Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

Nonetheless, your investigation is important. We need way more testimonials to get to the bottom of these things. Are programs like USAID a grift, or are the people cancelling it the grifters, or is the answer the dreaded middle?

This is the only way we’re going to re-find the spirit of this country (because it is absolutely absent at the moment). Americans have always been proud of programs that carry the legacy of the Marshall Plan.

I don’t want to get rid of a program just because it failed, anything can fail. We need to know if the people getting rid of these things even believe in goodwill and charity. They may not, in which case debating the finances and accounting is the obvious distraction.

This is less about if we have the money in the room, and more so about did we put people with the right fucking hearts in the room.

An uncharitable person will fight goodwill even if it’s free.

Security wise U.S. cannot even if they can intervene with socially bad policy except to prevent widespread civil arrest etc which is why CIA exists. U.S. pre-emptive wars were good for the military-industrial apparatus that keeps them in power & made sure others can't get those places. In global strategy terms, I suspevt Web3 & DeFi should be seen as an economical third party that reduces Chinese & Russian share of the Western economical pie at times dollar weakens.

The public can never understand that you need to be "though" to win because might makes right in statescraft & geopoli, so the U.S has to censor the internet including inside NATO to prevent economical ties' risk of dying due political pressure. It's understandable. If the game is played classified, and most humans hesitate to pull a gun's trigger, they have no idea about the world inside the entities that protect them. They cannot see that it's a very very zero-sum world, hobbesian world.

This is different from human history because WWII ±25 years we boiled over the techno-industrial pot, and nowadays all of the seemingly evil work of US & its agencies is, actually, necessary for the survival of mankind.

IOW I probably agree that the premise of USAID is flawed. However wiping it off the face of the earth over a matter of days is a massive over-reaction to the problem and is going to kill people short-term that didn't need to be killed if we had decided to take a deliberate approach to dismantling it.

> The entire diplomatic purpose of USAID is to build up good will abroad, but that's simply not working. No amount of money handed to whomever is going to change the fact that, within recent history, America has undertaken several pre-emptive wars and managed them poorly.

That is just so damn true. We do such a fantastic job of creating enemies of America.

"Please also be aware that if you were to be granted a presidential pardon, the pardoned offense would not be removed from your criminal record. Instead, both the federal conviction as well as the pardon would both appear on your record."

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questions

> Moreover, the traditional lie concerned only particulars and was never meant to deceive literally everybody; it was directed at the enemy and was meant to deceive only him. These two limitations restricted the injury inflicted upon truth to such an extent that to us, in retrospect, it may appear almost harmless. Since facts always occur in a context, a particular lie – that is, a falsehood that makes no attempt to change the whole context – tears, as it were, a hole in the fabric of factuality. As every historian knows, one can spot a lie by noticing incongruities, holes, or the junctures of patched-up places. As long as the texture as a whole is kept intact, the lie will eventually show up as if of its own accord. The second limitation concerns those who are engaged in the business of deception. They used to belong to the restricted circle of statesmen and diplomats, who among themselves still knew and could preserve the truth.They were not likely to fall victims to their own falsehoods; they could deceive others without deceiving themselves. Both of these mitigating circumstances of the old art of lying are noticeably absent from the manipulation of facts that confronts us today.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics"

The other type of Biden/Harris supporter has the privilege of time and energy to spend examining the situation critically and recognizes them as just supporting further corporate control behind the guise of bureaucracy instead of "strong men". But they vote/evangalize for them anyway because at least they don't actively advocate for harming people out of spite.

Every time someone says or implies "bOtH sIdEs" a hungry child gets kicked out of a free and reduced school lunch program and called a parasite.