Follow-Up

After the Vanity Fair piece (I posted it here yesterday), maybe more of the Press Poodles are waking up to just how shitty things are.

And maybe they're also beginning to see the unmistakable pattern indicating it gets a lot shittier (and pretty quickly) if we don't all get with the fuckin' program and put a stop to the Heritage Foundation's accelerating crusade to use our government against us - to finish subjugating us to a small group of plutocratic elites.

USAID cuts could lead to 14M deaths, including nearly 5M kids: report

“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” said White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in an interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development earlier this year. “Nobody.”

Her comment comes just after Elon Musk – the mega-billionaire who spearheaded the effort when he led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative earlier this year – admitted that DOGE was a disappointment. Before USAID staffing cuts were announced in February, Musk called the agency a “criminal” organization on X, the popular social media platform he bought and re-branded.

According to research published in the Lancet journal this summer, the USAID cuts may lead to more than 14 million deaths globally by 2030. Of those 14 million, an estimated 4.5 million would be children under age 5. That amounts to about 700,000 extra child deaths per year, said UCLA, where co-authors of the study are based.

USAID was established by the late former President John F. Kennedy and it was later mandated by Congress. For more than six decades, the agency helped save millions of lives and served to further U.S. interests around the world through humanitarian efforts.

“The study warns that the impact of USAID cuts could extend beyond the agency’s own programs: international donors may also reduce their commitments, further weakening service delivery in countries already dependent on external support,” UCLA explained.

After the USAID cuts made headlines in February, polling showed that a majority of people (58%) opposed abolishing the agency and folding it into the state department, as President Donald Trump’s administration sought to do. Nearly 90% also said they thought the U.S. should spend at least 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid.

Moves to take apart USAID were also swiftly met with protests and lawsuits. A suit filed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and Democracy Forward alleged the actions caused a “global humanitarian crisis.”

Wiles said she was “initially aghast,” at Musk’s plans to gut USAID.

“I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she told Vanity Fair.

Wiles said Musk’s plans were already underway by the time he announced them. She also said his desire for “fast-paced” action was shaped by his business experience, including his work at companies Tesla and SpaceX, and it’s not how she would have handled things.

“When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” she explained. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

Additionally, Wiles described Musk as an “avowed ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.”

Musk left the government in May after a public falling out with Trump. However, the impacts of DOGE continue in the form of downstream layoffs, disruptions to the real estate market and more, as Audacy covered last week.

As for the impact of the USAID cuts alone, Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and coordinator of the study published in Lancet, said projections indicate a “sharp increase in preventable deaths, particularly in the most fragile countries.” For example, Reuters reported last week that the Trump administration’s USAID cuts have disrupted life-saving treatment for starving children in Kenya.

“They risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” Rasella said. “For many low and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.”

And not to get too conspiracy-addled, but Musk has been quite vocal about his concerns over "breeding" and first world population decline. Seems obvious to me that one of the things he'd be willing to do in order could to keep the white world white, is to arrange for the demise of lots of brown people.

Just sayin'.

Jerks Of A Feather

"The good news" is that Bibi Netan-fuckin'-yahu is making it harder for American politicians to stay cozy with AIPAC, the same as Trump is making it impossible for American politicians to stay cozy with the GOP.

Everything else is nothing but fucked up and bad.

I can call the Israeli government assholes without being anti-semitic, just as I can call my own government fascistic without being anti-American.

In fact, by criticizing governments for doing shitty things "in the name of the people", I'm telling them they're acting against the best interests of those people, and they need to get back to looking after their citizens instead of bolstering their own power and lining their pockets.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, leading scholars’ association says

Israel’s foreign ministry called the resolution “disgraceful,” but it added to a growing chorus from rights groups concluding that Israel is committing genocide.

Israel’s nearly two-year military campaign in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left swaths of the enclave in rubble, meets “the legal definition of genocide,” the oldest and largest association of genocide scholars said in a resolution passed by the group’s members Sunday.

The resolution, by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, added to a growing chorus from human rights organizations and academics concluding that Israel is committing genocide, a crime outlined in a 1948 convention and defined by acts intended to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, in a message posted on X, called the resolution “disgraceful,” and said it was based on an unverified “campaign of lies” by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Israel’s government has reacted angrily to any suggestion its military campaign amounts to genocide, a crime defined in the aftermath of the Nazis’ systematic murder campaign against Jews during the Holocaust.

The resolution states that the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas against Israel that killed more than 1,200 people and prompted the Israeli military campaign in Gaza “constitutes international crimes.” But it also concludes that Israel’s response violates all five conditions set out in the 1948 convention, including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” according to Emily Sample, a member of the association’s executive board.

Any one of the conditions would be sufficient for a finding of genocide.

The association has roughly 500 members. A large majority — 86 percent — of members who voted on the resolution approved it, Sample said. “We were very surprised at the level of consensus there was,” she said, adding that the board had refrained from issuing statements on the question of whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, as it has in other conflicts, given the fraught debate over the issue.

