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I found out tonight that a friend, who happens to be a cadet from class of 1982 has a relative high up in USAID , responsible for over 600 personal, specializing in disease control. This includes providing treatment for highly contagious diseases like Ebola and keeping it out of the US . The scientists recognize addressing this at the source is the prudent and efficient means to avoid a worldwide health crisis.

Common sense, except for those who think a stable genius with failed casinos in Atlantic City can build a resort in Gaza

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I saw an interview today of an administrator who was very familiar with the workings of USAId and he said it is an extremely well run organisation. He said if there were problems it would be no different than any other organisation run by humans because people aren't perfect and inefficiencies can occur., My question is what makes Musk and Trump think they alone are perfect and everyone else in Government is imperfect, even negligent nd guilty of fraud, So just burn the place down and start over? Yeah, right. Meantime they are inflicting human suffering and great anxiety mong a lot of people. But they don't care. If you have a block of ice for a heart you can't feel empathy or compassion. Blind ego and lust for money and power guides your every move.

Then there's the billion dollars worth of farm products and medicines and so many other things provided by American farms and businesses that will now be brought to a halt, causing loss of revenue. spoilage and not to mention all the lost domestic jobs.

They keep saying how smart Musk is, and Trump never tires of saying how smart he is . but to me smart people don't say and do the things these guys these people do. And the GP lawmakers look on either saying nothing or trying unsuccessfully to explain the logic in their madness.

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It's self-evident that they are stupid jerks, fake men, ridiculous in the extreme. They do not even deserve a second of our fear energy time, as some people are realizing when they check in with themselves. Our energies have to go forward and deeply into what we have to do to renew the constitutionality of our democratic lives.. and country.

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So well said, Robin.

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There is no logic in their madness except mindless nihilism. These are extremely immature, simpleminded, unintelligent people on a power trip. That half the country has empowered them is its own sad statement on our national culture.

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The twin sister in Glass Onion calls them Shitheads

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I have one word for it…Isolationism!!

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Isolationism is a long standing, deeply rooted theme in American culture.

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Along with anti-intellectualism.

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Preventing a world wide epidemic just doesn't mean anything to T and M, much less feeding hungry people. Only money and power are important to them.

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Those that don't die will be enslaved to work

Trumps Gold Mines

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Xi wins the right to gain soft power and the world loses as USAID is destroyed. Thanks to Biden the US economy is doing well, and the US can afford AID, while other countries who will have to step up, are not doing so well thanks to US tariffs and other reasons. So, that creates the perfect opportunity for Xi.

While it may serve Musk's vindictiveness to shut it down, it might have another purpose too besides indulging evil men. I have started to suspect that Musk's disembowelment at the Treasury of USAID, medicare, medicaid, social security is in part to give Trump leverage against the Dems to try to force them to accept removing the Debt Ceiling that would allow him to put the US in deeper debt as long as he can to give his billionaires even bigger tax cuts than Elon is going to get through the treasury.

These old white racist men, just want to suck the meat and marrow out of the US and then they can take their money and go destroy another country. Elon is already setting that up in Europe, trying to gain welcome in Italy, England and Germany. However, I read an article today that says 90 percent of Germans are worried about foreign influence on the elections here, and Tesla sales sunk 60% in January. Relying on the AfD alone to buy Teslas is not wise, because a lot of them do not have the money, and perhaps they think putting themselves in power will redistribute it, but Hitler tried that and it did not turn out too well.

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My deep belief is that Drumpf and now his henchman Musk are setting out to loot the US Treasury completely and disguise it somehow. Nothing else makes sense for those two crooks.

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And after that Kosmo? Fort Knox and all that gold? Nah, that would be too obvious..

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They won't need to. Computer hacks transferring funds to secret accounts elsewhere and then all the new crypto Ponzi schemes will be good enough, physical objects too unwieldy and too easy to trace!

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Yes, of course. You are right Kozmo.

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agree Linda, I thought Elon was stupid for his purchase and mismanagement of Twitter-X but it turns out that this was his plan all along. I think he knows Tesla is doomed (the Chinese are out competing Tesla and foreign sales are drying up and not enough right-wingers are going to buy his cars) and the company has suffered with his X distraction (he tweets 100+/day on some days)!

I think his plan is to engage in acceleration in America’s decline and co-opt the government for a project to get to Mars…hell and us be damned.

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A stable genius with a failed airline, failed hotels, failed Manhattan development and a fake (failed) university who believes people who benefit from USAID are losers. I wonder how much aid South Africa will lose with Emperor Musk cutting it off.

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Yes, a failure with delusions of grandeur who sees kind thoughtful intelligent people are losers and suckers.

