In an attempt to make us all feel bad about MAGA, a Democrat operative pointed out that a 71 year old Burmese refugee in Thailand died the other day because the NGO providing her oxygen ceased service because Trump shut off the USAID funds. There were a couple problems with this:
- @Oilfield_Rando pointed out that the CEO of the NGO makes $2.2 million per year. You’d think he could have kicked in for an oxygen tank or two.
- An American lady in North Carolina died of hypothermia on January 6th, 2025, after FEMA failed to help her. No Democrat rose to condemn Biden over this. Bottom line: they don’t care about people dying. They only care about political power and the dead lady in Thailand, they think, helps them gain power. Think of how hard they had to look to even find this out?
- The conflict in Burma (called Myanmar by the current pack of thugs running the place) has been ongoing since 1948. It is an entirely senseless ethnic conflict that no civilized people would tolerate – and we note, with great care, that under British rule these conflicts were suppressed because killing someone on account of their ethnicity is barbaric and stupid.
As we are now closely reviewing all the foreign aid, we must also address the underlying reason for foreign aid. Why, at the end of the day, do we do it? After all, outside sporadic international help in response to natural disasters, until the mid-20th century foreign aid just wasn’t a thing. A couple reasons are given for it:
- Humanitarian. Can’t let people die. This, of course, is true. If we can in any way prevent an unnecessary death, we should do so.
- Global power. If we don’t provide the aid, then someone else will and we’ll lose influence over crucial areas of the globe, placing ourselves at a disadvantage.
We’ll start with number 2 here: global power. If we don’t, someone else will, to our detriment. Ok. Between 2012 and 2022 the United States provided about $2.8 billion per year in aid to Tanzania. That’s equal to 3.4% of Tanzania’s annual GDP. They should love us, right? I mean, if someone handed us a sum equal to 3.4% of our GDP every year, we’d probably like that guy. I know if someone handed me a figure equal to 3.4% of my annual income, I’d be grateful. So, how has this love worked out?
Tanzania has signed a $2.2bn deal with two Chinese firms to build a standard gauge rail link between the port of Dar es Salaam and a nickel mine in Burundi, Business Insider Africa reports.
Looked into who owns that nickel mine in Burundi and it appears to be a company called East African Region Group which is headed up by some sheik from the United Arab Emirates. We gave Burundi $69.7 million in 2024.
To nutshell, in return for $28 billion to Tanzania over the past ten years and nearly $70 million to Burundi just in 2024 we got…nothing. China gets to build the railroad and the Emirates get to mine the nickel. Oh, I mean, sure: there are more healthy workers in Tanzania and Burundi than there would have been without US aid and that’s nice…helps the Chinese and Emiratis a lot. I’m sure they’re grateful.
But at least we did provide the humanitarian aid, right? We can feel good about that!
Well, maybe not.
Not trying to pick on Tanzania here – in fact, I literally picked the country at random for the example here, figuring in advance that any African nation would have the same basic arc over the past 60+ years – but the bottom line is that it became independent in 1961 and in 2024, 63 years later, got $2.8 billion in aid from us. And a lot more from elsewhere (though I suspect that a lot of the non-US aid is actually just more US aid funneled through non-US NGO’s). Just what the heck have the people of Tanzania been up to all this time? In 63 years of American post-colonial development we went from an agricultural backwater to a significant industrial power (that would be 1776 to 1839) about to break out into major power level. And we didn’t get a dime in foreign aid.
Oh, wait. Perhaps that is it?
Americans are no smarter than Africans – people is people. Genius is rare and the average run of us are…average. Americans are not harder working than Africans. Americans are not morally superior to Africans. On the grand scale of things, a space alien examining an African and an American wouldn’t find a dime’s worth of difference between them. So, what gives?
The basic African story: independence granted by an exhausted Imperial power which just didn’t want to bother any longer (though people pump up the leaders of independence movements in Africa into some sort of super-human heroes); a colonially-educated, socialist-minded strong-man takes over and rules for ages (Tanzania was run by Julius Nyerere from 1960 to 1985) suppressing political dissent and trying to graft Marxist twaddle onto a subsistence-agriculture, tribal society. Debt, inflation and general misery results (in the best cases – the worst go Rwanda and genocidal murder)…along with buckets of foreign aid money. And don’t get me wrong here, as far as post-colonial strong-men went, Nyerere was pretty good…at least he doesn’t appear to have looted his treasury and he did (eventually) give up power (though basically to the one-party State he created and which persists today via bogus elections). It should be noted that Nyerere the anti-colonialist firebrand who is hailed to this day as one of the Liberators of Africa…died in a London hospital. All that time in power all that money spent…couldn’t even build one first-rate hospital in his homeland.
