It’s hard to find a common denominator in this larceny, but in an unrelated note, the defendants were Michel De Jesus Huarte, Ramon Fonseca, Vicente Gonzalez, Alyd Dazza, Monika Blacio, Ricco Dazza, Orlin Tamayo Quinonez, Juan Carralero, Madelin Machado, Gladys Zambrana, Javier Zambrana, Enrique Perez, Alejandro Hernandez Quiros, Vanessa Estrada, Vicenta Tellechea, Modesto Hidalgo, Carlos Castaneda and so on.
General
A Free Book — What Came to Mind: Thoughts Late in Life
In 2019, contributor to this site Robert S. Griffin compiled a collection of his short writings on a variety of topics called What Came to Mind: Thoughts Late in Life. For the book, Dr. Griffin gave himself a page limit—three hundred pages. Staying within that quota, he selected thoughts, as he called them, posted on a personal website he began in 2007—www.robertsgriffin.com—that seemed best for this book, which essentially is an exploration of taking on the challenge to live well—honorably, effectively, and gratifyingly—as the person one truly is. He tinkered with titles and edited for length and clarity. None of these selections has been published elsewhere.
What Came to Mind is made up of sixty individual efforts, but there’s coherence and progression—the writings are ordered chronologically—it’s even a memoir of sorts. It provides the personal background and frame of reference which grounds what he has written for this site. You may find a fair amount of this material unique, informative, stimulating, entertaining, and moving; you may find ideas that will contribute to improving the quality of your life. These selections were produced during the time Professor (now Professor Emeritus) Griffin went from being old to uses-a-cane elderly. In part, this book is about aging and death.
What Came to Mind is not available in published form. Here is a link to a free PDF of it. http://www.robertsgriffin.com/WtCmMd.pdf The blond toddler in the picture is the author.
E Pluribus Loot’em
It’s understandable that Democrats are fuming about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse, inasmuch as the people committing the waste, fraud and abuse are their constituents. What I can’t understand is why they’re saying so out loud.
The Democrats claim there’s no “waste, fraud and abuse,” and if there is, it’s minuscule — infinitesimal — and if there’s an occasional overpayment, we have inspectors general coming down with a claw hammer on the miscreants — or at least they were, until Trump fired them! (Technically, he fired 17 out of 70 inspectors, and I’m sure every last one of them was absolutely vital.)
Basically, they’re staking their claim on the idea that the government is a streamlined, well-oiled machine. The only step that would “actually” combat waste, fraud and abuse, Democrats say, is to “invest in a skilled workforce.” (“Invest” meaning, raise the salaries of federal government employees and, no, this has nothing to do with the fact that government unions give 99% of their political donations to us.)
The left’s full-throated defense of federal waste reminded me of my “Excellence in Government” file.
It’s been busting at the seams lately, with the addition of the trillion dollars stolen from COVID relief funds. For perspective, that’s more than we’ve given to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, more than it cost Jeff Bezos to send the Real Housewives into orbit, and is nearly as much as California’s Reparations Committee decided was owed to the state’s Black residents.
To be fair, the moment the $2.2 trillion “relief” program was announced, cybersecurity experts lit up the White House switchboard, warning that the CARES Act was like a 7-11 on the route of a BLM march. So it’s not as if anyone could have anticipated the coming heist. Only anyone who happened to peruse the dark web and notice that it was exploding with criminal groups in China, Nigeria, Romania and Russia, plotting to get their hands on U.S. taxpayer money.
Naturally, therefore, our highly trained federal workforce dutifully sent out a trillion dollars to federal prisoners ($267 million), dead people ($139 million — though curiously, Joe Biden didn’t get a cent) and people who appeared to be living in multiple states ($29 billion), among other manifest frauds. Sometimes the checks were sent directly to federal prisons, a mistake anyone could make.
Somalis in Minnesota stole $250 million in COVID relief funds, briefly distracting them from credit card skimming, child prostitution, machete attacks, child rape and joining jihad abroad.
Pretending to be providing meals for low-income children, the Somalis collected hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which they spent on luxury cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry and other purchases that are not remotely meals for low-income children. (They didn’t scam the Payment Protection Plan because so few Somalis in Minnesota had jobs even before the pandemic that it wouldn’t have been believable.)
Another item in my “Government Excellence” file concerns the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare committed by a different batch of Our Greatest Strength. So astute were government watchdogs that, from 2007 to 2009, Medicare made more home health care payments to a single county in Florida than to the rest of the country combined.
You can’t get anything past our highly trained federal workforce. (Would a CEO who failed to catch a half-billion-dollar theft from a single county be considered an indispensable employee?)
El Salvador can’t build us prisons fast enough.
