high tariffs, as well as adherence to the Global Governance Initiative (which, as we here never tire of noting, is an interesting thing to try and encourage while the US only more feverishly violates the sovereignty of nations everywhere). One hopes they’re supplying a bit more than just speeches to Venezuela, Cuba, and beyond, as the US prepares to start bombing.
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
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 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.
Am I misreading or does this just incentivize Nazi Elon Musk to start a war for his trillion dollars?
Source
how the fuck is there still so much money in Tesla? who, in 2025, is looking at Tesla or any of the other Musk properties and seeing the future of anything?
the boring old carmakers who actually still make cars aren’t existentially terrified of Tesla, they’re existentially terrified of BYD and Xiaomi
Because the “value” of Tesla stocks has no basis in material reality and is only a measure of hype. Tesla is incredibly overvalued. Under “normal” conditions this “should” correct itself as the market realises this (/s because this is idealistic thinking but capitalist economists have deluded themselves into thinking “the market” is somehow a rational actor). But investors don’t care about what a company is actually worth, they care about how much their stocks will be worth; this is based largely on how many institutional investors turn their attention to something and put money in it. Tesla had a lot of hype to begin with because people actually believed their bs and the West doesn’t have another real EV leader, so people assumed that they will have a huge percentage of all EV sales in the future. And Musk’s position with the government means the halo of credibility isn’t going away any time soon
And like half the cars that they DO produce get recalled for manufacturing defects or safety issues.
No I don’t understand either.
SpaceX has had a string of recent successes with Starship and Starlink, but Tesla? I don’t know.
Can someone who is good at economy explain to me how Tesla is able to hand Musk so much money (isn’t his pay packet nearing a TRILLION dollars?) when Tesla doesn’t have that much money at all?
I know a lot of it is tied to their market cap, which is insanely high, but that’s only $1.4T, and a lot of that is already tied to Musk’s existing stake.
Also, the board is openly handing musk their OWN money at this point. Surely they cant be getting a good deal from this from any perspective beyond some kind of blackmail or backhand deal…
Elon is getting $120 billion now and theoretically $1 trillion in 10 years (there are tiers to this, the lowest one is like ~$25 billion). The money comes from the shareholders. Tesla prints $120 billion new shares, the current shareholders get diluted. And they LOVE it. They even voted to give shareholders less power!
When I heard that, my first thought was that the vote was rigged.
To answer your question though, pay packages are often dealt with using potential value. Like, we’ll give you a billion shares at 2$ if you’re able to raise the value of all shares to 4000$
Honestly think trump is gonna end up getting rid of quaterly audits and reporting and that may well help tesla stock among others