Elon Musk is once again whining that people hate him for no apparent reason, (that is, other than his criminal attribution to the alleged ‘woke mind parasite’). He sees himself as an innocent elite genius who is merely trying to save the world with his companies. Below is Elon’s own tweet on X, where he states his case (or whines as is the case).
Now, being a human myself, I can’t speak for others, but I can assure Elon that I am not infected with any parasite—’woke mind’ or not. (I’ll leave that dubious honor to RFK, Jr. and his ‘alleged’ brain worm). As for ‘woke’ being some type of mental incapacity; well the DSM-5 (which documents diagnostic criteria for all medically recognized mental disorders), does not recognize any such ‘woke mind parasite’ and neither does the AMA (American Medical Association).
So, what’s Elon’s problem? Is he a clueless wanderer basking in his Asperger’s fog, or is he a pathological liar. No one knows for sure, but then again two things could be true. (Notice the qualifying term ‘could’. I wouldn’t want Elon to sue for ‘defamation’). Not only does Elon claim that the savage cuts to the U.S. budget aren’t hurting anyone, but he’s whining that, (ironic drum roll please), people are ‘being mean’ to him.
Elon’s lack of self awareness may be due to all sorts of factors which we can’t know without psychic or magical powers. We can only judge him by the choices he makes and orders he gives. And Elon’s chainsaw approach to budgetary issues has become a de facto death sentence to many, both globally and here at home.
While Elon can hide behind Donald Trump, (and while it’s more fun to blame Donald); the truth is that Elon and his fellow ‘billionaire bandits’ will benefit from these deadly cuts. Not only that, but our foreign adversaries will also benefit from this savage bloodletting of government programs.
So, let’s look at one specifically cruel and vicious cut—and the consequences, namely USAID.
Elon’s chainsaw, along with his pimply faced muskrat hackers, (this includes you ‘Big Balls); targeted USAID early into this execution process. Elon’s attack on USAID at the behest of Trump’s executive order, is illegal. No president can unilaterally dismantle a federal agency, such as the Department of Education, or in this case–USAID. Only Congress has the authority to dismantle a federal agency. Historically, USAID was first created under an executive order by John F. Kennedy, but was established to be an independent agency by an act of Congress. The Congressional Research Service explained: “Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”
Journalist Charlie Wartzel, reporting for The Atlantic in early February, called out this attack on multiple federal agencies as a type of coup. To quote:
“Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.”
And Wartzel is right. This is “nothing short of an administrative coup.” This illegal and illegitimate coup has cost lives across the globe, so hating Elon appears to be justified, (though Elon will continue to whine). However, since Elon seems to be clueless regarding the damage he and his team have generated; this article will outline the ‘collateral damage’ these savage cuts have wrought on those least able to sustain this ‘fiscal violence.’
Damage to global health via USAID cuts…TB is BAAACK….
If you thought COVID was deadly—tuberculosis or TB is worse. Known historically as ‘consumption’, TB is highly contagious and transmitted through the air. Reporting from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists spoke to the following concerns cited by the World Health Organization:
“On March 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a warning that the funding cuts to USAID would lead to a resurgence of tuberculosis (TB) globally.”
The Bulletin piece also cited how in 2023, … “TB killed 1.25 million people worldwide, supplanting COVID-19 as the planet’s deadliest infectious disease.” Furthermore, the Bulletin piece cited estimates from The Center for Global Development that postulated … “more than three million people could die within a year if foreign aid funding is not restored.”
Medical injustice and TB…
TB is a killer that has been effectively managed in more affluent nations, while allowed to flourish in poorer ones. Such medical neglect could be viewed as a form of premeditated genocide via diagnostic delays and treatment denial. Management methods for TB exist with early detection being the primary tool for the best outcomes. TB is diagnosed using X-rays, which are not always readily available in poorer nations. In more impoverished nations, TB is then diagnosed through the microscopic examination of sputum. While such microscopy can be an effective means of detecting ‘highly infectious’ patients; it has proven to be “less reliable for people who have extra-pulmonary TB, who are co-infected with HIV, or who have a latent case of TB.” Once diagnosed a treatment regimen is formulated which reflects the severity of that particular infection. Unfortunately, such treatments are not equally available globally. This is a core component of medical injustice.
