In Running to Stand Still, Bono sang that you should “cry without weeping. Talk without speaking.” He can add “condemn without counting.” Recently, the U2 frontman declared that 300,000 have died as a result of USAID funding cuts. The source for this widely cited figure is an example of how some facts are simply too good to check in the media.
Bono said “This will f— you off” and explained that tens of thousands of tons of food are “rotting” in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston because of recent USAID cuts, adding “What is that? That’s not America, is it?”
“They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said, acknowledging that while some aid groups do good work, the USAID system has been riddled with corruption.
It turns out that the 300,000 figure comes from a speculative model put out by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University.
I was critical of how these cuts were handled initially. It does appear that some important programs were interrupted and, while later restarted, the interruptions created dire and potentially deadly conditions for some of the most desperate recipients of U.S. aid.
However, it is the figure of 300,000 that shows how such calculations go viral in this political environment.
Nichols insists that this was never an actual count but a projection. It is the parameters of the projections in The Washington Post that are so striking. Nichols admitted that
“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable). And 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t.”
In other words, it depends on whether the programs were actually discontinued and whether local officials stepped forward to continue them. Those seem like some pretty significant “ifs” and raise the question of why project over a quarter of a million deaths on such assumptions. It seems akin to projected hundreds of thousand of deaths from air accidents if every FAA system under Trump is suddenly turned off.
What is the value of a projections with such sweeping “likely highly variable” assumptions?
I still like Bono’s music. It is his math that leaves me with the feeling that “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Bono has made a very successful second career at unexpectedly social shaming the leaders of countries during public events to give billions of their taxpayer dollars to his causes that they didn’t promise to donate while campaigning for office.
Bono is also successful at NOT donating any of HIS hundreds of millions of dollars to those very same causes. He is too important to sully himself by donating filthy lucre to any of the causes he shills for.
Bono doesn’t care if the claims made by his causes are factual, just as he doesn’t care whether or not most donated money disappears into the pockets of those running the charities, is stolen, or wasted.
Bono cares that he is seen as a humanitarian properly instructing and forcing the plebes to donate their country’s tax revenues to what makes him feel like a special human being.
Bono grifts much of his coercion powers by being publicly close to OTHER multi-millionaires who also keep a tight fist on their millions while giving the taxpayers’ millions to Bono’s events – Nancy and Paul Pelosi as just one example of uncharitable tightwads like Bono.
Culls, all of them: culls.
USAID should always have been audited. Frankly, valid programs that were paused, were resumed at blistering speed for a government agency.
Let’s hope DOGE tackles FEMA, which is currently mucking up the rebuild of Pacific Palisades and Eaton after the CA wildfires. Most especially, its activities in Hawaii need to be examined with an electron microscope. FEMA is in the process of building tiny homes to provide temporary shelter (2 years too late) for the victims of Hawaii’s devastating 2023 fires. The build cost of each 450 sq foot structure was astonishingly high, higher than if a private person built a house. Worse, early reports indicate that most of the residents weren’t fire victims at all, but rather the homeless. It has been alleged that Hawaii used FEMA to house its homeless, under guise of wildfire disaster relief, and that the bid was questionable.
I neglected to add that these expensive, tiny homes are also alleged to be unable to withstand Hawaiian weather, including hurricanes. Since only 167 tiny homes have been built, many of them housing the homeless, and over 2,000 homes burned, then this has only exacerbated skyrocketing rents. This means that families who lost their homes due to the fire, may never be able to return to the area.
They throw out these phony numbers to justify the flow of our tax dollars to their “aid” programs. What percentage of the “aid” money ends up going to where they say it goes, and what percentage ends up in the pockets of the middlemen dispersing the “aid”? That’s the question that needs to be answered before we give any more money to USAID.