While studying for his PhD at Tsinghua, Ben Norton is even giving amazing lectures on political economy at Fudan University. Life goals.

This $3000 book (Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese Economics) by Nanjing University has official explanations for every term used in Chinese socialist and Marxist economics, including:

• productive forces
• economic base and superstructure
• value vs money vs price
• circulation of commodities versus circulation of money
• labor theory of value
• primitive accumulation of capital
• socialist market economy
• primary stage of socialism
• China's rural revitalization strategy, and poverty alleviation program
• development, environmental, industrial, financial economics
• dialectical and historical materialism

The book is written by Chinese economists who shepherded China through Reform and Opening Up, so you can be sure that their explanations are accurate, and not the misleading liberal claptrap you usually see around economics

It's so hard to find good official documents that explain Marxist economics, so this book is amazing. This is the best reference I have ever found on it.

Y'all should all download it for reference.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is responsible for auditing the US government to avoid wasting money. However, the Pentagon just refused GAO inspectors and blocked public release of their latest F-35 report, probably because they look so bad. Here's what the numbers that have been released earlier already show:

F-35 readiness rates are disastrous:

• Mission capable F-35s (can fly any mission, even a beginner familiarization hop): 67% in 2021 → 44% in 2025
• FULL mission capable (can do all combat missions): 38% → 25%^1
• Even the old F-16C built in the 1980s sits at 64%, much higher than the F-35

F-35 fleet is split into castes:

~1,057 F-35s have been built, spread across the US and its allies. Of these, the US operates ~800 of them.

"TR" (Technical Refresh) is the jet's built-in electronics hardware, "Block" is the software it runs. Old hardware can't run new software, so TR-3/Block 4 is the only fully modern configuration:

• 238 global jets / ~180 US jets (~23%) built before TR-2/Block 3F will never be fully operational, and are not upgradeable. These can only be used for testing, training, or scrapped.
• 524 global jets / ~400 US jets (~50%) stuck at old TR-2/Block 3F standard, no plans to upgrade them.^1 Combat capable, but frozen at 2015-era capability.
• 295 global jets / ~220 US jets (~28%) are the only ones on the modern TR-3/Block 4 path. Except these are good for training only:^2 they're delivered without their delayed radar, and the engine core upgrade needed to fully power and cool the Block 4 electronics will only be installed in 2031

Zero F-35s are both combat-ready and on the modernization path. The mid-generation jets are the only ones actually doing any fighting, even though the aircraft was bought for the capabilities Block 4 promises.

The US only has ~800 × 25% full-mission-capable = ~200 combat-ready F-35s,^2 all frozen at 2015-era capability.

Meanwhile, China has produced ~500 J-20s at ~120/year, projected ~1,000 by 2030.^3 This means China probably already has more modern, combat-ready 5th-gen jets than the USA (at even a bad ~50% readiness rate (~500 J-20s × 50% = ~250 combat-ready J-20s versus ~200 combat-ready US F-35s).

Lockheed profits from every failure:

Lockheed's own 2025 study found their suppliers can't make 48 critical components for the F-35 on time. The Pentagon now wants to give Lockheed another $13.7B just to get to 65% full-mission-capable by 2030.^1 Of course, the Pentagon will also need to replace the ~580 unupgradeable or frozen US jets, all of which become future orders for Lockheed.

Other References

This Wednesday, Hunter Biden launched the $LAPTOP crypto coin, only for it to crash 98% by Thursday while 'mystery traders' of the coin have made windfall profits. ^[https://wset.com/news/nation-world/hunter-bidens-meme-coin-down-98-since-being-launched-report-crypto-laptop-social-media] ^[https://futurism.com/future-society/hunter-biden-laptop-memecoin-crypto-rugpull-national-disgrace]

This exactly mirrors Trump's and Melania's earlier crypto rugpulls. This universal scammy behavior is the most visual example of the equivalence between liberals and conservatives. Both will scam the working class to enrich capitalists.

Pretty sure this still counts as SFW. In other news, Grindr in Dallas suffered an overload and outage today.