TB activist John Green recently published a new book speaking to medical injustice titled: Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. The book gives a history of TB and how the spread of this virus “reflects the biases of society”… and … “centers on how the unequal availability of tuberculosis treatment is a form of medical injustice.” The book speaks to how … “TB has been used as a tool of racial and social segregation.” More importantly, this work speaks to the very topic of medical injustice.
So, what is ‘medical injustice’…
The National Institutes for Health (NIH) has spoken to medical injustice and the very real issue of racial disparities in healthcare. To quote: “Racial disparities in medical care should be understood within the context of racial inequities in societal institutions.” In a paper titled: Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in Health Care; authors David R. Williams and Toni D. Rucker further explained: “Systematic discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotypes. Effectively addressing disparities in the quality of care requires improved data systems, increased regulatory vigilance, and new initiatives to appropriately train medical professionals and recruit more providers from disadvantaged minority backgrounds. Identifying and implementing effective strategies to eliminate racial inequities in health status and medical care should be made a national priority.”
Now, this consideration is in direct defiance–of any internal morality war against the ‘woke mind virus,’ that occupies the grey matter of Elon’s cranium. In fact, Elon not only views such concerns with contempt, but he celebrated the ending of USAID, posting on his X account:
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.
Did Elon demonstrate the slightest compassion? No. Did Elon factor in the costs of future contagions resulting from these cuts? No. Elon has both a personal and professional history lacking in compassion or empathy. In fact Elon was quoted a few weeks ago on the Joe Rogan show, stating that …”The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”
He further called it out as …”the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.
So, where did Elon develop this morally bankrupt philosophy? No one knows for sure. Perhaps he’s having his ‘Marie Antoinette’ moment. We will have to leave that quandary to future historians. Going back to the issue at hand, what are the human costs of these cuts to USAID?
Human costs of USAID cuts…
These savage cuts will result in multiple surges of malaria, TB, ebola, HIV. Children will die. When speaking specifically to TB, funding and resources to fight the disease among poorer nations has been inconsistent. This lack of funding has artificially kept prices too high for at-risk communities. As a result of this inadequate access, the disease has mutated and developed varied levels of resistance to present day antibiotics. To quote : “When Johnson & Johnson received public funding to develop Bedaquiline—a drug produced to treat drug-resistant TB and extensively drug-resistant TB—the company sought to extend its patents in countries with a high prevalence of TB to prevent generic production at lower costs.”
Adding to the assault on public health, groups such as the ‘Stop TB Partnership’ are being forced to downsize as a result of these cuts.
Additional health clinics dependent on U.S. funding are forced to close. The cruelty of these savage cuts is only surpassed by the stupidity of the DOGE team. Cutting preventative care, diagnostics, and treatment regimens for the moderately drug resistant forms of TB we have identified now, will only lead to mutations which will eventually become completely drug resistant. At that point, we would be facing a deadly global pandemic far worse than COVID.
And yet, we have Elon whining about all the hate directed at him, claiming he hasn’t hurt anyone. Except that’s not true. The cuts Elon is demanding with his DOGE muskrats, especially to USAID will most likely result in some 3 million deaths per year, according to estimates from the Center for Global Development. The estimate is based on accumulated data collection. Their data focused …”on the interventions that had the largest direct impact in terms of lives saved, based on the available evidence.” The Center for Global Development … “did not include every possible lifesaving intervention funded by U.S. foreign assistance into our calculations.” Data which was included in this estimate focused on U.S. aid to the world’s poorest nations; such as assistance …”for combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB, and of course emergency humanitarian relief.” The group added that …”our global estimates of lives saved are mostly grounded in a calculation of the efficacy of the underlying services that foreign aid funds in each sector (e.g. lives saved by antiretrovirals), with some courageous extrapolation based on funding levels.”
