Understanding the US - Again

[A_Gupta]

“ HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure has a way with words. During an appearance on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend yesterday, Kennedy described why he had been determined to keep going to in-person addiction-recovery meetings during the COVID pandemic: “I’m not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

[A_Gupta]

CBP ( part of ICE - and those who killed/murdered Good - an American citizen) now using DoD lasers to shoot down
a party balloon - BEFORE informing FAA (and closing airspace of 8 hours - risking air traffic) ..lying about it...
See my post just few posts above (or in other dhaga.) ... and they are *only* doing lawful custom and patrol duty and arresting/deporting...

More details Pentagon let CBP use anti-drone laser before FAA closed El Paso airspace, AP sources say

Retired General Mark Hertling:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-el-pas ... ort-faa?1=

When organizations like CBP or ICE are equipped—and rhetorically encouraged—to behave like battlefield units, the discipline that restrains military forces is often absent, while the consequences of misuse are magnified. The military trains obsessively not simply to apply violence, but to control it. Domestic law enforcement is—or should be—built around principles of protection and service, not area denial or threat neutralization.

The rules of air defense have not changed: Know what’s in the air, know what you’re shooting at, and know where the debris might land. The fact that these rules had to be relearned over a major American city next to a large international airport should concern anyone who understands how quickly accidents become tragedies—and how easily discipline can be lost when the use of deadly force is normalized.

[Amber G.]

“ HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure has a way with words. During an appearance on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend yesterday, Kennedy described why he had been determined to keep going to in-person addiction-recovery meetings during the COVID pandemic: “I’m not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

But I am sure Faucci (-'former NIH director Fauci is a fraud' who actively colluded with this and that) will still be continued to be demonized by some of the usual Trump fans...

[Amber G.]

Furthermore, all fail to explain why they are unwilling to go to court. They scream all day about ICE yet not one mothers son has applied successfully to drastically curtail ICE actions in court because they all know that ICE is working within the law!

This kind of news is common -- and obvious to anyone here... eg..just from today:
Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.

-Detained immigrants have filed more than 20,000 lawsuits seeking their release
Trump administration continues detentions despite court rulings
Sheer scale of the lawsuits threatens to clog the judicial system
About 700 Justice Department attorneys deployed to represent the government in immigration cases...
immigrant detainees have filed more than 20,200 federal lawsuits demanding their release since Trump took office, a Reuters review of court dockets found, underscoring the sweeping impact of Trump's policy change.
In at least 4,421 cases, more than 400 federal judges ruled since the beginning of October that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding people illegally as it carries out its mass-deportation campaign,

List goes on..IT"S NO JOKE... Horror stories .. even among respected people (with full legal status, just randomly harassed)

[bala]

On January 20, 2025, President Joe Biden issued a preemptive, unconditional pardon to Dr. Anthony Fauci covering any potential federal offenses related to his COVID-19 response service between Jan. 1, 2014, and that date. The pardon aimed to protect Fauci from anticipated prosecutions by the incoming Trump administration.

// why would the El President pardon someone - only if they committed a crime!

[A_Gupta]

>> // why would the El President pardon someone - only if they committed a crime!

To avoid the promised persecution by the incoming Trump administration.

Trump is vindictive, he uses the Department of Justice (DoJ) to prosecute his enemies.

If the attorneys at the DoJ say there is no cause, no case, then he fires them and finds someone else. In several cases, the attorneys have resigned from the DoJ rather than compromise their integrity.

When these newfound attorneys have brought cases, typically they have been unanimously been rejected by the grand juries when a grand jury has been empaneled, or by the judges to which the cases have been brought.

So why should a person on a government salary and pension fear these cases if the case won't even come to trial? Because even to handle the preliminaries, they have to hire legal representation that is very expensive and that will financially ruin them.

So even if they are not guilty of anything, they suffer badly.

The preemptive pardon makes sure that Trump's vindictive nonsense is stopped very early in the process.

[A_Gupta]

List goes on..IT"S NO JOKE... Horror stories .. even among respected people (with full legal status, just randomly harassed)

To add to the horror, ICE often denies their medication to people in detention. E.g., say the detainee is diabetic. Metformin is the common medicine used to help control blood sugar. ICE doesn't let them have Metformin.

A particular bad case, in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, "...the 18-month-old baby, Amalia, who was suffering from respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, where she spent much of the next ten days on oxygen. Upon release, federal officers took her right back into detention at Dilley, and there she was denied daily medication prescribed after her hospital visit".

