#Aids support in 1990

[remembertheplunge]

Life scurries by--in August winds--and, all she touches--dignified.

August 21, 1990

I didn't call Arturo. he is on a well bent. Why poke in my kind face of death? Let the poor child lie in a cuddling, soothing Mother's arms place. Let him play well just once more. Let him "eat life". He knows where i am if he needs me. I'll send him a card from San Diego.

August 29, 1990

The old now cracks and falls away. i awaken to a new, to a stronger self. I grow closer to what--to who--Lew is. Funny, Life's course--so---contrite yet infinitely planned for maximum composure--The vistas and views, after Life has passed by, are as superbly interrelated as they are elegant and colorful.

Life scurries by--in August winds--and, all she touches--dignified.

End of this part of the above entries

Note:

Arturo was my Aids match. I was a volunteer with Stanislaus County Aids project in 1990. We would be matched with a person with Aids and help them through their illness and death. Thus, referring to myself as having the kind face of death. I was with Arturo when he eventually died on February 4, 1994.

I am Lew re: "who Lew is" above.

[nerdygaymormon]

The LGBTQ community has seen controversy regarding acceptance of different groups (bisexual and transgender individuals have sometimes been marginalized by the larger community), but the term LGBT has been a positive symbol of inclusion and reflects the embrace of different identities and that we’re stronger together and need each other. While there are differences, we all face many of the same challenges from broader society.

In the 1960′s, in wider society the meaning of the word gay transitioned from ‘happy’ or ‘carefree’ to predominantly mean ‘homosexual’ as they adopted the word as was used by homosexual men, except that society also used it as an umbrella term that meant anyone who wasn’t cisgender or heterosexual. The wider queer community embraced the word ‘gay’ as a mark of pride.

The modern fight for queer rights is considered to have begun with The Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was called the Gay Liberation Movement and the Gay Rights Movement.

The acronym GLB surfaced around this time to also include Lesbian and Bisexual people who felt “gay” wasn’t inclusive of their identities. 

Early in the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show and there was a focus on men’s issues. Lesbians were unhappy that gay men dominated the leadership and ignored their needs and the feminist fight. As a result, lesbians tended to focus their attention on the Women’s Rights Movement which was happening at the same time. This dominance by gay men was seen as yet one more example of patriarchy and sexism. 

In the 1970′s, sexism and homophobia existed in more virulent forms and those biases against lesbians also made it hard for them to find their voices within women’s liberation movements. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), commented that lesbians were a “lavender menace” that threatened the political efficacy of the organization and of feminism and many women felt including lesbians was a detriment.

In the 80s and 90s, a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS while the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians helped gay men with medical care and were a massive part of the activism surrounding the gay community and AIDS. This willingness to support gay men in their time of need sparked a closer, more supportive relationship between both groups, and the gay community became more receptive to feminist ideals and goals. 

Approaching the 1990′s it was clear that GLB referred to sexual identity and wasn’t inclusive of gender identity and T should be added, especially since trans activist have long been at the forefront of the community’s fight for rights and acceptance, from Stonewall onward. Some argued that T should not be added, but many gay, lesbian and bisexual people pointed out that they also transgress established gender norms and therefore the GLB acronym should include gender identities and they pushed to include T in the acronym. 

GLBT became LGBT as a way to honor the tremendous work the lesbian community did during the AIDS crisis. 

Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, movements took place to add additional letters to the acronym to recognize Intersex, Asexual, Aromantic, Agender, and others. As the acronym grew to LGBTIQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIAA, many complained this was becoming unwieldy and started using a ‘+’ to show LGBT aren’t the only identities in the community and this became more common, whether as LGBT+ or LGBTQ+. 

In the 2010′s, the process of reclaiming the word “queer” that began in the 1980′s was largely accomplished. In the 2020′s the LGBTQ+ acronym is used less often as Queer is becoming the more common term to represent the community. 

[strawb3rryqueer]

Hozier's mention of the word "hushpukena" (a Choctaw word) in the song Butchered Tongue was, of course, not a random decision. In a song about the pain of being disconnected from your ancestral language and culture as a result of colonization and oppression from outside forces- which is something that both Irish and Native American people have experienced to varying degrees. Not only do Irish and Indigenous people have this shared history of colonization at the hands of the British, but Irish and Indigenous communities have a long history of support for one another.

The usage of "hushpukena" is even more specific and important because it calls back to the mutually positive relationship between Irish and Choctaw people specifically. During the Great Hunger in Ireland, the Choctaw Nation donated $170, which is more than $5,000 in today’s money, to aid the Irish. Out of all American aid given to Ireland during the famine, the donation from the Choctaw Nation was the largest donation given.

In 1990, leaders from the Choctaw Nation visited County Mayo in Ireland to participate in the first annual Famine Walk. In 1992, Irish people visited the Choctaw Nation and participated in a trek to commemorate the Trail of Tears. Also in 1992, a plaque commemorating the Choctaw's aid was installed in the house of the mayor of Dublin. In 1995, the Irish President Mary Robinson visited the tribal headquarters of the Choctaw Nation to thank the Choctaw people for their aid. In 2017, a sculpture named "Kindred Spirits" was built in Cork, Ireland to commemorate the Choctaw's aid and to continue friendship between the two communities. In 2018, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland visited Choctaw tribal headquarters and stated,"A few years ago, on a visit to Ireland, a representative of the Choctaw Nation called your support for us ‘a sacred memory’. It is that and more. It is a sacred bond, which has joined our peoples together for all time". In 2020, more than $1.8 million was raised by Irish people as aid for Native American people (specifically the Navajo and Hopi) during the pandemic, to help provide food, clean water, and health supplies.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #14

April 12-19 2024

The Department of Commerce announced a deal with Samsung to help bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing and research and development to Texas. The deal will bring 45 billion dollars of investment to Texas to help build a research center in Taylor Texas and expand Samsung's Austin, Texas, semiconductor facility. The Biden Administration estimates this will create 21,000 new jobs. Since 1990 America has fallen from making nearly 40% of the world's semiconductor to just over 10% in 2020.