All we can really say here is that the aid is the problem – that it actually props up what is wrong in the recipient countries. Think about it: Nyerere’s policies were basket-case bad right out the gate…what kept his people fed sufficient to prevent bloody revolution was the foreign aid. The gifts of the First World. And so it goes in one Third World nation after another – a lousy, stupid and usually corrupt post-colonial Ruling Class makes a mess of things and then begs for aid to put a band aid over the failure. And we give and give and give and nothing really ever improves and on top of all that, we here in the USA don’t even get to exploit the material resources and cheap labor…the Chinese get to do that. How is this good? How is this considered moral?
I don’t want us to leave people to just die – but if people are just dying then we can’t just pass out the cash. We have to address the underlying problem…and that problem is going to invariably be the Ruling Class of the country where people will die if they don’t get aid. They’re either too corrupt or too stupid (or a combination of same) to run their country. I don’t care about offended patriotic sensibilities…if you will starve without my food, then when I send the food, I send my control over you. Because I can’t trust you’ll fix the problem. If we send aid, it comes with strict instructions not just on how the aid is used, but how the recipient country will organize itself going forward. And, hey, they can refuse the conditions…and the food. Their choice. Let the local strong-man rant and rave about American imperialists…I don’t care. But if he wants food rather than his people rising up to kill him, then he’ll do as he’s told.
As I’ve said on many occasions of late, it is time for us to enter the real world. To take things as they actually are, not as we might wish them to be. It is the only way anything is going to get fixed.
Blogs For Victory 
Four more years of this level of corruption:
Corruption charges against Eric Adams ordered to be dropped by Justice Department officials. Bove in his bitchy letter insists that it is unethical or even illegal to investigate or prosecute a sitting elected official because it will interfere with their duties LOL.
Acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sassoon, has resigned rather than bow to this corrupt political pressure. Sassoon is hardly a bleeding heart liberal — she’s a conservative Republican, Federalist Society member who clerked for Scalia.
Get on your knees for the President and all your legal troubles just disappear!
Meanwhile Trump admits that he caved into Putin’s demands re Ukraine. So picking fights with allies and appeasing our enemies. Fantastic, getting cucked by Putin. Pathetic.
And now an anti-vaxxer as Health Secretary. LOL.
She seems nice
Pointless, but nice.
We really do need a sarcasm font.
“She seems nice” is kind of the Western version of “bless your heart” where tone is important to convey the real, opposite, meaning of the words.
I’m still not sure this person isn’t yet another alias of one of our fanatically obsessive trolls.
Is this the Lynne Goodman I knew back in the day? You look the same as you did 40 years ago. Do you remember that night when you decided to join the guys, and we ended up in that strip club in Okinawa? I was so embarrassed for you.
Maybe Lynne could help her cause by detailing the charges against Adams, and assuring us that this isn’t selective prosecution. As Democrats are famous for. Otherwise, we can simply chalk her up to being another unhinged Trump hater.
“Otherwise, we can simply chalk her up to being another unhinged Trump hater.”
Or maybe another alias linked to a photo pulled from the internet, designed to get a nose back under the tent.
why though? Does it seem like this is going to work? That you’ll suddenly become liberals?
That’s a good point, RDM. We can only speculate what their motive is for coming here, but what it boils down to is either a sick pathology that delights in nitpicking and gotchas or they’re getting paid. There really aren’t any other possibilities. The ones who have come here for an actual political discussion are virtually nonexistent.
I’ve always seen the troll invasions as evidence of a couple of things.
One is the equivalent of keying a nice car because you are ticked off that someone else has something you don’t have. This is why I call them “blog vandals”. There is no desire or intent to engage in actual discourse, just a strange satisfaction in the effort to mar something by smearing s**t on it.
And one is the smug conviction that by blindly accepting and then parroting the Leftist scripts this somehow conveys intelligence. We have often noted that the trolls never advocate for an actual POLITICAL structure over the one we describe and endorse. There is some muttering in the general direction of supporting a Leftist agenda, and a lot of snarling about people, but never even a token effort to explain an allegiance to a specific governance model. This, while typical of the Democrat base, also illustrates the superficial nature of Leftist support.
And then, of course, is the very real fact that there are people who are paid to invade and vandalize conservative sites. Not that there is an actual payroll where people are given salaries for posting attacks on conservative ideas and people, but a kind of gig economy where there is compensation for how many clicks posts generate. This would explain the pattern of purposely posting things obviously designed to prompt responses.
There is no interest in “converting” any of us, because they never offer anything to convert TO. They couldn’t care less if anyone ever changes a single iota of an existing belief, because that is not why they are here. There is the cheap thrill of attacking and insulting, and I don’t discount that attraction to a certain mentality, but there is no evangelism there.