Despite the fact that no one’s Medicare has been touched by Musk, and no one in the Trump administration has suggested cutting Medicare, Democrats act as if DOGE is a thinly disguised plot to destroy the program. But they sure don’t mind when Our Greatest Strength drains Medicare with laughably obvious scams. I guess feigning concern for Medicare is more politically advantageous than defending the Democrat-voting criminals who are emptying it.
For my final “Excellence in Government” story, I give you two South Carolina housewives, Charlene Corley and her twin sister, Darlene Wooten, who casually defrauded the Pentagon out of $20 million over 10 years by scamming a military payment system overseen by 12,000 highly skilled government employees at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
The twins, a schoolteacher and state budget employee, registered their new company, C&D Distributors, as a military contractor and began sending ordinary hardware to the Defense Department, under a program to fast-track minor supplies to the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. When a mistaken decimal point on a shipping invoice netted them an unwarranted $5,000, the sisters realized that no matter what number they entered, it would be paid, no questions asked.
Whereupon they began charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship small items worth a few dollars or less — $998,798 for two 19-cent washers, $492,097 for an $11 threaded plug, and $499,569 for 10 cotter pins worth $1.99 each.
Even decades after the scandal of the Pentagon paying contractors $600 for ashtrays, $640 for toilet seats and $400 for hammers — all billed to the taxpayers — the military wantonly paid more than 100 of the sisters’ preposterous shipping charges.
Their scheme went on from 1997 to 2006 and might have continued to this day (we’re always at war someplace) but for a mistaken double entry. When the feds were finally closing in — several beachfront homes, 10 luxury cars, plastic surgery, jewelry and millions of dollars later — Wooten committed suicide, leaving a $4.5 million check made out to the Defense Department.
We can only hope that the Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, Russian, Hispanic and Somali criminal gangs ripping off U.S. government programs will be as guilt-ridden.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER
Dugin: Russia’s Liberal Saboteurs
Russia has the same problems with its bureaucracy as the U.S. and the West general have. In the U.S. the vast majority of federal bureaucrats are Democrats and, if the first Trump administration is any indication, they will again do all they can to sabotage the policies of the elected government. Trump and Musk are trying to curb this unelected power but it will be very difficult.
We have a powerful group of opinion leaders who believe that lifting sanctions would be disastrous. Because liberal-leaning officials would immediately try to roll back all the achievements in import substitution, in asserting the sovereignty of our economy and production, in ensuring security in those areas that are vital to the development of the state.
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
Sergey Lavrov has essentially acknowledged what many experts, including myself, have written about for years: that in Russia there exists an entire class of officials left over from the 1990s who do not share the head of state’s orientation towards strengthening sovereignty. They dream of once again making Russia a part of the global world — a world that no longer exists. This is their phantom pain, but because of it, they take an entirely destructive stance, obstructing the process of sovereignization in all areas.
These stubborn individuals no longer merely want to reshape our economic system to fit the West. While formally maintaining loyalty to President Putin and nodding along with everything he says, they are in fact trying to destroy what has been built, acting in defiance of Russia’s interests. And this is precisely what Lavrov pointed out, referring to opinion leaders — something that already means a great deal.
In reality, contrary to the illusions of the so-called “sixth column,”1 relations between Russia and the West are not improving at all. Yes, there are very cautious steps towards de-escalation with the United States, but Europe, on the contrary, is preparing for war with us. Therefore, our duty — our direct obligation — is to ensure the economic sovereignty of the country. Yet liberal-leaning officials are obstructing this effort.
Liberal ideology itself has already been effectively criminalized in our country. Imagine replacing the word “liberal” in Lavrov’s statement with “Nazi”: in Russia, some officials with Nazi views sympathize with Hitler and do not want to strengthen our national security because they believe things were better under Hitler’s occupation. We would be horrified by such a statement. And yet today, liberalism is practically a synonym for a new form of Western hegemony, racism, and Russophobia. Therefore, to be a liberal in Russia is simply an ideological crime. The foreign minister has, in fact, admitted that such people exist in Russia. And he was almost certainly referring to specific officials — not marginal figures with no influence.
Today, this sixth column is rejoicing over the warming of our relations with Trump. But not in order to strengthen our position — rather, to derail as quickly as possible all the progress Russia has made on the path of sovereignization since the beginning of the Special Military Operation. And this is outright sabotage — treason, betrayal, a revolt, a mutiny of liberal officials. And since even such a cautious, precise, and restrained diplomat has mentioned them in his remarks, it means the situation is extremely serious.
I believe Sergey Lavrov — who stands on the same level as the greatest foreign ministers in the history of our great nation — should be trusted. There truly exists within the country a core force working against President Putin’s sovereign reforms. The sixth column is a threat of conspiracy, essentially of a coup d’état, because the attempt to roll back the achievements in import substitution and economic sovereignization — on which the development and security of our state depend — is nothing less than that. And this is very serious.