The Department of Energy announced it granted New York State $158 million to help support people making their homes more energy efficient. This is the first payment out of a $8.8 billion dollar program with 11 other states having already applied. The program will rebate Americans for improvements on their homes to lower energy usage. Americans could get as much as $8,000 off for installing a heat pump, as well as for improvements in insulation, wiring, and electrical panel. The program is expected to help save Americans $1 billion in electoral costs, and help create 50,000 new jobs.

The Department of Education began the formal process to make President Biden's new Student Loan Debt relief plan a reality. The Department published the first set of draft rules for the program. The rules will face 30 days of public comment before a second draft can be released. The Administration hopes the process can be finished by the Fall to bring debt relief to 30 million Americans, and totally eliminate the debt of 4 million former students. The Administration has already wiped out the debt of 4.3 million borrowers so far.

The Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion dollar collaboration with USAID to buy American grown foods combat global hunger. Most of the money will go to traditional shelf stable goods distributed by USAID, like wheat, rice, sorghum, lentils, chickpeas, dry peas, vegetable oil, cornmeal, navy beans, pinto beans and kidney beans, while $50 million will go to a pilot program to see if USAID can expand what it normally gives to new products. The food aid will help feed people in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Department of the Interior announced it's expanding four national wildlife refuges to protect 1.13 million wildlife habitat. The refuges are in New Mexico, North Carolina, and two in Texas. The Department also signed an order protecting parts of the Placitas area. The land is considered sacred by the Pueblos peoples of the area who have long lobbied for his protection. Security Deb Haaland the first Native American to serve as Interior Secretary and a Pueblo herself signed the order in her native New Mexico.

The Department of Labor announced new work place safety regulations about the safe amount of silica dust mine workers can be exposed to. The dust is known to cause scaring in the lungs often called black lung. It's estimated that the new regulations will save over 1,000 lives a year. The United Mine Workers have long fought for these changes and applauded the Biden Administration's actions.

The Biden Administration announced its progress in closing the racial wealth gap in America. Under President Biden the level of Black Unemployment is the lowest its ever been since it started being tracked in the 1970s, and the gap between white and black unemployment is the smallest its ever been as well. Black wealth is up 60% over where it was in 2019. The share of black owned businesses doubled between 2019 and 2022. New black businesses are being created at the fastest rate in 30 years. The Administration in 2021 Interagency Task Force to combat unfair house appraisals. Black homeowners regularly have their homes undervalued compared to whites who own comparable property. Since the Taskforce started the likelihood of such a gap has dropped by 40% and even disappeared in some states. 2023 represented a record breaking $76.2 billion in federal contracts going to small business owned by members of minority communities. This was 12% of federal contracts and the President aims to make it 15% for 2025.

The EPA announced (just now as I write this) that it plans to add PFAS, known as forever chemicals, to the Superfund law. This would require manufacturers to pay to clean up two PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. This move to force manufacturers to cover the costs of PFAS clean up comes after last week's new rule on drinking water which will remove PFAS from the nation's drinking water.

Bonus:

President Biden met a Senior named Bob in Pennsylvania who is personally benefiting from The President's capping the price of insulin for Seniors at $35, and Biden let Bob know about a cap on prosecution drug payments for seniors that will cut Bob's drug bills by more than half.

[queerasfact]

Black History Month: Simon Nkoli

“I am black, and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary and primary struggle. They will all be one struggle.”

Simon Nkoli was born in the late 1950s in the Black township of Soweto in South Africa. He grew up under apartheid, and first became involved with anti-apartheid activism as a student, despite negative reactions within the movement to his homosexuality.

In 1984, Simon was arrested along with 21 other men while protesting rent increases in the township of Delmas, a group which became known as the Delmas 22. While in prison awaiting trial, Simon was outed, and faced backlash from the rest of the group, many who feared that pulic knowledge of his sexuality would negatively impact the outcome of the trial. To the surprise of his co-accused, Simon received an outpouring of support from the international queer community, which in turn led to greater international support for the Delmas 22 and anti-apartheid work.

Simon was ultimately acquitted, and began work as a founding member of a new group, GLOW - the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of Witwatersrand - fighting for the rights of queer people in Johannesburg’s Black townships. Simon was diagnosed with HIV while in prison, and focussed especially on HIV/AIDS activism in Black communities. With GLOW, Simon went on to organise Johannesburg’s first Pride march in 1990.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president, marking the end of apartheid. Simon met and negotiated with government officials to ensure the rights of gay and lesbian people would be enshrined in the country’s new constitution - the first country in the world to do so.

Learn more

Image: Simon wearing a shirt with a pink triangle which reads “No liberation without gay-lesbian liberation”, and a pin reading “Silence=Death”

[batmanschmatman]

Book Rec: Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Bérubé

Occasionally I see some discourse on Tumblr from folks in the HBO War fandom or different historical/history adjacent fandoms about how there weren’t that many members of the queer community involved in WWII, and I’d really like to point them and everyone else with an interest in queer history to this wonderful book. Originally published in 1990, Coming Out Under Fire gets into all the different ways queer folks DID participate in the war. It’s from an American perspective, so if you’re looking for other Allied experiences, unfortunately there won’t be much here for you, but it’s exceptionally well researched, and crucially a lot of the content comes from interviews with surviving servicemembers. There’s also a documentary based on the book, which came out a few years later and includes video interviews with some of the folks included in the text.