I am heartened by the perception that Trump has been learning from his mistakes so maybe he will continue to do so. That hope makes the news (as yet unconfirmed) that he has appointed a Globalist Deep State denizen, US Army Colonel (retired) Gerald (“Gerry”) W. Parker, to head up the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy a little less concerning.
What is “One Health”? Dr. Malone explains it:
I’m not freaking out about this. Trump’s astounding record of brilliance over the past not-quite-a-month gives him a little leeway to make a misstep every now and then. So far this alleged nomination has not been verified, and even if it is Trump knows how to fire people.
His credentials to run the office seem to be in order…but, as we know, credentials aren’t everything! A quick glance at One Health does generate a host of questions…not so much in the stated intent, but in the details of how it is to be achieved. I, too, will trust Trump on this as he had earned that…but the top people involved in One Health for the USA are a house of Globalist horrors – running from Donna Shalala (remember her?!) to Scooter Libby. Not exactly the sort of people who give MAGA a sense of confidence.
You can find here (PDF) his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic from 10/2023 (so, GOP controlled House). One thing that stands out early: he praises Operation Warp Speed and that probably made him acceptable to Trump who still stands by it (and, truth be told, there was some good work done early on in it). It is a lengthy document but in just skimming a few main points made, it seems to me that:
1. He acknowledges that Covid might have originated in a lab, though he doesn’t go as far as to say its release was deliberate (I believe it was: a test case both in the spread of a bio-weapon and how to massage the Global Narrative on it).
2. He acknowledges that tyrannical regimes (ie, China) are probably the worst places to have a biolab; their lack of transparency and accountability leave them wide open for accidental or deliberate release of pathogens.
3. He asserts the need for massively better control over pathogen research and appears to be very hard on people doing “gain of function” research (though he seems to differentiate between types of gain of function research).
On the whole, he comes across as both knowledgeable and intelligent. As long as Trump calls the shots on whether or not to go into emergency mode (rather than letting Parker do it as Fauci did), I think it’ll be ok – we might be getting a watch dog on gain of function research who knows what to look for.
I hope you’re right about this guy, but his support of One Health is a big red flag. I’m in favor of increasing respect for the lives and quality of lives of animals, and maybe having a veterinarian in this position is a good thing, but the effort to put environmental issues, as subjective and politically motivated as they can be, on equal footing with care and treatment of sentient beings sounds way too radically Leftist for me.
As long as Trump keeps an eye on him, I’ll withhold judgment.
As far as Warp Speed went, it was great in its proof of the ability to make rapid progress when necessary. It’s just that once the program reached a certain point, where its defects became so obvious, that should have been admitted, instead of charging ahead based on Magical Thinking.
Time will tell! But he bears watching.
I read this yesterday as well. My first reaction was, there must be something we don’t know. I guess the safest strategy going forward is to not have another pandemic.
And man, oh man do they seem to want to crack up bird flu as the next pandemic, don’t they? In this I really hope Trump has learned his lesson…and that we have, too.
Here’s the thing for me going forward: the “Spanish flu” of 1918 had an overall mortality rate of 2.5%. In some areas it went up as high as 22% but this is based on a variety of factors and the higher death tolls were rare. Covid had a mortality rate of 0.5%…we went into global panic mode over a disease that wasn’t even 20% of Spanish flu and we can see that the world continued functioning without global lockdowns in 1918 an in a time when medical treatments were much less effective. The whole Covid thing was ridiculous…and that is what I hope Trump remembers: that if the medical guys aren’t certain it has a 3% mortality rate, then there’s no need (or effectiveness) in lockdowns.
The bad ones we might be hit with are SARS (11% mortality), Anthrax (10 to 50% depending on variety) and Marburg virus (23 to 90% depending on variety). If it ain’t one of those three, it isn’t a problem…and the other high-mortality diseases (like Ebola) are very unlikely outside tropical areas.
“they seem to want to crack up bird flu as the next pandemic, don’t they?”
This is like tattoos. Bear with me here. For almost forever the tattoo thought process was “Should I get a tattoo?” or “Do I want a tattoo?” Then, almost overnight, this morphed into the assumption that getting a tattoo was not a matter of “if” but of “which”. That is, “What tattoo(s) should I get?”
Just as we have gone from thinking of a pandemic as a rare occurrence, we now see the term “next pandemic” as an expression of the thought process that having pandemics is totally normal.
How about some guide rails on that term? Like first it has to be something that spreads quickly, kills a high percentage of those who get it, and can’t be easily and effectively treated. Because of those three basic criteria, Covid only matched one.