@Amber G, why do you think this kind of thing is not widely known even among BRF's widely read audience?

[bala]

>> // why would the El President pardon someone - only if they committed a crime!
To avoid the promised persecution by the incoming Trump administration.

That is a cop out (using US terminology). Fauci has some insidious connections with the Chinese labs that spilled out covid viruses into the open. The chinese paid off many in the US. I remember Clinton boy looting the Haiti charity money.
BTW i don't want to argue any further since you are set in your opinion(s) which i don't share.

[Jay]

That is a cop out (using US terminology). Fauci has some insidious connections with the Chinese labs that spilled out covid viruses into the open.

Care to share what you are referring to as the insidious connection? As I understand, most rightwingers are mad at Fauci mainly because of hiw opposition to trumps ways on how he was handling the covid outbreak in 2020 and they view this as one of the reasons why trump lost in that election. Also during 2021-2024, Fauci in his statements said the china lab-leak theory may be incorrect and this is another reason for the hate.

[A_Gupta]

>> // why would the El President pardon someone - only if they committed a crime!
To avoid the promised persecution by the incoming Trump administration.

That is a cop out (using US terminology). Fauci has some insidious connections with the Chinese labs that spilled out covid viruses into the open. The chinese paid off many in the US. I remember Clinton boy looting the Haiti charity money.
BTW i don't want to argue any further since you are set in your opinion(s) which i don't share.

You asked a question, " why would the El President pardon someone - only if they committed a crime!"
I answered the question per my information.

I was unaware that we were arguing.

And as always, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
Facts are supposed to be universal.

Coming to the origin of COVID, Fauci & co's original sin was to get published in Nature at the start of the pandemic, an article that basically said that if you postulate an origin of the COVID virus to be in Wuhan laboratories, you must be a conspiracy theorist.

That article blunted for many months the scientific and intelligence efforts to try to pinpoint the origin of the virus.

After years of effort on the part of contrarian scientists, the Wuhan laboratory origin of the virus hypothesis is now as respectable as all the other hypotheses.

The problem with all of the hypotheses of virus origin is that the evidence for them is circumstantial, and without the cooperation of the Chinese authorities, the evidence to decide one way or the other is simply not available.

The second issue is the allegations (simplified) that Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance Inc had the Wuhan laboratories conduct research that was forbidden in the US, and channeled US funds to the Wuhan lab. There is no definitive proof of that this happened either or of Fauci's involvement in this (especially if it didn't happen).

My personal take is that the whole field of virologists is too self-serving. To me it makes no more sense to study dangerous viruses in the heart of a densely populated city than it is to do sub-critical plutonium experiments in Manhattan. The whole purpose of the research was to prepare for future pandemics. The "mad scientist" archetype that destroys the world with good intentions comes to mind.

My opinion is that the virus leaked out of the lab, not deliberately, but inadvertently. Moreover, the bat virus might have become somewhat more adapted to humans by its reproduction in the lab.

There needs to be adequate oversight over research into things that can turn into pandemics, or mass destruction. The same holds for Artificial Intelligence; but good luck trying to get any kind of regulatory oversight focused on the safety of human beings.

[A_Gupta]

Re: Clinton and Haiti : After the 2010 earthquake, Bill Clinton was appointed UN Special Envoy to Haiti, and both Bill and Hillary Clinton were heavily involved in coordinating international aid and reconstruction efforts. Independent investigations (e.g., by BBC, Politico, and fact-checking outlets) found no evidence that the Clintons personally “stole” money. The issue was more about inefficiency, bureaucracy, and questionable priorities rather than outright looting.

[Vayutuvan]

"China lab leak theory maybe incorrect".

"Maybe" is a weasel word. Not a single one of the posters in BRF is so immature as to let emotions drive their view of the world.

It is intellectual dishonesty to make every issue into a binary good vs evil, with us or against us, and such. What is astounding to me is that the same set also shout and scream being non-binary, Europe is the mother civilization, support Columiba College liberal education, Trump screwing Haavad, ...

[Vayutuvan]

Both HiC and BC served in the highest posts in the world, BC serving in arguably the highest post in the world. Their daughter waa educated at the best colleges in the US. All three together run a charitable foundation that rakes in USD 750 million PA.

By every metric, BC is one of the most suitable to lead the effort.

So why was there inefficiency, burocracy, and most importantly "questionable priorities"?