One of Bérubé’s main points in his introduction – and for writing the book in the first place – is the American government, history textbooks, Hollywood, etc. is able to paint the WWII-era military as an almost entirely straight military force because many queer people who participated in the war effort were silenced during their lifetimes, and were unable or unwilling to reveal their true identities. Some of this was from societal pressure – the post war period saw a huge surge in homophobic rhetoric and persecution in the name of fighting Communism, not to mention the ever present heteronormative pressure to get married and have kids – but also because so many queer veterans died during the AIDS epidemic. Bérubé was inspired to preserve the voices of those who were still with us and shed a light on some of the folks we lost. (Note that this was also an intensely personal issue for Bérubé, who lost friends and his partner to AIDS and thus saw first hand how devastating this was to the community in terms of robbing us of our loved ones, friends, elders, and history itself.)

In the book, Bérubé makes the point over and over again that queer people were involved at basically every level in the American military during the war. There’s stories about guys lying when asked “Do you like girls?” during enlistment, lesbians in the Women’s Army Corps being brought to trial for fraternizing, drag shows in POW camps and in reserve, front line combat veterans discussing losing romantic partners to enemy fire or coming out to foxhole buddies, who were supportive allies rather than hateful. One of my favorite stories that’s always stuck out to me is a guy who came home and decided to come out to his elderly mother, who was fully accepting and supportive of her son’s sexuality. I see so many people speaking in absolutes that there’s NO WAY you could come out to your family and be accepted in the past, and while that was certainly true for so many people, it’s also not an absolute truth.

Please note I am NOT giving blanket permission to make assumptions about real-life people’s sexualities or identities, nor am I saying Band of Brothers fics where half the company is dating each other are historically accurate, but it’s really sad to see folks on here (unknowingly, hopefully) perpetuating the myth that there really weren’t that many queer folks in the military during WWII. We were there, we just couldn’t be out the way we might have liked to be. After the war, the Red Scare, societal pressure, and a literal epidemic silenced countless members of the community about their time in the service. There’s no way to know how many people who fought on Guadalcanal or worked at stateside bases or sorted mail in France were queer, but it’s a lot more than you were led to believe.

As a member of the community and a historian (brief resume: MA in Public History, BA in American History, have published stuff and created exhibits for dozens of museums), I just want to remind folks that we have always been here, and our lives weren’t always miserable and tragic when we came out to people or decided to live as authentically as we could get away with. It’s not completely historically inaccurate to write fic or original fiction where your queer characters can come out to their families and not be shunned, or live with their partners and not be immediately murdered. Being queer wasn’t invented at Stonewall.

[petervintonjr]

Today we celebrate the life and accomplishments of the "Godfather of Voguing," Willi Ninja. Born in 1961 Queens, New York, Willi was raised by an encouraging and supportive mother, Esther Leake, who not only encouraged his passion for dance but --significantly-- supported his own self-identity. While not able to afford dance lessons, Leake nevertheless took her son to ballet shows and other performances at places like the Apollo Theater, and Willi embarked on a self-taught path to dance greatness.

Borrowing heavily from the Harlem ballroom scene (and its established role as a socially safe space for Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ alike), Willi mastering the singular art of voguing, a unique form of dance that blended fashion poses with precise martial-arts movements. In 1982 Willi founded his own dance troupe, the House Of Ninja, which --in keeping with Harlem ballroom tradition-- also served as a community safety net. The "Ninja" moniker was inspired by Willi's own interest and study of various martial arts. Willi rapidly ascended to stardom, perfecting and reinventing his dance techniques. By the 1990's Willi had landed appearances in music videos (including two with Janet Jackson), films, talk shows, and international runway shows; drawing attention from pop icons like Madonna and fashion moguls like Jean-Paul Gaultier. One 1991 appearance on Joan Rivers' show caused considerable buzz as he encouraged audience members to "walk" as if participating at a drag ball.

On this very date (June 9) in 1990, Jennie Livingston's inspiring documentary Paris is Burning, which features appearances by Willi and the House of Ninja, was released at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival. The film exposed Willi and his signature choreography to a much wider audience. Shortly after the film's premiere, Willi starred in Anthem, a critically-acclaimed 9-minute video directed by Marlon Troy Riggs.

Willi never neglected his own community, though --his rising stardom offered him a megaphone to advocate for many issues important to the LGBTQ+ community, among them HIV/AIDS awareness and fighting to end the relentless social stigma that accompanied patients with the disease. Willi himself died of heart failure due AIDS complications, in 2006.

[daughterofthetwopomegranates]

*reblog this please!*

Armenia Struggles to Cope with Exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia is having problems integrating over 100,000 refugees who fled Nagorno-Karabakh when Azerbaijan took control of the enclave in September 2023. Yerevan has tried to be generous, but it lacks funds and a long-term plan, leaving the displaced people exposed and facing an uncertain future.

Lusine had intended to raise her fourth child in the large, comfortable home that her family built over ten years in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountain enclave in Azerbaijan. Since the early 1990s, ethnic Armenians had controlled the area, in defiance of Baku, but in September 2023 that de facto autonomy came to an end – and Lusine’s plans along with it. When Azerbaijani troops rolled in, she quickly gathered her family and packed up everything she could carry, fleeing along with 100,000 others to seek refuge in Armenia. January found her in a teeth-chatteringly cold, half-built house lent to her by local Armenian authorities.

(Above) Lusine and her family members inside the house where all twenty of them now live. (Below) The exterior of the house, with the truck they arrived in parked out front. November 2023.

Azerbaijan’s offensive on 19 September led to the exodus of almost the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh in just a few days. The pregnant 34-year-old Lusine travelled with her children in the bed of an old construction truck. The attack had been preceded by a nine-month Azerbaijani blockade of the region that left residents undernourished, lacking medical supplies and deeply distressed. As Azerbaijani troops advanced, the de facto authorities, who had governed the region with Armenia’s support since seizing it from Azerbaijan in the 1990s, quickly surrendered. Thus ended a long, violent struggle for control of Nagorno-Karabakh that fuelled three wars in as many decades and left a legacy of mass displacement of both ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Over 100,000 people have had to flee to Armenia since September 2023. Source: UNHCR as of 14 February 2024. Mapcreator, OSM, Copernicus.

