Man Up! - Closed Borders, No Foreign Assistance, And Take Care Of Your Own

Liberals have howled at what they consider the unconscionable razing of USAID and the end to limitless American foreign assistance.  The Editor-in-Chief of The Economist in an interview with Elon Musk, the leader of the charge against America's behemoth bureaucracy, asked him if he realized that by closing USAID, he has the blood of millions of children on his hands?

Musk, characteristically cool, confident, and without anger, said no, he did not.  The charge was spurious and ignorant, politically motivated, superficial and inflammatory.  Channeling Ronald Reagan, Musk said, 'USAID is not the solution.  It is the problem'. 

Anyone who has worked for or with USAID knows that American foreign assistance has been a total, dismal failure.  It has been transparently and overtly political in its choices of 'investment', overlooking fraudulent, corrupt, and hopelessly criminal regimes in exchange for political support, opposition to American enemies, and access to raw materials.  Given this nod to dictators, autocrats, and their oppressive policies, it is no surprise that the Presidents-for-Life up and down the African continent have taken the money, offered thanks and a willingness to reform, and filled Swiss and offshore bank accounts with unearned dollars.  

As part of this intellectually and morally corrupt pas de deux, African governments did nothing to facilitate the development projects included in international loans and grants.  Without government support, these projects rarely got off the ground, and if they did, they foundered and died within a year. 

The donors themselves - USAID and European development agencies - were complicit in this failure to implement projects funded by them.  American projects were hopelessly optimistic in their projections, mired in political cant, and overseen by either rank amateurs, or progressive-minded inclusivists for whom Africa could do no wrong. 

In one infamous project where a USAID-sponsored non-profit agency got a supplemental grant from a private foundation to 'save newborn lives'.  While the funds could easily have been invested in wide-coverage tetanus vaccination campaigns which would have dramatically reduced the disease immediately, the agency refused such a 'top-down, siloed' approach and preferred a more participatory, community based one which would focus on maternal intimacy, warming, and love.  Needless to say, deaths from tetanus remained at their high levels. 

Because of a politically-motivated campaign for exclusive breastfeeding, mothers who chose to work outside the home, but could only do so if they relied on bottle feeding, were refused inclusion in the campaign.  The American women who had made exclusive breastfeeding a progressive cause celebre denied women of promise and enterprise the information necessary to properly bottle feed their infants. 

AIDS prevention campaigns which refused  because of 'cultural sensitivity' to recognize the dangerously promiscuous behavior of both African men and women and come down hard on the serial and multiple sexual partnerships lost the opportunity to inject the key component in prevention - moral responsibility. 

When George Bush instituted PEPFAR, a program which aimed at the rapid production and distribution of anti-retroviral drugs which could dramatically reduce mortality from AIDS, there was initial resistance from the anti-top-down advocates; but when Bush insisted, said that traditional behavior change campaigns were not working, the drugs went international and AIDS mortality dropped significantly. 

'By closing down USAID [and PEPFAR]', the Economist editor went on, you were consigning millions of people to unnecessary suffering and death'; but Musk replied that it was African governments' responsibility to rationalize their profligate spending, stop the corruption which robbed the people of billions in financial resources, and negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for favorable arrangements; and up to private foundations and non-profit agencies to take up the slack.  

Continuing to pour money into corrupt regimes, whatever the short term benefits, only perpetuates the corruption. 

The Scandinavian donors, hoping to promote in Africa the same 'democratic socialism' they had in their own countries, poured hundreds of millions of foreign exchange into Tanzania where President Julius Nyerere and his socialist nationalism party promised universal reform and rapid development.  Of course nothing of the like happened, and Tanzania remained poor, undeveloped, and dependent on foreign aid. 

'Pull the plug', said a development economist of the Rand Corporation. 'It is time cut off these dependent, corrupt, manipulative African 'leaders' completely from foreign assistance and force them to borrow on international capital markets.  Let the World Bank return to its original role of lender of last resort.' 

