We are a measles country. We are no longer the country fighting cancer. We are going to cut down our forests and sell our lands. If your tornado hits at night you are in trouble because the weather service doesn’t have enough people to work at night so no one even gets notice that there are tornados, never mind where they are going. When your home is destroyed you can no longer count on FEMA to help you. Many contractors got changes to their government contracts that included no longer needing to not have segregation. There used to be a clause in government contracts that said you could not segregate employees and now the government has explicitly removed that clause. We have elected officials who think the President of the United States can legally choose to deport people with no due process. The United States government tried to renege on paying its bills to American businesses and nearly half of the Supreme Court was ok with that. We are snatching people in the street, leaving their children on sidewalks and in cars, and whisking them off to known horror prisons in other countries, and considering doing the same to people who are legal citizens too. We were once the envy of the world and now the world is staring at us in horror. 


Tonight I went and networked. I went to the first screening of the movie Lobito Bound. Africacell paid to have a movie made which was an adventure movie/road trip. It wasn’t really an adventure movie but it was a road trip movie, putting out the positives of the Lobito Corridor. Under the Biden administration the US government and our European allies worked to create a railway in Africa that will dramatically reduce export time and increase trade. It will also help the west get access to African critical minerals as opposed to being so dependent on China. My group at USAID was working on this. The movie will be released on an unnamed global platform before the end of the year so you can see it too. 

Most of the world spies on each other by recruiting locals. Russia is special/unique in that it posts Russians in other countries. This got harder with the modern digital computerized social media age when it was easy to figure out someone wasn’t real. They set up shop in Brazil because Brazilians can get visa free access in almost as many countries as the US but you can get a genuine birth certificate by pretending you were born in a rural area. Countries around the world started working together to crack things when Russia re-invaded Ukraine. They had businesses, careers, girlfriends, and were nervous about being photographed. Brazil had some breaks in the case and kept moving to arrest people who kept magically disappearing. Then Brazil decided if they couldn’t catch them, they would “burn them,” and announced them on Interpol. 

“It was an ironic revenge. Mr. Putin has, for years, manipulated Interpol’s databases to harass dissidents and political opponents.
Last fall, the Brazilians issued a series of Interpol blue notices — alerts seeking information on a person. The notices circulated the names, photographs and fingerprints of the Russian spies, including Mr. Shmyrev and Mr. Cherkasov, to all 196 member countries.”

Ukraine had a massive drone attack on Moscow last night. Russia says they intercepted 150 of them. They were going for a semiconductor factory. But there were also several regions that had to restrict the use of their airports. 

In April Russia lost an aircraft in sabotage. There have been many sabotage operations and Russia has lost many long-range bombeers, advanced air defense systems, etc, but this may have been the most movie-worthy. It was an expensive plane, $50 million, and it was in the Russian heartland, so it sent a message too.