news

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-12-04-2023-ece85568ce36cb2315f26b10adda30fa

Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.

After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.

There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.

The weekly update is here on the website.

Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.

The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

https://nitter.net/MSF_canada/status/1730819946362405039

https://www.msf.org/msf-convoy-attacked-gaza-all-elements-point-israeli-army-responsibility

World needs to move off oil. I hope Xi can get an efficient scheme to do hydrogen and oxygen from seawater. Green energy + battery + water purification. I'm sure we have the capacity to make a self sustaining or net positive way of doing this with current tech and knowldge. BRICS should be developing and testing cutting edge tech in these places. Once oil is irrelevant, or a minority player in world energy, the global grab for oil lands will decrease as developing countries will benifiet from the tech.

Knowing the US and how peak hawkish they are now with it's history with Venezuela, I think this is a trap from within. Those advocating for this should be placed on a SUS list. They'll use it as an excuse to go full military on Venezuela and crank down on the sanctions again.

Money on it being a cop or an ex-cop? Also, ARM THE HOMELESS

This fucking sucks, the Great Satan needs to be forced to embrace the Great Seitan

(so does the rest of the first world but Great Satan/Seitan was funnier)

Sigh.

Teen Vogue continues to be awesome.

Henry Kissinger was one of the US empire's proudest, most prolifically murderous foot soldiers.

On November 29, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who NPR calls “one of the country's most important foreign policy thinkers for more than half a century,” died at 100. Kissinger was responsible for an estimated 3 to 4 million deaths... and millions of human rights violations .... recalled by Yale historian Greg Grandin in his obituary of Kissinger for The Nation: “Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places.”

In May, Grandin wrote ... about Kissinger making it to age 100, outliving his contemporaries who share some of the blame, like Richard Nixon. That month, MSNBC commentator Medhi [sic] Hasan “celebrated” Kissinger’s birthday by recalling “some of the many, many people around the world who didn’t get to live till 100, or even 60, 70 or 80, because of Henry Kissinger, because of his support for brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars, and war crimes.”

Kissinger’s... political career launched by steering US foreign policy through the Vietnam and Cold Wars, using, as Grandin put it, “bombs as an instrument of diplomacy” — an approach which, HuffPost’s obituary observed, “has become a hallmark of US foreign policy.”

In the 1970s, Kissinger was partially responsible for right-wing coup d’etats and government overthrows in Latin America, including Chile and Argentina.

The Intercept’s obituary said Kissinger “stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa."

Upon news of Kissinger's death, the internet celebrated possibly more than it did after the last elderly imperial death.... Joshua Hill posted a video from the 2010s of Kissinger being “unrepentant” about the deaths of Cambodians, where Kissinger’s personally approved carpet-bombing campaign still wounds and takes lives from cluster bombs left there more than 50 years later. (The US provided the same sort of bombs to Ukraine this year.) C-SPAN posted footage from 2016 of Kissinger defending his role in Vietnam. A biting missive from the late Anthony Bourdain... got posted over and over again.

Within 10 minutes of seeing the news, I started seeing the headlines: “America’s Most Notorious War Criminal” dead, a Teen Vogue classic; “Controversial Diplomat;” and some spicier ones, such as “Finally” at the leftist Tribune. Publishers Verso and Jacobin had a book fully prepared and ready for a print run for the occasion. It’s hard to exaggerate how long the media had to get ready for this moment. A contributor to the New York Times’s obituary died in 2010.

Apparently, the preparedness to dance on Kissinger's grave went hand-in-hand with an assumption, proven right, that those currently in power wouldn’t hesitate to eulogize a war criminal. Eric Adams and George W. Bush are among those publicly mourning. In life, Kissinger was a friend to Hillary Clinton, an advisor to Trump, and feted by the Obama administration in 2016 — at the same time that Obama acknowledged the US’s role in Argentina’s “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists.

Kissinger has advised or been celebrated by every presidency since he joined Nixon’s cabinet, though less so with President Biden. However, current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, whose name has been sprawled across coverage of America’s 2023 involvement in overseas wars, attended Kissinger’s 100th-birthday party at the New York Public Library...

New York City’s social strata was a respite for Kissinger, according to New York magazine’s Choire Sicha, who noted that from 1977 onward — when... “in all the world there were fewer names more hated than his” — he left his academic and diplomatic careers behind to attend socialite parties after his campaign of death.

“Historical memory is short, and US politicians from both parties have a habit of bestowing accolades and kind words on officials who deserve nothing of the sort,” wrote Azadeh Shahshahani for Teen Vogue in 2021 following the death of fellow war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, calling for accountability for both Rumsfeld and Kissinger. Shahshahani pointed out that, in 1971, in Bangladesh alone, Kissinger had enabled the deaths of between 300,000 and 3 million people by providing arms to the Pakistani Army.

Ultimately, there’s little to celebrate about a war criminal who lived without regret to 100 years old, comfortably admired by the political class that created and supported him, with millions of deaths in his tracks. I’m reminded of a lyric: “Not everybody gets the chance to live/A life that isn't dangerous.”

Our tech overlords, modern-day robber barons with hubris and unchecked power, aspire to never age, never die, to outlive us on other planets rather than save ours. There’s not much dignity left in the “lesser evil” that is folks gladly burning our planet to the ground in favor of supposed American business interests. Things are dark right now. But, as writer Edward Ongweso Jr. tweeted, “At least one less literal demon walks among us.”

While death tolls keep rising over the world at the hands or arms of the US empire, to outlive one of its proudest, prolifically murderous foots soldiers offers some small karmic comfort.

https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1730695483398537666

Along with the renewed proposal to push them through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, the English translation of the report adds:

"The Sea is also open to Gazans. At its will, Israel opens the sea crossing and enables a mass escape to European and African countries."

Full article is here. Dermer, who iirc is also American as well, was Netanyahu's longtime Israeli ambassador to the United States, and is friendly with many members of Congress

https://www.israelhayom.co.il/magazine/hashavua/article/14889801

btw, the Israeli newspaper reporting Netanyahu's plan to "thin out" the Gaza population is the one founded by his patron, the late Sheldon Adelson. It's distributed free all over Israel and is often criticized for being a propaganda rag for Netanyahu. So for them to report this means it's real.

https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1730715663100981439

Not news to anybody here, since we already know they take NED money, but still - nice to see some confirmation that Federal Evans and the rest of the Bellingcat crew are collaborators.

it ain't easy being green, Jack