The Bank played an important development role in the past as this specialized lender.  Governments went to Chase, Dresdner, Citibank and others for loans, and if refused but having put together a reasonable and creditable proposal, the World Bank would step in. 

Once Robert McNamara took over the Bank presidency in hopes of restoring his credibility after a disastrous tour as Secretary of Defense prosecuting the failed American military adventure in Vietnam, the Bank hemorrhaged money.  'Poverty reduction' was the refrain, and the Bank began down the same failed road as USAID. 

 

The Chinese have gone one step farther.  Forget 'development' and simply conclude favorable bilateral contracts. Guarantee us oil at a fixed, below-market rate, and we will rebuild your transportation infrastructure, no strings attached.

'Development' - the traditional 'cooperative, community-based, participatory, inclusive programs in which the means are more important than the ends - is finished, and Elon Musk knows it. 

The illegal immigration crisis has two damaging effects - first and foremost it is causing disruption and social chaos in those European countries which, seduced by the progressive notion of 'inclusivity' let in all comers across their borders. These migrants, by and large Muslim have taken the charity of their recipient countries and given nothing in return.  France in particular is home to nests of radical Islamists who adamantly refuse integration and assimilation.  Finally conservative leaders throughout Europe have said basta! and are likely to win the next elections. 

Refusing illegal immigration has a second benefit, forcing corrupt and inefficient governments to address the needs of those citizens who flee and those who would like to.  Popular revolt is likely and welcome. 

Only those who have lost their jobs at USAID are shedding tears.  The rest of the country, thanks to the exposes of Musk, Rand, the Trump Administration, conservative journals and thinktanks, is finally seeing the phenomenal waste of dollars and resources because of in intellectually corrupt and practically inefficient program. 

Millions of deaths? Hardly.  A reform of foreign assistance according to conservative principles will be an important step in forcing recalcitrant, entrenched autocrats to react or to incite their governed to revolt.  In either case, the demise of international aid can only be a long term benefit. 

Republican, Democrat, And 'I Don't Care' - The End Of Partisan Politics In A Virtual, AI Age

It is hard to envisage any world but our own; impossible to imagine a future where what matters now does not matter, where religion is simply part of history, and where concerns about equality, environment, and demography disappear or take on unimaginable forms. 

Yet the 'post-human' generation - one which has been genetically modified and where mind and computer are interchangeable - that prosaic issues, those which limit rather than liberate, disappear and the world becomes a limitless universe of possibility. 

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Melanie Tripp had been immersed in partisan politics from a young age.  Although born and bred of conservative parents in a conservative age, she like many of her generation was drawn to the social revolution of the Sixties.  Action, involvement, and engagement were the only ways to validate one's existence in a complex world.  To sit by, ignoring the problems of racial discrimination, the warming planet, the persistent glass ceiling, and the frustrated aspirations of gay men and women was tantamount to moral failure. 

Melanie never lost her way, and while many of her colleagues treated the Sixties as a right of passage and nothing more, found comfortable sinecures on Wall Street and K Street, and left demonstrations and political activism far behind, she held the course. She had been a progressive's progressive, aligned with each and every cause in the canon.  Progressivism and activist, confrontational politics had become her whole life. 

So the idea of this virtual, artificially intelligent world disassociated from the reality she knew, was unthinkable.  No matter what the platform, the vehicle, or the modality, life would always be about compassion, consideration, and doing the right thing. 

Alfred Tomkins, Professor of Cybernetics And Brain Function at MIT had this to say about the coming post-human generation:

The implications of this engineered evolution are profound.  First, we will no longer be hindered in our mental and spiritual evolution by the inefficient use of our brains.  When a mind-computer interface (i.e. once decoded, human brain impulses will be able to be read by the computer and vice-versa) has been completed, the range of our mental capacities, however limited in the past, will be limitless.  Imagine a Google search without a screen or keypad.  The mind will not only have access to all information available in real time, but all past information that has been digitized.  

Not only will we have access to this information, but we will be able to use it however we want.  The distinction between fantasy and reality will disappear; and we will no longer be tethered by what is but what might be or what might have been.