Like other refugees, Lusine and her twenty relatives sheltering in the sparsely furnished and unpainted dwelling they now call home are too fearful to return even if they could. While a few refugees from the enclave have moved on to Russia or Europe, making a new life in Armenia is the only option for most. Lusine’s new neighbours gave them some old beds and a wobbly table; charities provided food and clothing; and the family has installed a wood stove in one room. “It is still cold, and the wood is so expensive”, Lusine said. “We had to leave in one day. And now we have nothing. What will be our future?”

A similar question faces the Armenian government. It has pledged to fully integrate Karabakh refugees – whose plight has evoked sympathy among the Armenian citizenry – but the resource and planning challenges that lie ahead are substantial.

Lusine’s family members inside the house they all share, November 2023.

A Generous Start

By most accounts, Armenia has been as generous as its resources allow with Nagorno-Karabakh’s former residents. The government registered arriving refugees and helped them find shelter in population centres rather than guiding them into refugee camps. All are eligible for Armenian citizenship, of which some have already availed themselves. Every adult has received a one-off payment of $250, followed by a $185 monthly stipend – the minimum wage in Armenia where people on average earned $668 per month in 2023 – to cover rent and basic needs. In towns throughout the country, refugees have been getting by on this support, stretching it by banding together to live with several people under one roof. But the aid has strained the state budget, and it is not clear how long Yerevan can sustain the payments. It is a huge burden for a country of some three million people, a quarter of whom were already living below the official poverty line. At least one in every 30 people now living in Armenia is a refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh – as many as the inhabitants of the country’s second-largest city, Gyumri.

Unless the government gets more funds to help it cover refugee-related costs, poverty and social frictions look set to mount. “You will start seeing real problems in three to four weeks if the government starts lacking money to cover the bills”, said an international expert who came to Armenia in the wake of the crisis, warning of a surge in homelessness. Armenians’ solidarity with refugees has been remarkable to date, but fatigue could kick in. Resentment may take root among locals if they see refugees being helped into jobs and housing that others might struggle to find, or bringing down wages, local officials and international experts said. Inadequate support for refugees now could lead to even costlier long-term social problems. “The local government would have to hire more social workers”, the head of an international humanitarian organisation said. “The same is true for police, doctors and teachers”.

Ellada, 54, has been displaced three times: from Baku as a teenager, in 2020 when Azerbaijani forces took over parts of Nagorno-Karabakh, and now. She lives in a kindergarten. November 2023.

Yerevan has sought international aid, but the amounts received have been insufficient. The European Union pledged over €17 million ($18 million) in budgetary support for Armenia’s cash payments to refugees, but disbursement of the funds has been delayed, seemingly by bureaucratic hurdles. International and local organisations, including UN agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, have also provided humanitarian support, but they say they are having trouble raising funds so that they can give more. In October 2023, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that the government would need $97 million to cover refugees’ essential needs through the end of March. Together, 60 international and local organisations have collected 47 per cent of this amount (which is separate from the EU’s pledge). To bridge the gap, Armenia has taken out a loan from the World Bank, and it is sounding out other international lenders as well. Armenian diaspora organisations from Europe and the U.S. are preparing to help the government organise a conference to raise additional funds from states and private donors, but no date has yet been set

To the extent Yerevan seeks funding for more than cash assistance and humanitarian aid, however, it will need to make clear what precisely it is asking donors to support. Since October, the government has been working on coordinating several programs to support longer-term integration, but it has announced no overall plan and offered no cost estimate.

Making Housing a Focus

The government says housing will be the main focus of its efforts. In September, as Karabakh residents flowed into Armenia, it moved fast to register and dispatch them to parts of the country where local authorities had housing available. But the vast majority of refugees gravitated toward the capital, despite the higher rents, thinking it would be easier to find work there. Almost half settled in Yerevan and another 30 per cent in the vicinity, where local authorities say there are far more refugees than available housing. In the town of Masis, a twenty-minute drive from the capital, many local officials had to temporarily vacate their offices so that refugees could move in. Kindergartens, libraries and schools have been repurposed as living spaces. Locals estimate that 11,500 people – almost 10 per cent of Nagorno-Karabakh’s previous Armenian population – have arrived in Masis, nearly doubling the number of residents. The former de facto Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh flag now flies beside Armenia’s over the town hall.

Alina, 35, at the former sports school which is now home to her and others displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh. Masis, November 2023.

The Armenian government will eventually have to find places for these refugees in temporary housing to go to. Many, like Lusine and her family, have found shelter in unfinished or abandoned houses – some the vestiges of households who left the country for economic reasons. Many still have legal owners. “Some may agree to sell, but some may not”, said a municipality leader. He and officials in other regions said they were talking to private companies and wealthy individuals about donations to build new housing. In Kotayk, a central region north of Yerevan, they estimated the cost to be at least $20,000 per family to build a small house near the main town.

The entrance to the Lachin corridor, the only road that connects Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Over 100,000 displaced Armenians fled this way last year. Now, it is barely used. November 2023.

There are cheaper options in sparsely populated regions – though few refugees want them. Vardenis, which borders Azerbaijan, is cheapest of all, with a village house ready to move into going for some $5,000. But one reason the prices are low is that, over the past three years, it has become the most dangerous area along the border, with frequent skirmishes between the Armenian and Azerbaijani militaries. Many residents have already left, and many more are eager to sell their homes and relocate. Among people from Nagorno-Karabakh, still suffering from the trauma of forced displacement, Vardenis is hardly a draw. “Refugees would get off the buses halfway when they learned the government was sending them to Vardenis”, said a town official. “No one wanted to live at gunpoint again”. Some 800 Karabakh Armenians have arrived in the region, only a tenth of the number local officials had made plans for. “These are the poorest, who had no choice”, a humanitarian worker said.

Samvel, 53, has been displaced twice. He now lives in Sotk, just outside Vardenis, in a border area which is encircled by military positions. December 2023.