Psychological Bioterrorism is the use of fear about a disease by governments and other organizations, such as Big Pharma, to manipulate individuals, populations, and governments. Although the fear of infectious disease is an obvious example, it is not the only way psychological bioterrorism is used.
In a January 2017 interview with the journal Current Concerns, Dr. Alexander Kouzminov (a former Soviet-Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) intelligence officer) described operational fundamentals of spy tradecraft which he termed “Information Bioterrorism.” His analysis was supported with examples drawn from events surrounding late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century infectious disease outbreak events: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (2002–2003), Avian Influenza A (H5N1) (1997, 2006–2007), and H1N1 “Swine flu” (2009 He defined this as a new method for exerting global operational influence and manipulation over individuals, populations and nations, and he suggested that other names for this strategy could be “information bioterrorism” or “information biological blackmail.” In the essay, Dr. Kouzminov provides specific language for key roles, responsibilities, and strategies used when deploying this form of bioterrorism.
Dr.Malone often writes about the Psy Wars–even wrote a book about the phenomenon.
He writes: “Psychological” or “Information Bioterrorism” involves the use of fear of an infectious disease to control people and their behavior. It is a very potent method for mass manipulation of populations, and this method works by creating a state of heightened anxiety and fear of death in the people who are targeted. This promoted fear is often based on allusions to misleading, poorly documented historical stories—essentially folktales or parables—about historical epidemics of very dangerous diseases such as plague, typhoid fever, yellow fever, polio, or smallpox. Often, these parables have little relevance to modern society with its sophisticated sanitary practices, clean water, hospital networks, and wide spectrum of antibiotics, antifungals, antiparasitics, and anti-inflammatory drugs.
(BTW Dr. Malone believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a valuable spokesman for the identification of this mass mind control strategy.)
This is encouraging (hat-tip, Jeff Childers) And for the record, Ro Khanna is a far Left Democrat from California.
Jeff ends with this, and I could not agree more:
There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.
Not fond of giving Lenin credit for anything, but this is a great reference to what we have been seeing the last almost-a-month
Yep.
One thing that strikes me about Lenin, just as an aside, is that he was Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev.
Pobedonostsev was the absolutely disastrous advisor of Nicholas II for the first ten years of his reign and more than any other individual, he made sure that not only would there be a revolution but that it would be an explosion of violence. Like Lenin, he looked out across humanity and found it to be silly, narrow, cowardly and stupid…which argument can be made but both Lenin and Pobedonostsev had the same flaw: they thought they were immune to it. The only people on Earth who knew what was what and, dammit, they were going to force everyone to do as they were told!
This is the disease of the half-smart: just clever enough to not be average, but lacking in any sense of humility.
The thing is, what are their values as a party? As you note, plenty of Democrats want to merely double down on what they have – which is a firm conviction that they can endlessly alter things. There is an arrogance underlying their views – from their conviction that they can save the world by controlling cow farts to “fixing” a depressed teen via genital surgery. This is the “1 plus 1 equals 3” fallacy at the bottom of their views. And they can’t fix their problems without abandoning their certainty.
But none of this is actual politics. It might be about what kind of government would be needed to be able to engage their social engineering schemes (totalitarian) but it is never just about the best way to govern a nation. The “values as a party” are all some version of shaping mankind and society to fit their template but not the most effective way to govern.
Most conservatives have a pretty good idea of the actual political ideology they support. They might not be very articulate, and they might start off with a lot of argy-bargy Identity crap and so on, but pushed to define their actual form of preferred government it will be basically a federal government with limited power and most authority left to the states or to the people. But keep pushing a Democrat and all you get is more Miss America interview level pap and examples of how their party affiliation makes them more moral and virtuous. You will not get a response that the best way to govern a nation is to consolidate power in the hands of a few elites who then run everything and tell people how they have to live their lives.
Very cleverly done.
Cool – well done.
The Resolute Bed?
LOL
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY !!!
Anyone tired of winning yet? Yeah, me neither.
We’re all familiar with the Leftist howl of “follow the SCIENCE!!!” accompanied by the derisive sneer of “Science DENIER”. But we never hear of the mechanism by which we are (1) informed of “the science” and then (2) convinced that it is, must be, real. This article explains it, in detail.
Thacker dissects the way “science” is presented and then validated by the Usual Suspects in a circular and incestuous flurry of mutual admiration and endorsement.
We think we are aware of the inherent falseness of what we are fed as “news” but until we read an in-depth analysis of how this has been accomplished it’s still just a vague perception that what we are told is BS. This article shows us how the sausage is made.
Have you been to Bluesky? I’ve got an account there and, wow, it is the most boring social media site I’ve ever seen…just endless Lefties mindlessly repeating the talking points of the day.
That’s because you just described what passes for political discourse on the Left.