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Great story. There are another million or so just like it, each one full of deep lessons for those who can listen. Anyone who loves Muddy Waters and clean food is surely going to heaven.

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Unfortunately USAID barely registers over here, especially in MAGA land. The results of this “wipe out” will be so devastating in terms of human loss of life. And yet MAGA land professes such proud Christian values. As a physicist (his name escapes me) once wrote: “Good people do good things, bad people do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.” Clearly, right now, it’s bad people doing bad things.

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And too many of every kind of people not paying attention.

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Steven Weinberg was the physicist

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Yes, thank you!

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"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." <https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/86758.Steven_Weinberg>

Also: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." <https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/86758.Steven_Weinberg>

Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics.

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Thanks for the accurate quotes! The word “evil” is so much more appropriate for our current crisis.

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And the Devil went down to Georgia…except now it’s the whole USA!! Let cheer on all our judges in all our courts to chop these guys at the knees.

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Exactly, Janet Robbins

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Thank you Janet for the thread

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It’s rare that ‘bad people’ do good things.

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That was probably U.S. physicist Richard Feynman.

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Both Trump and Musk are megalomaniacs and and Trump is demented. I think they're doing all this stuff quickly in the hopes that some of it will fall through the cracks of litigation. No way. Too many people are affected by each of their actions. Musk is committing crimes -- I hope there is a way to charge him with at least some of them -- the hard part is that it has to be done by an enforcement agency outside the executive branch. Being a special employee does not protect him.

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Both Felon47 and F’Elon Swastikar are sociopathic monsters.

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The Muskrat (no offense to four-legged muskrats) uses his great wealth to intimidate and buy what he wants. The Rethugs in the House and Senate have to change their underwear several times a day as he threatens them with a well financed primary if they don’t do what he wants.The extreme power of money in politics has become an existential threat to the whole world, not only to our tottering democracy.

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That guy did more good in the month of May 2004 than Elon Musk+his gnomes will ever do in their greedy, narcissistic lives. The far right elite has wanted to gut the social programs that benefit and protect those Americans who aren't rich since the New Deal. They smell blood in the air and will try to obliterate regulations that keep our water clean, food safe and harmful chemicals out of our bodies. All the things that give us a longer life.

I wish I'd seen Muddy Waters too.

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Oh! oh! I just remembered I did see Muddy Waters and I said hello to him. He said hello and looked confused. I won't go into too much detail, but he was playing at the Sunday afternoon The Sound concert at Fillmore Auditorium with the Butterfield Blues Band and the Jefferson Airplane in mid September 1966. I think it was my first Fillmore concert and I went with my husband, then my boyfriend. He does not remember it, not even the poster with the nude woman on it... Sorry I made this all about me....... You can delete it if you want.

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Cool story Ellen. We need these types of diversions.

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That's very nice of you. In that case I recommend listening to "Subterranean Homesick Blues, "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", as the poet says. It's the song of my life and sounds best loud, especially the last two weeks. But as Lucian says, USAID is more important to our wellbeing, and other people's wellbeing too.

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I was around there then and I don’t remember it either. I’m glad you brought it up 🙏

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Three concerts, Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon. The Airplane, Butterfield (and Bishop and Bloomfield) and Muddy Waters. I've seen The Rolling Stones at least 10 times and I still remember seeing Muddy Waters and Butterfield, Bishop and Bloomfield for the first time.

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ooh yea...

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The USAID workers in Vietnam to me were like the Seabee unit in our province that I sometimes hung out with.

I pretty much have been telling everybody since that they, and my late friend Dr. Jorge Winterer, were the only ones I saw over there doing anything that even tried to really help the Vietnamese people.

Of course in retrospect, none of us were really seeing clearly.

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In 1964 I walked into a small shop in a village without electricity in Greece. It was the first time I saw USA on a huge bag of rice.. over that summer I saw more evidence of the help we had provided edges of society that had been blown up in the Italian and Nazi occupation - evidence of the starvation in world war 2 villages in Greece - allayed by USAID. In return, then, a deep affection for Americans.

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Heartbreaking story. Thank you for telling it.

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Both of the ogres perpetrating this mess are takers, both lie and cheat. Both are soulless and surrounding themselves with wannabes. Truthfully? I don't think either of them even know what USAID is, but it has "US"in it, therefore, it must go. There must be a way out. The Mrat slithered his way in to the United States by lying. The Convict-in-Chief is a third generation cheat, liar, and loser. His grandfather was a German draft dodger, his father was a Fascist and he? He is a combination of the two. We can't give up the fight to topple them and we just can't give in.

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Two takers working together is like antimatter meets matter…Kaboom…they annihilate each other!!