State housing policy is set to change in March, with rent subsidies shrinking in favour of longer-term support for buying or building homes. In the coming weeks, the government is planning to offer around $7,400 per person to each family with more than two children to buy or build a house. The aim is for refugees to put down roots in one place, an official said. It remains unclear what other subsidies the other refugees will continue receiving and for how much longer. While the new policy may help refugees find more stable and sustainable housing solutions, municipal leaders are steeling themselves for a new crisis if rent support dwindles.

The Employment Challenge

As concerns employment, the government and civil society made quick first moves. In January, Yerevan began a special support project offering to reimburse companies paying refugee salaries for a certain period, in the hope that the firms would extend this arrangement into longer regular contracts. Over 5,000 Karabakh Armenians started working in their first six months in Armenia, official data shows. “The main question is how many will retain these jobs”, an Armenian businessman said. “I bet the numbers will be small”. Some locals organised job fairs for Karabakh Armenians. At one of these events, held at Yerevan’s main university, company representatives met with a group of job seekers, predominantly men – a scene consistent with the gender employment gap among this population. Tigran, a taxi company representative, brandished a list of over twenty refugees he had interviewed for drivers’ jobs. The bespectacled 21-year-old, who himself fled Nagorno-Karabakh in September, has been managing cab drivers for several weeks. “The main thing is to stop thinking we are refugees”, he said. “Armenia is not foreign to us. We must start a new life here”.

But it will be a long road for all the displaced people who want jobs to find them. At best, it will take an estimated ten to twenty years, according to an independent economists’ report for the government that Crisis Group has seen. That could undo some of the progress Armenia has made in tackling joblessness as the economy has grown in the past five years, raising unemployment from its current level of 11 per cent to 15-17 per cent. The above-referenced report calls for an ambitious plan to create up to 25,000 new jobs and reskill up to 4,000 people in sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, construction and retail. Without these measures, it suggests, thousands of displaced families may be compelled to flee once again. (Russia is a major destination for Armenian workers who send remittances home and over 6,400 people from Karabakh have already moved there, Armenian officials say.)

Some foreign development experts agree on the need to think big. They have recommended to the government tax breaks and special projects to attract job-generating investments in construction and infrastructure. A Western development agency representative suggested that Armenian diaspora groups in the West could act as liaisons to get major U.S. and European construction and other companies to establish offices in those Armenian regions hosting significant refugee populations. In the past, successful Armenian émigrés have invested in Armenia, helping generate jobs and provide communities an economic boost, especially in places distant from the capital. The government should look for ways to collaborate again with the diaspora in support of the new wave of refugees.

Supporting the Most Vulnerable

Not all the Karabakh refugees will be able to work. The new arrivals include 30,000 children and 18,000 people aged over 65, according to the UNHCR. There are also several thousand disabled people. Men with missing limbs, from war injuries and landmine explosions, are a not-infrequent sight in areas where Karabakh refugees have moved. Stepan, 49, sleeps on an iron bed in the corridor of a kindergarten, where renovations were halted to accommodate dozens of refugees. He lost his right hand and left eye during the first war over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s but nevertheless cares for an elderly aunt. They get by on his wife’s meagre salary from a cleaning job at a school, but they have received a notice telling them to vacate the kindergarten in March. “I don’t want to think about the future”, Stepan said. “We have nowhere to go. Here, I am nobody. Who will help us?”

Samvel, 53, has been displaced twice. He now lives in Sotk, just outside Vardenis, in a border area which is encircled by military positions. December 2023.

Armenia should expand existing support programs to ensure that disabled people have the support that they require. Armenian non-governmental organisations say around 9,000 people with disabilities lived in Nagorno-Karabakh before the 2020 war, but only about 2,000 had officially registered as persons with disabilities upon arrival in Armenia. State institutions caring for elderly and disabled people have seen a 25 per cent rise in residents since the refugee crisis, said Mushegh Hovsepyan, who heads an NGO called Disability Rights Agenda. Arpenik, 84, is waiting for a spot in one such care facility. At first, she stayed back when people began fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh. “I got worried when I stopped hearing even the sounds of dogs barking”, she said. She stopped a passing Azerbaijani police car, which took her to the Armenian border, where she found temporary housing. “I’ve lived such a long life, all of it in one place”, Arpenik said. “If only I could have a bit more certainty about where I will spend the last days of my life”. The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner has urged Armenia to accelerate reforms that will help people with special needs to stay at home rather than move into institutions where possible.

People who feel stigmatised by their special needs in light of prevalent social norms – such as those with HIV or drug addiction – face even greater challenges. Armenian NGOs spent over a month tracking down over 100 people among displaced Karabakh Armenians, who were previously in databases to receive HIV medications. Even then, some placed in sports halls and other collective centres refused treatment, fearing their neighbours would find out and make them outcasts, said Zhenya Mailyan, head of the NGO Real World, Real People. For drug addicts, she said, Armenia runs a special treatment program, but it is available for free to only a handful – around 600 people – and getting help of any kind outside Yerevan is almost impossible.

The Need for a Plan

Armenia absorbed a wave of refugees from the Karabakh fighting in 2020, but this challenge is far bigger. As it struggles to pull together the strands of an integration plan, Yerevan is under pressure – not only from Karabakh Armenians, who wonder what the future holds for them, but also from the citizenry and potential donors. A fully articulated plan must address housing and employment, make full partners of local authorities who will be implementing its directives, and consider the impact that it will have on the locales where it will be put into practice. In some places, bolstering service providers such as schools, police and hospitals can help meet the needs of recently arrived refugees, but well-designed programs would seek to boost support to entire communities – not just new arrivals.

Meanwhile, refugees like Lusine, grappling with their recent loss, are still coming to grips with a new and challenging reality. Her husband recently found a job building roads – albeit in another region of Armenia. “The kids still occasionally see our house in Askeran in their dreams”, Lusine said. “It will take years, probably decades, until we start living a normal life again”.