Sauce: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sE6xJGCX34w

Sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/TankieTheDeprogram/comments/1wajmco/thank_you_for_your_service_comrade/

After her side job as Biden's Commerce Secretary in charge of suppressing Chinese technological innovation, Gina Raimondo has now gone back to her main job of licking capitalist boot by suppressing any mention of wealth redistribution like UBI.

UBI is the only relatively mainstream solution to AI layoffs that isn't just straight socialism.

Joe Biden's Former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has decided that UBI in response to AI is the thing to fear most. She said: "I personally think it's like the end of America."

She is now heading up a newly-launched extremely well-funded organization to make sure the country reaches for anything but a basic income in response to AI. It's called RAISE US, and the money behind it comes largely from the companies building the disruption it exists to manage.

RAISE US launched June 25, with Raimondo as CEO and former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb as co-chair. It has already secured more than $500 million toward a $1 billion target. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation are anchor partners. Behind them sits a wall of corporate and philanthropic money: Blackstone, General Motors, IBM, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, Deloitte, UPS, Cisco, Workday, Arnold Ventures, and a dozen more.

The article goes on to show that RAISE US's advertised alternative to UBI, job retraining programs, is proven to be as ineffective as one single community college course is at improving job prospects. RAISE US's entire job is to mount excuse after excuse to allow capitalists to capture all profit from replacing everyone's jobs, while making it appear like it's the workers' fault for not keeping up.

Who could have possibly foreseen this? /s

It's almost like when these AI CEOs constantly tell their investors how they're going to make everyone homeless and jobless, then all the workers start taking them seriously and seeing them as the threat that they are.

As I have posted before:

There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:

• communism, where the abundant fruits of automation are distributed evenly among all, ala fully automated luxury communism
• exterminism (from Peter Frase’s book Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers.

It’s quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.

This video by Adam Ragusea (a pretty mainstream food channel) looks at how U.S. hereditary farms often preserve quasi-feudal relationships where large farm landowners exert control over migrant and trafficked laborers, recreating power imbalances similar to feudal lord-serf dynamics.

Along the way, he makes a nice overview focusing on the advent of capitalism as a progressive force against feudalism, and how US farmers, whose practices are descended from southern feudal slave plantation owners, still preserve some unproductive, harmful aspects of feudalism.

In the West, we have heard endless news stories about the advent of clean hydrogen. Unfortunately, it is mostly a ploy by Western fossil fuel companies, lying about repurposing their natural gas infrastructure for hydrogen in order to be allowed to keep burning natural gas for longer. As a result, actual progress on clean hydrogen is very slow and has basically not grown beyond the existing chemicals industry.

In China, hydrogen production is a serious and intensive field of research and scaling, with the potential to help make China fossil fuel independent.

This on-the-ground documentary is amazing for dispelling persistent myths about Chinese food safety. In the early 2000s, China had a series of scandals and subsequent police crackdowns around waste cooking oil, which was being scooped out of sewage grease traps and being reprocessed into disguised brand new cooking oil.

While this was a legitimate problem, Westerners somehow still believe that to this day, all Chinese food is still cooked in waste gutter oil. In actuality, China has cracked down completely on uses of gutter oil for human consumption and has instead created productive industries to turn waste gutter oil into valuable products like hydraulic oil, machine lubricant, and sustainable aviation fuel.

This kind of waste-to-products recycling is exactly what we need more of.

The Chinese government has spent half a century, and continuing today, working to restore degraded environments.

China began by greening the Loess Plateau, a formerly productive forest and grassland ecosystem turned into a sandy wasteland by centuries of exploitative farming. The government work with villagers on the ground to change farming practices, build dams and terraces, plant trees, and more. Altogether, the project restored 4 million acres and lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty.

See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2G79sIJ97w

China then applied these same practices to greening the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts, stopping sandstorms, halting the growth of the deserts, and restoring former desert into productive grassland:

Caption says forest coverage increased from 8% to 73%.

See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91vrHrcVJ_w