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If only.

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It's taken 80 years; from 1945 to 2025 for the Reich to insinuate and subvert itself into the American Military Industrial Government by way of the Repugnantan Party.

80 years to groom the grandson of a draft dodging bar room & brothel grifting German expat; and son of a real estate, grifting slumlord Nazi sympathiser; into the full blown psychopathic narcissist; ready and willing to

systematically feed the finely woven tapestry of our Democracy into the chipper.

'Make that a John Deere chipper. John Deere the time honoured supplier of agricultural equipment; now driving farms out of business by grifting on equipment repair.

The whole damn machine has passed off that Carmel Carnival Clown of a dashboard bobble head as the tool running the machine.

When it all goes to shit and he alone takes the fall; blubbering "wha happened?!?"

The Reich will still be indulging all of its deplorable appetites.

It takes way more than two wrongs to make a Reich.

Jus' sayin'.....too much?

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Donald is a complete Psychopath.

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He fits all 30 descriptions of a Psychopath.

He belived he is "never wrong."

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👏👏👏

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These people have no idea what a bargain the USAID budget is. The return is incalculable, not just in the simple fact of doing a great deal of good in the world, but in the good will and influence that translate to soft power. They think they are thwarting “wokeness,” but they are castrating their own regime.

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Lucian,

These numbskulls on Care about enriching themselves and don’t give a damn the USAID is ne of the most critical agencies in the world for the provision of humanitarian assistance, or one of the must vital components of our national security apparatus and foreign policy. Its personnel and the NGOs that they work with are worth a half million soldiers. They do things that give us credibility and respect without costing the blood of American soldiers and the vast sums of money needed to deploy them to the areas these talented and courageous humanitarians work.Trump, Musk, their cabal and supporters view USAID as a welfare agency for undeserving and racially inferior foreigners. The work of USAID keeps countries from becoming the clients of China and Russia, without requiring American military power.

It is far more a far important and effective component in our national security than another 10 Army divisions, two more carrier battle groups, and another Marine expeditionary brigade combined. I say that with near 40 years of military service, combat experience in Iraq, and more high level military joint education, and military history knowledge than anyone in the Trump-Musk Cabal or greedy, nihilistic, and incompetents.

Thank you for sharing this personal experience with us.

Peace, continued to heal up, be safe and watch your six.

Steve Dundas

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We do care. We have for a very long time. I can't come up with anything important to add, Lucian.I am overwhelmed by all I am required to do in it's minutia since my home and shop/studio burned to the ground up in Altadena. It's all the time I can muster to keep up with you, Heather, Joyce and a few others. Thank you for what you lay down so cogently.

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I'm so sorry for your paradigm changing loss.

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Ransom, I've missed seeing your comments acrossed the Substacks community we share in common. Caring is the very heart of what we share, horrified at what is happening around us. Hearing of your loss in those devastating fires breaks my heart...I'm so sorry for your loss. Having that fall on top the nightmare we are all living, I can't imagine. Joyce always ends with we are in this together...Stay strong, WE truly are in this together...Please let this community know what we might help, as you and your neighbors work to rebuild. Peace.

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USAID does so much in supplying food and in global disease control. I am acquainted with several people who spent years working with USAID. I asked one of them today about whether PEPFARS and the TB treatment programs have really been resumed, and word on the ground is, they haven't--because the Musk minions fired all the contractors and intermediaries who get the medicines to the clinics and patients. Even if they don't care about what happens to people in "sh**hole countries", they are ignoring what is delicately called "enlightened self interest". The resurgence of partially treated HIV, TB and other infections is a recipe for evolving more drug resistant strains of all these infections. And they won''t stay 'over there'--they'll be over here in no time spreading across North America.

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These people have no idea who they are fucking over. FAFO, because if Social Security Checks stop coming and I'm relying on my 'friends with money,' or my step-mother (who has my dad's money), I'm fucked. And it won't be pretty when we're done kicking the shits out, either.

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Some trump propaganda supporter that I took to be a bot posted three comments in yesterday's forum this afternoon. Based on tales of USAID waste, one pre-disputes your touching story here. Angered, I replied:

I heard some of this bs too last night on I Heart Russian Disinformation Clear Channel Radio—stuff so ridiculous no one with an IQ higher than the NYC temperature would believe it. The actual aid the world is losing (hear real news on NPR and Democracy Now!) will disable and kill in recipient countries and break hearts here. Hard to believe Muck has any intent but to destroy global trust in the U.S. for at least the rest of our lifetimes. Basics (a gift 🎁 link): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/business/usaid-conspiracy-theories-disinformation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vE4.9RBN.-irEPap_FSj5&smid=url-share

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