[librarycards]

If one subscribes to an ideology that views people with cognitive, psychiatric, and other diagnoses as mostly incompetent, ‘child-like’ and unable to care for themselves or make meaningful decisions about their lives, then an idea such as independent living or living in a non-institutional setting is quite radical, which is why it was, and still is, so ferociously resisted. It may be useful to understand what one means by a ‘dependent population’ that cannot live 'independently,’ which is what many proponents of institutional and group home living say of people with significant disabilities. Two dimensions could be affiliated with the term dependency: first, dependency on the state for financial support, health care, and other provisions; second, perceived inability of people to engage in their own self care without assistance of others (Oliver 1990). Some disabled people seem to fit both definitions.

In everyday usage, dependence implies an inability to care for oneself and thus having to rely on other people’s assistance. Conversely, independence implies not relying on anybody and requiring no assistance, a concept tied to an individualistic ethos (Oliver 1990). Disabled people often embody a different definition of independence, as exemplified in the principles of the Independent Living Movement. Under this framework, independence is perceived as the ability to control one’s life, such as hiring one’s own aides, and deciding on daily routines. It is not understood to mean doing things without any help from others. When analyzing daily living in modern societies, it is hard to find situations in which any people are independent from one another. Thus, projecting dependence as a characteristic only of 'fragile’ members of our societies (i.e., elderly, disabled, and children) may seem natural, but it relies on a specific North American framework of rugged individualism (Ben-Moshe, Nocella, and Withers 2013).

If anything, in many cases it is societal attitudes that create dependence amongst elderly and disabled people. Inaccessibility of the built environment, patronizing attitudes, historical exclusion from schooling and the increasingly fast pace of life in modern societies are all contributing factors to the social construction of disability (Wendell 1996) and dependence (Oliver 1990). Dependence is not inevitable or inherent within these populations. Dependence was prescribed to people with disabilities, and the elderly, so it seems detached from 'normal people’s’ existence (Finkelstein 1993). An additional problem of the creation of forced dependence and infantilization is that it is often 'masked by loving care’ (Hockey and James 1993) of family members or professionals.

Liat Ben-Moshe, “Alternatives to (Disability) Incarceration”, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada.

[kudzucataclysm]

SE Timeline Rough Draft

Early 1800s - Martians arrive on Earth after a century of observation. They either land in central Siberia or the Alps. Over the course of a couple years, the Martians split up to infiltrate human society. They are extremely successful.

1868 - Computers are invented.

1889 - Lupe Altena is born.

1897 - Personal computers invented. Sold to the general public.

1904 - Hammond is created.

1909 - There are over 500 webpages on the world wide web. This is the start of the internet.

1914 - WW1.

1917 - Carmine Keller is born.

1922 - WW1 ends in a “stalemate” with the establishment of multiple European DMZs. 

1925 - The first man in space. A political party, “The Machine”, takes the majority of power in congress.

1930s - Britain goes to war with Japan. Superscience race begins, leading to the invention of the atomic bomb. Lupe splits from The Machine (The New Machine) and funds the creation of the Martian hunting team known as ATLAS. First mutant powers begin to emerge.

1940s - Economic stagnation as conflicts at the European DMZs begin to escalate. America looks to profit as it appears another outbreak of total war may occur in Europe. Hammond and Azelfafage meet; Lupe catches ADP. Friday joins ATLAS.

1951 - Yellowstone Incident. Global atomic war begins 7 hours later. The winter of that year lasts for almost a decade.

1951-1969 - Famine. Plague. Civil war. Nuclear, broken weather. Superpowered chaos. Tall tales emerging from the wastes of red creatures with a hundred eyes… 

1955? - Lupe Altena establishes the Promethean Society and headquarters The New Machine in the outskirts of the former city of Chicago.

1958 - The construction of what will eventually be known as “The NEC” begins.

1960s - Countries not as devastated by the atomic war (such as Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Switzerland, Argentina, etc) attempt peacekeeping operations in the United States with little to no success. The Disincorporated United States of America is established, and a corporate committee of “superheroes” acts as its sword.

1970? - Martians reveal themselves to the world, promising aid and support in exchange for Earth’s resources. They soon begin terraforming Earth’s atmosphere in order to ensure a major ice age.

1971 - Intersolar Protocol is signed. A new species, known as “Chimera”, explodes across the world.

1973 - Maya Fontaine is born.

1974 - Carson Keller is born.

1980s - Necropolis turns into a tower of Babel, a megacity of stacked/layered cities, out in the middle of Lake Michigan due to the Martian King Azelfafage. The city’s population grows to the size of a country, and is unofficially regarded as such (to the ire of DUSA). It becomes a free economic zone, influenced largely by foreign capital.

1990 - Lupe Altena disappears. The authority of the NEC falls into feudalism between cities and layers. Francis Mueller is born.

1991 - Outbreak of firestorms across the southern states. Desmond Arkady is born.

1995 - Hammond disappears.

1999 - Francis experiences a “medical incident”. She develops a form of amnesia.

2000 - Francis and Vincent meet.

2003 - Sloane Arkady abandons the family. Francis is handed over to alleged crime lord Carmine Keller.

2004 - The remnants of the Arkady family move to the NEC.

2005 - Desmond is inducted into the Promethean School of Science.

[techtimechronicles24]

🇯🇵 The Sony NEWS (Network Engineering Workstation) is a series of UNIX-based workstations and servers developed by Sony Corporation. Introduced in 1987, the NEWS series represented Sony's ambitious entry into the high-performance computing market, targeting professionals in engineering, scientific research, and academia.

💾 In the late 1980s, the computing world was rapidly evolving with a growing demand for powerful workstations capable of handling complex tasks. Sony, primarily known for its consumer electronics, ventured into this niche market with the NEWS series to provide high-end workstations for network computing and engineering applications. The initial model, the NEWS NWS-800, was unveiled in 1987. It was designed to compete with established UNIX workstations from companies like Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics.

