Russia's Africa Move 

A smooth video, probably produced by a Russian media outlet but  omitting to mention obvious  problems African countries face beyond  partnership choices.

It'ss no good just re-organizing ownership of resources, or ditching "Western influence" in exchange for another. You have to actually develop productive capacity and make things well  and cheap enough to sell them or trade with others. Until African countries can do that they will merely be exchanging one dominance, let’s say France, for another. In this case Russia’s.

Secondly the relations between Africans countries and the so-called “West” are not similar. Britain has far different relationships with its former colonies, for example. North Africa is different again.  The video  makes it sound like Burkina Faso is a representative of the whole continent.

As for nuclear weapons, for what possible strategic purpose would any African country need them except to use against another African country? Who intends to invade any African country? Only Islamists, probably Africans themselves. Or neighbors over a border dispute of which Africa has several. Who does any of the 50+ countries intend to invade outside Africa or attack? Nobody.

Africa’s problems are not to do with so called “Western oiminance”" so much  but in moving from resource selling and peasant agriculture to creating the kid of internal governance, free of corruption and tribalism/ethnicism, to create societies of educated makers and doers in the modern sense. This is what every country, including those of Europe, has had to go through to become rich and powerful. African unity will remain a dream until a majority of it's sates are thriving and democratically run.

The Great Deception

 

This month marks the start, four years ago,  of the  COVID lockdowns and  cover-up of the origins of a  virus, engineered in Wuhan and partly funded by US and UK  grants and research. This  despite such being forbidden by  Presidents Obama  and Trump in the USA. It was  circumvented by outsourcing it to China in  a lab controlled by the Chinese military health service.  What could possibly go wrong?

The sleazy cover-up that followed damaged the prestige of scientific “experts” and science itself for  a generation. It forced Biden to preemptively pardon Dr. Fauci whilst in the UK Lord Vallance,  who led the British cover-up,  has been rewarded by appointment as  Stamer’s science minister. The social, economic and personal damage done to Western society by the COVID public health failyre  will reverberate for many more years.

Today one thanks the honest scientists like Drs. Alina Chan, Sunetra Gupta  and Jay Bhattacharya and dozens of others who were smeared, hounded and  lost their jobs for speaking the truth at the time.

This sordid tale of Chinese scientists engineering a furin cleavage into an already deadly virus, at the behest of the Chinese military and final oversight  of the Chinese Communist Party shows the terrible danger of science  controlled and funded by totalitarians like the CCP. 

Yet also uncovered was the dangerous adjacency and collusion of top scientists and politicians in democratic countries. Astonishingly, UK and US scientists played the role of  Wuhan  funding dupes and then massivly supressed this truth.

Science should be about the truth and that sets us all free. In  this COVID episode  we got  instead  lies that end up  harming us.

The "lockdowns" policy also aped the CCP's verion of public health in a pandemic. This was the reverse of  more than a century fn international pandemic practise whereby the sick are quarantined and the well keep the economy going. Now, like the CCP,  we quarantined the  well and what followed was an instant economic disaster. 

Sir Keir Doge?

 Notable news today that Sir Keir Starmer is to get rid of the massive quango that is NHS England, an oversight body, saving billions of pounds.

So the NHS is  like the US Dept of Education. Administration costs soar , whilst patient outcomes and healthcare access has plummeted and costs are out of sight. Since the  US Dept of Education was founded (1979) the average cost of a public university education  has risen fro $10,200 ( 4 years) to $99,680 with  no increase in scholastic attainment.

In dollar power $10,200 in 1980 is now $32,900 after inflation. That should be the cost of a 4 year public  degree in USA today, so the costs   are now  3 X higher than economic reality. 

The budget of the Dept of Education in 1980 was $14.2 billion and in 2024 was $268 billion, but adjusted for inflation it's budget today should be some $54 billion.  The number of employees in the Dept  in 1980 and today is almost the same.  It is simply spending 3 x the amount of money for no change in educational outcome.

Which is why Trump  proposes to abolish  the Dept of Education and in UK presumably why Sir Kier has gone DOGE  and canned NHS England.  About the first right thing Sir Keir has done. Imagine what he will find if he looks into other government departments.