(Translated from the Russian)
Matt Goodwin on the NHS (UK)
The UK is the worst of all Western countries in self-destruction. The powers-that-be hate the White British.
Here are two things the British people learned about their National Health Service (NHS) in recent weeks. First, rats and cockroaches are invading hospital beds and wards, the sick and elderly are being treated in corridors and car parks, and the dying have sometimes been left undiscovered for hours.
Those are just some of the deeply disturbing findings from a survey of 9,000 people working in the NHS, who also reported crumbling ceilings, broken toilets, sewage leaks, and patients routinely being treated in hallways, offices, and car parks.
What’s the second thing we’ve learned about the NHS? That while it’s visibly falling apart, failing patients and taxpayers alike, this has not stopped NHS bureaucrats and trusts from investing heavily in an utterly divisive, increasingly costly, and unBritish ideology that is pushing our public institutions to favour some groups over others.
That’s right. Instead of prioritising things that used to guide our public services —competency, political neutrality, treating people equally, and rewarding individuals for hard work— bureaucrats are rewiring the NHS around an extreme ideology that judges people on the colour of their skin and discriminates against whites.Just look at what we’ve learned. NHS trusts are discriminating against white people who apply for NHS jobs by adjusting shortlists to favour black and ethnic minority candidates. NHS documents encourage the use of the ‘Rooney Rule’, making it compulsory for minorities to be shortlisted for jobs and, if they are not, requiring managers to explain why. If two people are equally qualified, NHS employers are now using people’s race, rather than their individual achievement, as a ‘tie-breaker’.
At least 11 NHS trusts have schemes that are specifically designed to help minorities. NHS bodies routinely use divisive terms like ‘the global majority’, designed to elevate non-white groups, which account for most of the world’s population, over white majorities in the West. Some 30 NHS trusts in northern England have signed up to ‘anti-racism’ award schemes, appearing more like a political party than a supposedly politically neutral public service. Senior NHS staff are joining ‘white ally training’ sessions to reflect on their ‘racism’ and inherent ‘white privilege’. NHS trusts have ‘race equality steering groups’, designed to magnify and prioritise the voice of minorities over others. And the NHS is investing around £40 million every year into more than 800 ‘diversity’ jobs, some of which pay more than nurses and doctors.
Even today, after the bombshell and historic UK Supreme Court judgement that the definition of a woman should be based on biological sex, NHS guidance remains firmly committed to a deeply unscientific ‘gender identity theory’, which asserts that somebody’s self-identified ‘gender identity’ is more important than their biological sex —a view many people in the NHS have promoted despite evidence to the contrary.
Haiti: The most dysfunctional society ever?
The writer describes a totally dysfunctional society still dependent on the U.S. for basic services and still sending migrants to the U.S. Then he threatens that it will get worse if U.S. aid and willingness to import Haitians stop.
The Haitian government is too compromised to confront them effectively. For years, government officials have paid off and armed gang members in exchange for protection and intimidating their rivals. International sanctions against Haitian officials show the ubiquity of government ties to gangs, corruption and drug and arms trafficking. Sanctions from the United States and Canada have targeted some of the most powerful people in Haiti, including two former presidents, three former prime ministers and several cabinet ministers. Now even the new transition council, which took office under an agreement brokered last spring with support from the United States, includes three members who have been accused of bribery and were summoned to appear in court on those charges. …
But the impact of this lightning-fast withdrawal of U.S. foreign aid funds is brutal. Thousands of Haitians have lost access to health care. Lunch programs for children in schools have closed for lack of food. Now, when families come to my office to report gang attacks, they often haven’t eaten in days. We refer them to U.N. programs that provide food, but there’s not enough. They often need urgent medical care, after suffering rape or other injuries, and have no place to sleep. We no longer have places to send them.
The Trump administration moved to end eligibility for protected status for about half a million Haitians living in the United States and cut a humanitarian visa program for thousands more. In recent years, many Haitians fled to the United States with visas because gang members threatened their lives, killed their relatives and destroyed their homes. If their protected status is removed and they are deported to Haiti, they will have no one to receive them and no place to stay. More than a million people are already internally displaced.
The lack of stability in Haiti will affect other countries, too. More Haitians will almost certainly flee — to the United States, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Haitian gangs’ unchecked expansion beyond their neighborhood bases into transnational drug markets and criminal networks is already bringing illicit drugs to the United States. Some gang leaders have made political demands, announced the formation of political parties and even threatened to overthrow the government. This renders Haiti’s politics even more volatile and makes Haitian gangs a greater threat to other Caribbean countries and the United States.
There’s a lot the United States can do. It should continue to support the vetting, training and equipping of Haiti’s struggling police force and shattered judiciary. U.S. officials should ramp up the inspection of shipments destined for Haiti to end the traffic of arms and ammunition and prosecute anyone who breaks U.S. laws trafficking arms and drugs to and from Haiti. American officials should also press the government to create and enforce anticorruption policies. …
These days in Port-au-Prince, we are teetering on the edge of a total gang takeover. At night, as gangs go on the offensive, many parts of the city are dark because fighting has largely cut electricity. My friends and colleagues stay awake, terrified, listening to the gun battles and texting one another.