In other words the ties that bind will be cut, and we - the human mind - will be free to explore both interior and exterior worlds.  Old passions, concerns, issues will be irrelevant once the mind itself is freed from brick and mortar. At play in the fields of the Lord, suggested author Peter Matthiessen - a limitless, epiphanic journey through realms only dreamed of. 

What most upset Melanie Tripp was the idea that in this brave new world individualism would reign. Anyone with access to the indefinably vast universe available to the human mind via a seamless link with the computer would need no one to travel with. However, relationships might be virtual but no less satisfying, and so perfectly created to fit one's personal, particular desires that any thoughts of who or what was left behind would immediately disappear. 

Individualism, Melanie and her fellow progressives believed, was at the heart of the conservatism which was threatening to disassemble the carefully designed utopian visions they had long held. If advocates of AI and futurists like Alfred Tomkins were even partially right, then the world would be consumed by and subsumed within an artificial, unstructured, sybaritic world of fantasy.  Human beings were not meant for such a rudderless, undisciplined chaos.  

The American census form asks questions about political party affiliation, and there are only three choices - Republican, Democrat, and Other - but political scientists have often wondered why there was not a fourth category, 'Indifferent'.  For as hard as it might be to believe in this divisive, contentious age that there could be anyone indifferent to the issues facing the world, there are a growing number - a number which will only increase as absorption into a virtual, cyber-mediated world becomes a reality.

The new world of virtuality, artificial intelligence, and complete interface with the electronic circuitry of of the computer will be fundamentally different - unrecognizable in fact - from that of today.  It will not be just a modified version of life, but an unimaginably different one. Once the tethers from reality have been severed, all bets are off - religion, philosophy, economics, finance will mean nothing, or will be reconfigured in an artificially constructed, personal universe. 

In order to accommodate this virtual permanence, the 'real' world will also change.  Robotics of infinite variety will make, produce, harvest, process, and supply, all controlled by independently intelligent machines.  The human body will be reconfigured and adjusted through recombinant DNA to adapt to this new environment.  The human organism will fit the function of the new cyberspace. 

Professor Tomkins went on:

It is quite normal for today's citizen to wonder what the world is becoming, so radically different it will be from anything they can imagine.  The toll has been most telling on the progressive mind, so inextricably linked as it is to its particular notion of a socially utopian future.  This notion, borne and raised in the days of Brandeis, Lafollette, and Gompers, has long since lost its relevance and intellectual elasticity. AI and virtuality are redefining 'utopia' and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the progressive vision 

Melanie, who had always been a fierce advocate of progressive causes, a firebrand of righteous indignation, was now even more animated and eager.  She marched in Iowa against the construction of AI data centers, in every silicon valley in the country against the further development of AI tools, on the steps of Congress to demand legislative action to prevent the pernicious spread of this destructive, existential threat. 

The genie, however, is out of the bottle and there is no putting him back.  AI will continue apace as will advanced genetic research, and the post-human generation is a certainty.  Those already stoic and sanguine about the future, those with the intelligence and insight to be able to imagine a future with few of the road signs and mile markers of today, welcome the new world.  Those penitential worriers like Melanie Tripp will never be able to see beyond the cant and confining canons of belief and will go fighting and struggling to oblivion.  

Monkey Meat And Ebola Vx421, The Big One - Panic And Hysteria From The Heart Of Darkness

 'Monkey meat', said Richardson Allen, longtime traveler to the heart of darkness, he called it, Africa, home to Lucy, the first homo sapiens, and the source of most of the world's problems.  

Rich Allen was a World Bank consultant, responsible for negotiating, concluding, and overseeing soft loans to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire and former home to one of the continent's longest ruling and most despotic rulers, Mobutu Sese Seko.  The Congo had not much improved over time, and typical of post-independence countries of the region, had fallen into civil war, bloody squabbles over resources, and brutal tribal rivalries. 