💻 The early Sony NEWS models were based on the MIPS architecture, a series of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processors known for their performance efficiency. Later models transitioned to other architectures, including the Intel x86 family. The NEWS series ran on a customized version of UNIX, providing a robust and versatile environment for software development, data processing, and scientific computations. The workstations boasted impressive processing power for their time. For instance, the NWS-800 featured a 16.67 MHz R3000A processor and supported up to 24 MB of RAM, which was substantial in the late 1980s.

🖥 High-resolution graphics capabilities were a standout feature of the NEWS series, catering to applications requiring detailed visual representations, such as CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and multimedia development. As the name suggests, network engineering was a core focus. The NEWS workstations were designed with advanced networking capabilities, including support for various networking protocols, which was critical for collaborative engineering projects and research. The machines were equipped with sizable storage options, including SCSI hard drives and support for external storage devices, ensuring ample space for large datasets and software applications.

⚙️ The Sony NEWS workstations found use in numerous specialized fields. They were particularly popular in academic research labs, animation studios, and engineering firms where high computational power and graphical capabilities were essential. Despite their advanced features, the NEWS series faced stiff competition from other established UNIX workstation manufacturers. However, they carved out a niche market due to Sony's reputation for quality and innovation. Over time, the landscape of computing evolved, and the demand for proprietary workstations diminished in favor of more standardized PC-based systems. Sony eventually discontinued the NEWS line, but the series left a lasting impression on the high-performance workstation market.

🌐 The Sony NEWS series represents a fascinating chapter in the history of computing, showcasing Sony's foray into the realm of high-performance workstations. With its robust UNIX environment, advanced graphics, and strong network capabilities, the NEWS series was a testament to Sony's engineering prowess and innovation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, it remains a memorable part of the evolution of workstations, reflecting the dynamic nature of technological advancement.

[remembertheplunge]

What you can take and what you can hold

What you can hold and what you can take from Patrick's talk and from Long Time Companion is that death is a part of life. A part of being human. You can be there for someone who is in the process of dying. It's like being awake in a nightmare, but moving on with what needs to be done .You can take and hold that in the 80s and 90s, we came to the aid of those stricken with Aids. We had a natural need to do so out of community. You were there with our brothers and sisters to the end. We will always be "with" them.What you can hold and what you can take from Patrick's talk and from Long Time Companion is that death is a part of life. A part of being human. You can be there for someone who is in the process of dying. It's like being awake in a nightmare, but moving on with what needs to be done .You can take and hold that in the 80s and 90s, we came to the aid of those stricken with Aids. We had a natural need to do so out of community. You were there with our brothers and sisters to the end. We will always be "with" them.

End of entry

The above are reflections on a talk by Patric Batt at the Academy in San Fransisco, Ca, which I attended on February 8, 2024 where he discussed Aid's in the 80's and it's impact on he and his close circle of friends.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against ASIA

Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.

In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin’s democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.

In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.

In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.

In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.

In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war, 2. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.

Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover.

In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India.

In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.

In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment.

US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange.

US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen.

In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.

In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.

Between 1964 and 1973, American pilots flew 580,000 attack sorties over Laos, an average of one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for almost a decade. By the time the last US bombs fell in April 1973, a total of 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance had rained down on this neutral country. To this day, Laos, a country of just 7 million people, retains the dubious accolade of being the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita.

From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos’s rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino.

Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed.

From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 source to 3.8 million.source Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians,source23 20,000–62,000 Laotians,4 and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward.

In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre.

In 1984, documents were released showing that Eisenhower authorized the use of atomic weapons on North Korea, should the communists renew the war in 1953. The 2,000 pages released show the high level of planning and the detail of discussion on possible use of these weapons, and Mr. Eisenhower’s interest in overcoming reluctance to use them.

In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued.

The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed. Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People’s republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day.

From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island’s population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans.

In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas. American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT. Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.

The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, “What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident.” Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and “jellyfish babies” (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll’s military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016). 

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.

In 1945 during the month-long Battle of Manila, the US in deciding whether to attack Manila (then under Japanese occupation) with ground troops, decided instead to use indiscriminate carpet-bombing, howitzers, and naval bombardment, killing an estimated 100,000 people. The casualty figures show the US’s regard for filipino civilian life: 1,010 Americans, 16,665 Japanese and 100,000 to 240,000 civilians were killed. Manila became, alongside Berlin, and Warsaw, one of the most devastated cities of WW2.

US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.

From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia.

In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces. 

In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising. 

In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, “kill everyone over the age of ten” and make the island “a howling wilderness.”

Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii’s native monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen’s desire “to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life” for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Is Lula Anti-American? It's complicated.

It’s the question in Washington that won’t go away: “Is Lula anti-American?” Since returning to Brazil’s presidency on January 1, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has repeatedly caused alarm in the U.S. capital and elsewhere with his comments on Ukraine, Venezuela, the dollar and other key issues. An unconfirmed GloboNews report in June said President Joe Biden may have abandoned any intentions of visiting Brasilia before the end of the year because of frustration with Lula’s positions.    

The question causes many to roll their eyes, and with good reason. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, some in the United States continue to see Latin America in “You’re either with us or against us” terms. Washington has a long record of getting upset with Brazil’s independent stances on everything from generic AIDS drugs in the 1990s to trade negotiations in the 2000s and the Edward Snowden affair in the 2010s. A large Latin American country confidently operating in its own national interest, neither allied with nor totally against the United States, simply does not compute for some in Washington, and maybe it never will.   