[A_Gupta]

Fauci's pardon was not an isolated pardon.

NPR reported:

President Biden said he was issuing pardons to retired Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the members of Congress and staff who served on the Jan. 6 committee and the U.S. Capitol and Washington, D.C., police officers who testified before that committee.

Biden said the preemptive pardons were needed because of threats of "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions" by the incoming administration.

How could Biden have known of threats of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions? Wasn't it vile to suspect Trump of planning such things?

Well, Trump's intentions were very clear to anyone who was paying attention.

And the events since January 20th, 2025, when Trump began his second term amply prove that the fear of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions was justified.

[uddu]

Covid was a combined U.S+China effort to dominate the world. It did not go as per their plans and post covid ended up with a Multi polar world instead of a Duo polar world.

[A_Gupta]

So why was there inefficiency, burocracy, and most importantly "questionable priorities"?

If I answer to the best of my knowledge, I hope you won't accuse me of arguing with you.

The very first thing is that the Haitian administration was considered too corrupt to be consulted.
But then how do you know what the priorities should be?

So the main thing, IMO, is the exclusion of Haitian institutions and communities from the relief efforts. AFAIK, this was common across all the organizations doing relief work in Haiti.

So, the Red Cross, independent of Clinton's commission also ran itself into a mess.
NPR, 2015:
In Search Of The Red Cross' $500 Million In Haiti Relief
https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/41152415 ... iti-relief

NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success, according to a review of hundreds of pages of the charity's internal documents and emails, as well as interviews with a dozen current and former officials.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.

(emphasis added).

Permit the digression, but PM Modi when he came to power in 2014, said something very similar - that development projects in India were imposed from above, and not owned by the people it was intended to benefit, and that is why most of those projects delivered very poorly.

(August 15, 2014: "“Development should not be government‑driven alone. It must be people‑driven. When people feel ownership, when they participate, only then can projects succeed.”" {I have the date wrong, but I recall PM Modi saying this.)

This is a law of physics almost, and the Clintons, their Foundation, the Red Cross and the many other institutions failed to take this into account.

[A_Gupta]

Back to Haiti, sorry, once you bring up the topic, I have to look into it. Some of the problems have to do with Haiti itself. Lots of other concerns in the report below, which I leave you to read.

USAID (the agency that Musk and Trump ended) independent of the Clintons had a housing effort.

Here is the Office of the Inspector General audit report on that effort:

Audit of USAID/Haiti's New Settlement Construction Activities
Report Number 1-521-14-007-P
Apr 14, 2014
https://oig.usaid.gov/node/683

According to USAID/Haiti planning documents approved in August 2011, the new settlement construction activities would build up to 4,000 houses, provide 11,000 home sites, and equip the sites with basic services and infrastructure; other partners and donors would then fund the
construction of houses on these sites. The mission expected these activities to cost $55 million, with completion in December 2012.

.... the mission did not achieve its goals for constructing houses and developing home sites within budget and on schedule. As of completion of audit fieldwork in August 2013, the mission had substantially completed construction of only 816 of the planned 4,000 houses—21 percent of the goal. The
mission completed engineering and design services for approximately 2,300 home sites and was evaluating proposals for site development work, but had not provided basic services and infrastructure to any of the planned 11,000 home sites.

Some reasons:

Emphasis on using local labor and products. The construction contractors tried to use local labor whenever possible. These efforts provided a needed boost to the local economies and developed skills locally but required additional worker training and oversight, which slowed the pace of construction. At the Caracol-EKAM site, the house design featured locally made wooden windows; they required additional time and effort for Haitian producers to
manufacture.

Shortage of willing partners. USAID/Haiti planned to develop 11,000 sites and services and partner with nongovernmental organizations to fund the construction of houses on these sites, but the mission had difficulties finding partners for the construction projects. The organizations were reluctant to deal with the land tenure and construction challenges in Haiti. The mission has entered into agreements or memorandums of understanding with
three partners that will contribute to the construction of more than 4,000 additional houses on sites developed by USAID; however, as of August 2013, construction had not begun on these sites.

[uddu]

https://x.com/KanwalSibal/status/2022703913422782950
@KanwalSibal
This is effectively a declaration of war against the non- West.

What Rubio is saying is that the world’s pressing matters will be identified by the US, the US will use its power to deal with them and the outcomes will be determined by US national interest.

Very disquieting about the future.