 

Not only did the genocidal Hutus find refuge there after the Rwandan civil war, but they joined forces with the various regimes in power to secure the eastern region's vast resources of rare earths necessary for all cell phones and computers.  Opposing tribes fought bloody war against the Hutu coalition.  The prize was worth billions of dollars and geopolitical power. 

Allen hated going to Kinshasa - more pestilential slum than city, a lawless place of violence and civil ineptitude - but he was obliged to by his Washington handlers.  o there or else he was told, and thrice-yearly visits to the country were now part of his routine. 

The ruling party's President in power for nearly a decade and like his forbears headed for a President-For-Life term of office, was particularly generous to Allen, for he brought a multi-million dollar loan package from the World Bank, one of the recent investments that came without the codicils and conditionalities of the past.  The complaisant, tolerant, and progressive Bank directors felt it was time to let Africans determine their own course, and far be it from an elite white cadre in Washington to set the ordre du jour. 

This of course was just what the President wanted.  He understood that the World Bank, little more than a shill for the United States, was only interested in securing the mineral wealth of the eastern region, and would do anything to curry favor with the present regime.  As such, they could be had.  The Bank had renegotiated loams with Tshilombo three times after his Minister of Finance had failed to perform adequately on the loan, and had insisted that this would be the last of the series.  'Sink or swim', said Harlan Rietveld, Director of the East and Southern African region of the Bank; but he knew that was just whistlin' Dixie. 

When Allen arrived this time, he began to hear rumors coming out of Kivu Province that suggested the emergence of a deadly Ebola-like disease, and that first indications were that the virus had jumped from monkeys to humans and made its way, thanks to dinners of roasted monkey brains and cassava, through a number of villages in the region.  Reports were as yet unconfirmed - the Congo had refused WHO or CDC assistance - and so one only had rumors to go on. 

The news of the disease of course could not be contained, and soon it found its way in the American news media.  'New African Monkey Virus!' shouted the New York Post headline, and from that tabloid word spread around the country. 

The New York Times having turned far left and sympathetic to the progressive movement in America took the Post headline as yet another example of conservative racism.  Calling Africans monkeys - at least by association - had been long retired, an editorial noted, and from now on the virus would be called simply by its scientific name.  But Ebola Vx421, although necessary to distinguish it from previous forms of the mother-virus, was too cumbersome for the popular press; and so the Times decided on 'Forest Sentinel', a convenient, memorable, and not entirely illogical nomenclature. 

Rich Allen had eaten plenty of monkey meat in his sojourns in the Congo. 'Bush meat', the catch-all term used by Africans to describe whatever you caught that day - snake, rat, bat, or monkey, was all he knew his meals by and was told not to ask further.  The meat was not bad when simmered in hot sauce with local herbs, and since there was nothing to eat on his long journeys into the jungle, he had no choice.

 

Besides, Allen was not a worrier.  After escaping malaria, rabies, hepatitis, hemorrhagic fever, AIDS, snakebites and road accidents - to say nothing of kidnapping, carjacking, armed assault, and tribal crossfires - he was not about to get upset about yet another jungle thing.  

Africa had given the world nothing but awful things, thought Allen - slaves, disease, filching, diverting, and out-and-out thievery of international foreign assistance, and more death and destruction than the rest of the world combined - so one more nasty bit coming out of the jungle was, in the scope of things, quite normal and expected. 

Of course he didn't share these thoughts with his colleagues and superiors at the Bank, for they would have jumped on him for latent racism, and assured that his career in the Bank would come to a quick and precipitous end.  Yet, the truth was unpleasant as it was, was unavoidable.

The stew he tucked into at an Ngoma roadside stall was probably field rat or vulture and not monkey, and even if it was, the probabilities of infection with a still only rumored disease were small.  However, when he returned to Washington and saw the increasing new stories about the Congolese virus - the moniker 'Monkey Disease' had stuck no matter how much the woke Times had tried to give it a euphemistic turn - he was not surprised. The country had gone apoplectic when COVID hit American shores, and had become hysterical over a relatively mild disease which affected old people and the immunologically infirm. 