The resolution accused Israel of carrying out “indiscriminate and deliberate” attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, deliberately attacking medical and aid workers as well as journalists, forcibly displacing the enclave’s entire population multiple times and killing or injuring more than 50,000 children.

“This destruction of a substantial part of a group constitutes genocide,” the association concluded, of the attacks on Gaza’s children.

More than 63,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israel has repeatedly said it does not intentionally target uninvolved civilians and accuses Hamas of fighting from populated areas. Throughout the war, Israel has barred independent human rights groups and journalists from traveling to Gaza. Palestinian journalists in the enclave have been killed in numbers unprecedented for media workers in a modern conflict — the vast majority in Israeli air or drone attacks, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The resolution nodded to the growing number of organizations finding Israel is committing genocide, among them Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, along with United Nations experts. The International Court of Justice is hearing a case brought by South Africa alleging that Israel is violating international law by committing and failing to prevent genocidal acts.

Sample said the timing of the association’s resolution — long after the war started, on the eve of the second anniversary of the conflict — may have owed to a fear of “personal and professional consequences.” Members of the association had lost jobs in the United States and been denied visas to travel there for speaking out, she said.

For scholars, “coming out against a genocide like this was difficult to weigh personally,” she said.

In Israel, where there has been broad support for the military offensive, but splits among academics regarding the nature of the war, the small number of Israeli experts who specialize in genocide studies nearly all agree that Israel’s actions amount to genocide, said Shmuel Lederman, an Israeli genocide scholar and political theorist at the Open University and University of Haifa.

In recent months, particularly after Israel announced a near-total blockade of humanitarian aid in March, more of Israel’s academics, particularly international law experts, began to consider the genocide label, Lederman said. After famine was declared in parts of Gaza last month by the global authority on hunger, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked assertions that Israel’s role in the famine bolstered the case for genocide.

“If we wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon,” he told Israeli reporters in August.

“What we’ve been seeing is since late March, because of the starvation, the declaration of ethnic cleansing as an official aim, it’s not just genocide scholars — there seems to be a broader and broader agreement with legal scholars that we are seeing [genocide],” said Lederman, who recalled that he personally reached a similar conclusion in the spring of 2024.

“The bottom line is, there is a reason why so many people in this field of study agree. It’s very hard to be a genocide scholar and not say it’s a genocide,” he said.

Ukraine

This is called an incitement to commit genocide. It's a war crime.

These guys will be dragged to The Hague, or they'll be cowering in sponsored exile as guests of sympathizing asshole regimes, or they'll be dead (likely by their own hand).

If the Kremlin’s intentions weren’t already clear enough, here is former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev saying today that the concept of an independent Ukrainian identity must "disappear for good" pic.twitter.com/hqnPvXq4oA

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) March 4, 2024

Genocide:

A crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.

Genocidal Intent:

The mens rea (mental element) for the crime of genocide. "Intent to destroy" is one of the elements of the crime of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. 

Today's Today

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazi's "final solution" to the Jewish question—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.

Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes.

Liberators and Survivors

Ukraine

Erasing a people's history is killing their identity. Killing their identity is an efficient, wholesale method of genocide.

Now imagine the books pictured here are:

• Black American History
• Native American History
• Catholic American History
• Cuban American History
• [insert your group here] History

Stand up and get in the fight.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread - the Russian attempt to annihilate Ukraine isn't the only thing going on.

1/24
If, for whatever reason, you have lingering questions about Russia’s intentions in this war, let me remind you of what we know. This is the missile that killed dozens of civilians at a train station in Kramatorsk, as they attempted to flee the bloody war. #velshi pic.twitter.com/McgXIVxf6u

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) April 10, 2022

Today's Today

The Armenian Genocide "started" on this date in 1915.  And of course it didn't - it started way before then because history isn't just some randomly jumbled string of unrelated events.

Writing in the late 1890s after a visit to the Ottoman Empire, the British ethnographer William Ramsay described the conditions of Armenian life as follows:

We must, however, go back to an older time, if we want to appreciate what uncontrolled Turkish rule meant, alike to Armenians and to Greeks. It did not mean religious persecution; it meant unutterable contempt ... They were dogs and pigs; and their nature was to be Christians, to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence – capricious, unprovoked violence – to resist which by violence meant death!^[34]

But we can kinda fix the date by noting that something happened 24APR1915 that pretty much signaled a change in the Turkish Government policy regarding "the Armenian problem".  

So, 1st there was this:

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Young Turk government authorities on the night of 24 April 1915.

And before long, there was this:

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote, "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation"

And this:

Decapitated heads of Armenians placed on stakes.

And this:

Armenian Christian women crucified

Maybe we can thank The Cosmic Muffin it never fucking works in the end, but there's always somebody - usually followed closely by a big buncha of rubes - willing to blame every difficulty (real or imagineered) on a hapless minority, and to mask their own lust for blood, power and treasure by tapping into a base human brutality in order to try just one more time to kill his way to glory.

So why do we keep saying, "never again" when history is just chock full of this kinda shit?