That said, there is a long list of reasonable people in places like the White House and State Department, in think tanks and in the business world who are perfectly capable of understanding nuance — and have still perceived a threat from Lula’s foreign policy in this, his third term. The list of perceived transgressions is long and growing: Lula has repeatedly echoed Russian positions on Ukraine, saying both countries share equal responsibility for the war. In April, Lula said blame for continued hostilities laid “above all” with countries who are providing arms—a slap at the United States and Europe, delivered while on a trip to China, no less. Lula has worked to revive the defunct UNASUR bloc, whose explicit purpose was to counter U.S. influence in South America. He has repeatedly urged countries to shun the U.S. dollar as a mechanism for trade when possible, voicing support for new alternatives including a common currency with Argentina or its other neighbors. Lula has been bitterly critical of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela–”worse than a war,” he has said—while downplaying the repression, torture and other human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship itself.    

For some observers, the inescapable conclusion is that Lula’s foreign policy is not neutral or “non-aligned,” but overtly friendly to Russia and China and hostile to the United States. This has been a particular letdown for many in the Democratic Party who briefly saw Lula as a hero of democracy and natural ally after he, too, defeated an authoritarian, election-denying menace on the far right. And for the record, it’s not just Americans who feel this way: the left-leaning French newspaper Liberation, in a front-page editorial prior to Lula’s visit to Paris in June, called him a “faux friend” of the West.  

To paraphrase the old saying, it’s impossible to know what truly lurks in the hearts of men. But as someone who has tried to understand Lula for the past 20 years, with admittedly mixed results, let me give my best evaluation of what’s really happening: Lula may not be anti-U.S. in the traditional sense, but he is definitely anti-U.S. hegemony, and he is more willing than before to do something about it.  

That is, Lula and his foreign policy team do not wish ill on Washington in the way that Nicolás Maduro or Vladimir Putin do, and in fact they see the United States as a critical partner on issues like climate change, energy and infrastructure investment. But they also believe the U.S.-led global order of the last 30 years has on balance not been good for Brazil or, indeed, the planet as a whole. They are convinced the world is headed toward a new, more equitable “multipolar” era in which, instead of one country at the head of the table, there will be, say, eight countries seated at a round table—and Brazil will be one of them, along with China, India and others from the ascendant Global South. Meanwhile, Lula has lost some of the inhibitions and brakes that held him back a bit during his 2003-10 presidency, and he is actively out there trying to usher the world along to this promising new phase—with an evident enthusiasm and militancy that bothers many in the West, and understandably so. 

Continue reading.

[centrally-unplanned]

I don’t remember you doing Gorbachev’s VOR (apologies if you already did), so, if you are willing: Gorbachev, middling VORcel or negative VOR?

I didn't! He is hard because essentially you need like a third axis for people like Gorbachev - someone who was hugely impactful but in a 'fuck up' sort of way. It seems wrong to mark Gorbachev and like Rudy Guiliani during 9/11 as the same tier, right? The latter just did nothing and took media credit, the former made massive, bold plays that blew up in his face. So yeah, lets use negative VOR for that.

I tend to be on the team of "the USSR was not in crisis" in 1985; it had reached the limits of its model for growth, and was definitely going to go through a budget crunch and stuff, but that isn't terminal for a lot of societies. The reformist faction in the CPSU was not the majority, and even dissident groups at this time were overwhelmingly looking at marginal changes. Gorbachev himself was elected by his supporters as a younger, status-quo 'tinkerer' - he by no means outlined a revolutionary agenda to get in power.

Gorbachev's killer talent was playing the party system - he played the long game, essentially coming up the ranks as a quintessential moderate and then revealing himself as a radical to break the illusion of consensus in CPSU thinking. Its a rare talent and I think he deserves credit for that; iterated over dozens of major events, he broke precedent policy and reigned in the conservative faction to back his new way. He does a *lot* of political gamesmanship in this period which is generally underappreciated, which he does to stack the deck against halting reform. I think there are very high odds the USSR does not embark on Glasnot & Perestroika in 1987 without him, and the nature of those reforms is really critical.

They are critical because they are complete cock-ups, and went far into imploding the Soviet economy & system of governance. At this point he deserves less credit; the fall of Eastern Europe was probably not a coup of Gorbachev's political daring, but instead a system moving into freefall and trying to cut its losses; it is in fact amazing how little opposition it got inside the USSR (they also did not see it coming at the speed and scale it did). And by 1990 Gorbachev is out of ideas, desperately begging for aid abroad to 'transition' the economy while others like Yeltsin are building parallel state structures and people like Yavlinsky are building the 500 Days Economic Programme. He is clearly out of his depth; he knew how to manipulate the party system to obtain power, but was inadequate to the task of what to do with that power once he had it.

Though while he was never in the drivers seat on the later reforms, something he did do was serve as a block on the CPSU getting better leadership in power; even during the August 1991 coup they had no intention or plan to replace him as GenSec. In this way he has (negative) VOR value as well - how well he stacked the deck came back to haunt the USSR, and not many others could have done it like he did.

There are deep structural forces at play here too, just don't have time to get into those. Overall I say essentially [B+], with the understanding that its pointing into the 'failure' direction of the 'impact' chart compared to his fellow B-tiers.

[queerasfact]

Happy birthday Keith Haring!

Born on the 4th of May 1958 in Pennsylvania, Keith Haring was one of the best known pop artists of the 20th century. Many of his works were large-scale murals in public spaces, created for charities and public service campaigns.

Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he used his work as a vehicle to talk about his experience with the disease. He spread awareness, and criticsed public complacency through the motif of "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” figures. He also created the Keith Haring Foundation to preserve his work and support organisations assisting children and those with HIV/AIDS.

Keith passed away from AIDS-related complications on 16 Feb 1990 at the age of 31.

You can learn more about Keith’s life and work through The Keith Haring Foundation.

[Image descriptions: Keith, a young man in a Nike jumper, standing in front of his artwork, a black-and-white line drawing of two figures fighting before one stumbles down a set of stairs; three yellow figures, covering their eyes, ears and mouth respectively against an orange background; blue banners at the top and bottom of the work read “IGNORANCE = FEAR” and “SILENCE = DEATH. FIGHT AIDS ACT UP”.]