The thought of a true killer, one which did not simply cause congestion and aches and pains but foul discharges, bloody weeping eyes, pustulating sores, and rabies-like delusions was very scary.

As in the early days of COVID, the government was quick to act.  The show of immediacy and federal concern and responsibility would pave the way for more extensive and politically rewarding influence, so regardless of whether the rumors coming out of Africa were true, it behooved the government to act. The conservative government in power was reluctant to press the panic button, but the liberals in Congress saw the same political advantages they had reaped during COVID.  

Although Dr. Fauci, the COVID czar was being brought before Congress and challenged for his authoritarian shutting down of America, concealing the truth about the virus' origins, and his revealing arrogant statements in his purloined diary, there was no reason not to set off alarm bells and rally the country around the Democrat party. 

The far right had had enough of Africa, and with the new muscularity of President Trump's foreign policy and the decimation of Iran, they suggested that the next bombing run should be over eastern Congo and blow the whole place to smithereens, wait till the dust settled and the bodies are picked clean, and then set up American mining operations to secure access to the rare earths. 

Surprisingly, at least to liberal Democrats, the fact that this racist, nationalistic cant was spreading, and not a few Americans agreed with the principle.  Just look at what's happening in Europe - another African problem as tens of thousands of sub-Saharan 'migrants' storm a Spanish territory in Morocco to gain entry to the EU while thousands more cross the Mediterranean to Italy and beyond. 

The worst came from the underground paper 'The Freedom Gazette' published somewhere in the Humboldt County, California deep woods, in which its editors wondered whether the virus could be contained in Africa and 'do the job for us'.  A hateful screed condemned by the Left and given berth by the Right, but an unfortunately common, although thoroughly rancid idea. 

Politics aside, the rest of the country had quickly moved past the jittery stage and was in full-throated pre-panic aphasia - howling, barking, and frenzied.  'How can we stop it?  Can we contain it?' were the most rational statements coming from the populace who unwittingly and indirectly had mouthed the same foul ideas of The Freedom Gazette'.  Containment was a kind of genocide after all, no one could deny that; and so the New York Times hounded their editors to be careful what they wrote. 

Rich Allen went back to the Congo in the midst of the furor.  By that time he had a beautiful Fulani mistress and spent long, languorous hours with her in the Presidential Suite of the new, five-star Hotel Independence built with Bank 'easements' and rival to the best hotels of Asia.  Renegotiating the loan was a piece of cake since both parties wanted closure, so triplicate copies of the new loan agreement were signed and delivered early in his stay, so the next two weeks were simply delightful. 

Kivu and the eastern Congo were far away, too far away for any concern whatsoever; and even if the rumors were true and he died of some fulminating jungle fever, better it be in bed with lovely Amina Diallo. 

The rest of America was neither so sanguine nor stoic, and the hysteria about The Big One spread and intensified.  Congressional spokespersons were warning that COVID was kindergarten play compared to Ebola Vx421, and that the time to prepare was now. 

Finally epidemiologists from WHO were let into Kivu, but they had been screened and vetted.  Only African doctors were to be allowed to investigate, so the team was led by Elvis Adebayo, a Nigerian Ministry of Health Associate Director, an Ibo appointed because of his tribal loyalties and with nothing whatsoever to do with his medical qualifications.  The rest of the team was cobbled together with the same political favorites and Africa-first nationalists. 

As a result, nothing came of the visit except 'Nothing to worry about', but as soon as the composition of the team was provided to the press, the anti-African sentiment only increased. Concern, which had turned to indifference, had become sheer screw you fed up nastiness.   Old General Curtis Lemay was resurrected thanks to AI and he was seen virally repeating his famous, 'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age'

Luckily EbolaVx421 turned out to be nothing - a few dead monkeys and a hundred dead from fulminating dysentery unrelated to the virus but mistakenly reported as the epicenter - and slowly but surely the American panic dissipated and disappeared. 

Richard Allen reluctantly left the warm embraces of his lover and returned to Washington already planning his next trip.