The results of USAID according to the Center for Global Development…
Results speak for themselves far better than any public relations commercial. According to the available data, USAID has accomplished the following results:
- “Overall lives saved are concentrated in East and Southern Africa, plus Nigeria, in line with the geography of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and malaria burdens.
- The specific countries where we estimate the largest number of lives saved are Nigeria and South Africa, both at around 150,000 lives saved per year from U.S. foreign aid, almost entirely due to PEPFAR support for HIV/AIDS in South Africa’s case, and largely so in Nigeria, albeit with significant numbers due to vaccines, tuberculosis control, and malaria control in that case.
- Outside of Africa, we see the highest numbers in Indonesia, India, and Pakistan, based on allocations for TB controls (and for vaccines in Pakistan’s case), as well as in Ukraine (mostly due to TB and HIV/AIDS control).”
Does anyone notice a pattern here? The most impacted groups happen to be in black majority African nations, or Southeast Asia—with one exception—Elon’s native South Africa. Are these cuts merely a function of corporate greed, or is this a de facto genocide against black Africans and Asians? The statistical analysis provided by The Center for Global Development included data on several diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, vaccine preventable deaths or disability from COVID, measles, polio, and once again—TB.
More specifically, when we examine the statistics from drug resistant TB, the results are as follows:
- “For tuberculosis, we know of no empirical estimate of the impact of US foreign aid relative to a realistic counterfactual, and present exclusively a ‘gross’ estimate.
- The WHO estimates that TB treatment and provision of anti-retrovirals to HIV-positive people with TB averted an estimated 44 million deaths between 2010 and 2022 including TB/ART combination treatment preventing 9.2 million. To avoid any risk of double-counting, we assume 36 million deaths averted from TB treatment alone.
- The WHO also estimates that roughly 20 percent of TB control is funded internationally with 51% of aid coming from the U.S.
- Combining these figures yields a total of 300,000 tuberculosis deaths averted due to US foreign aid.
- As a robustness check, the estimated cost per death averted of international TB assistance is around $2,000, this exercise suggests a cost per life saved of $2,150.”
Confronted with this data, what is Elon’s response? Again, he’s still whining about all the ‘hate’ directed towards him. Elon is incredulously tone deaf to the justified hatred he generates. He rails against empathy. What Elon fails to understand is that empathy is that missing ingredient, the secret sauce—if you will—required for the formation of what we commoners refer to as—a conscience. Then again, Elon prefers computers to people and computers don’t have a conscience. They don’t need one. Subsequently, cutting off aid to starving children isn’t a problem when you don’t have a conscience. Cutting off aid to the desperately ill isn’t a problem when you don’t have a conscience. Maintaining the books for a premeditated genocide targeting racial minorities isn’t a problem when you don’t have a conscience. In fact, this isn’t the first time the information technology industry assisted in a cold blooded extermination of targeted minorities—a genocide if you will. The old IBM Corporation …”knowingly organized all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and even extermination. Ironically, it is this type of technology that Elon and his fanboys–worship. So much for having a conscience.
Then there’s the additional accusations that Elon is possibly a racist or a neo Nazi, that have prevailed in social media to the extent that Elon’s father felt the need to rebut these claims with his now infamous and asinine statement, quoted by The Washington Post. To quote:
“They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all. Actually no crime. We had several black servants who were their friends.”
Apart from the tone deaf nature of this quote, we only have to look at the targeted cuts to conclude that the effects of those cuts hurt racial minorities (as in non-white populations), the most. One thing’s for sure, if Elon’s not a virulent racist—he sure as hell does a great job ‘playing one on tv’.
And that alone is deserving of our hatred.
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