Unpaywalled link:
Haiti’s Gangs Have Evolved. The United States Will Pay the Price.
The Empire Strikes Back at the Menacing Darryl Cooper
I kept hoping for an evenhanded account of Churchill’s drunkenness, his chronic indebtedness, his Jewish financial benefactors, and essentially Jewish organizations and media promoting war, as Horus has written about authoritatively. But in vain. (Here and here Horus defends Cooper after his appearance on the Tucker Carlson show.) But the “newspaper of record” just provides general negativity from establishment historians. Re David Irving:
a disgraced British historian who has denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and helped popularize the theory about Mr. Churchill’s culpability in World War II espoused by Mr. Cooper on Mr. Carlson’s show.
The author David Irving, who was found by a British court to have distorted facts in his books.
Mr. Cooper has defended Mr. Irving’s work, even though Mr. Irving was found by a British court in 2000 to have misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence in his books. To Mr. Cooper, he’s an example of “pressure groups” succeeding in censoring questioning voices.
It’s a theme that seems to resonate with him: powerful forces keeping people from knowing the full story, even if the story has been discredited.
The link below is not paywalled.
The NYTimes prepares its Readers for the evil Darryl Cooper (Who “Sides with History’s Villains”) with this scowling portrait
A very different photo supplied by the Tucker Carlson Show
The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains
Darryl Cooper is no scholar. But legions of fans — many on the right — can’t seem to resist what he presents as hidden truths.
Listen to this article · 17:40 min Learn more
All of a sudden, everyone was coming for Darryl Cooper.
There were the newspaper columnists, the historians, the Jewish groups: “Repugnant,” said the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, in a statement. Even the Biden White House released a statement, calling him “a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda.”
So it was time for Mr. Cooper, one of the most popular podcasters in the country, to do what he does best: hit record.
In a special episode of his history program, “Martyr Made,” Mr. Cooper addressed the controversy, which had exploded out of his Sept. 2 appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the podcast started by the former Fox News host. At first, Mr. Cooper — a gifted historical storyteller but not a trained historian — defended the claims he had made on Mr. Carlson’s show: One, that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the war, not, by implication, Adolf Hitler. And two, that millions had died in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe because the Nazis had not adequately planned to feed them.
But then he pivoted. He admitted he had been “hyperbolic” about Mr. Churchill and said he had not meant to imply the Holocaust was the result of logistical problems. Then he read harrowing testimony from a survivor of the infamous 1941 massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, at one point becoming so overwhelmed that he had to collect himself.
This emotional ventriloquism is a big part of Mr. Cooper’s approach and appeal.
On TikTok, a fan praised him as “one of the best historians of our time because he tries to go out of his way to understand the perspective of everyone involved in a situation.”
Or, as Joe Rogan put it when he had Mr. Cooper on his show in March: Mr. Cooper’s work inhabits extreme positions in an attempt to understand the psychology behind them. The critics, who Mr. Rogan suggested were “paranoid” Jews, were overreacting, missing the point.
These critics have probably helped make Mr. Cooper bigger than ever. He has the most subscribed-to history newsletter on Substack, one spot ahead of the eminent economic historian Adam Tooze’s. In the wake of the Rogan interview, “Martyr Made” was the seventh-most popular podcast on Spotify, just after Mr. Carlson’s, though it has since fallen. Mr. Cooper’s followers on X include Vice President JD Vance and David Sacks, President Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar. This year, a guest on The New York Times Opinion’s “Ezra Klein Show” — a fairly reliable barometer of the elite liberal mood — recommended “Martyr Made” as a good window into right-wing thinking.
All of which makes Mr. Cooper a man of this second Trumpian moment: an idiosyncratic autodidact with no formal affiliations who has built a huge audience by promising his listeners ostensibly forbidden histories, a self-fashioned “brave truth-teller” willing to challenge elite consensus, said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University who has written about the history of right-wing media.
His project syncs up with the radical skepticism ascendant on the American right, which is currently upending decades of institutional wisdom around public health, education and international trade. And in its outlook, if not its politics, this skepticism rhymes with the “woke” left’s, promising deeper realities concealed by a dying power structure.
To his detractors, Mr. Cooper is a fascist, sloppily peddling old debunked arguments. To his supporters, he is pure of heart, merely asking uncomfortable questions about our national mythology.
“The Western order is coming apart,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview. “This whole postwar structure is going away and we need to rethink it. Darryl is a threat to that.”
The question is, what kind of a threat?
Continues…
Also available at Barnes & Noble
Also available at Barnes & Noble
