July Bazaar

The round up of what's around

Dear friends,

Y’all know the deal with the Bazaar by now: a collection of news stories, academic papers, and opinion pieces thrown together with quotes and commentary from me. Read what interests you and skip the rest!

West Africa

I want to start with a corner of the world that means a lot to me, but very little to most people I know: West Africa.

• Firstly, absolutely historic news out of the Congo and Rwanda: “Trump declares end to Rwanda–DRC conflict with historic peace agreement”

  by Solomon Ekanem via Business Insider. It is really scurrilous that this hasn’t been reported simply because its Trump and the majority of news media feels a partisan obligation to hide his achievements and trumpet his failures (I hope it goes without saying that this approach is nothing like journalism). Here’s an extract from the article:

The treaty, set to be signed in Washington, was the product of intensive diplomacy led by Massad Boulos, Trump’s senior adviser on African affairs, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Boulos began shuttle diplomacy in April 2025, meeting leaders in Kinshasa and Kigali to negotiate troop withdrawals, an end to rebel support, and regional security guarantees. His efforts culminated in the signing of a “Declaration of Principles” in Washington, followed by draft treaty submissions from both countries in early May. By mid-June, Trump announced the final agreement, calling it a step toward ending “violent bloodshed and death… more so even than most other wars.” The treaty includes commitments to withdraw troops, disarm armed groups like M23, and repatriate displaced persons. It also introduces a minerals-for-security framework, offering U.S. access to strategic resources such as cobalt and lithium in exchange for helping stabilize eastern Congo.

• I would be delighted to live to see peace in the Congo, although I confess I have concerns about how this is being done. Will US corporations end child labour in cobalt mining? Will they find less environmentally destructive ways to extract lithium? Peace, I celebrate… but this situation worries me. I will endeavour to keep an eye on it.

• Also being ignored by the legacy media are the mass murders of Christians in Nigeria. Here’s Kayode Lawal from the Nigerian Daily Post on a recent atrocity:

Quoting eyewitness accounts, Senator Zam said the assailants, armed with heavy weaponry, launched a coordinated night-time raid on Yelwata, resulting in widespread destruction, the deaths of more than 200 civilians, many of them women and children, and the razing of several communities. He described the attack as deliberate and genocidal, emphasising that these were not isolated incidents or spontaneous clashes, but rather planned atrocities targeting vulnerable rural populations.

• Lest you think this is a one-off, here’s Amnesty’s report via AFP/France 25: “Thousands killed in two years of violence in north and central Nigeria”:

More than 10,000 people have been killed across central and northern Nigeria in the two years since President Bola Tinubu took office, Amnesty International said Thursday, blaming his administration for failing to stem the surge in jihadist attacks, bandit raids, and communal violence.

• Despite all the idle talk of ‘Black Lives Matter’, the Western nations - and the US in particular - actually do not give a damn about black lives in Africa, and they are generally happy to look the other way when black Christians are slaughtered.

Africa and the US: PEPFAR

I have a great many friends who are insistent to me that the dismantling of USAID represents some kind of disaster, but every time I dig into it, I find worthy-sounding NGOs taking an absurd cut of foreign aid, and on the other side I find African nations with problems caused by that foreign aid, or corrupt local versions of The Third Man, where supplies intended to help are sold for profit. Recently, a dear friend suggested that the closure of USAID was causing an HIV/AIDS disaster in Africa. So I investigated.

• If you stick ‘Africa’ and ‘AIDS’ into a search engine, your first two dozen results will be calls to panic about the terrible disaster Donald Trump has caused in Africa! This is, in itself, suspicious. The coverage, if you examine it, is weak, and largely seems to depend upon an article written by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. I won’t link to it as its really far from responsible journalism, but you can easily find it if you’re really interested, or pieces downstream of it covered by once-great newswires like Associated Press and Reuters.

• Downstream of this article, you will find such oddities as this PEPFAR Impact Tracker, which purports to predict the lives lost by freezing funding to PEPFAR. As might be imagined, this is pure computer-modelled hallucination, but don’t fret, we’ll get to the research data below.

• In terms of why we’re seeing this co-ordinated panic, I found this sober opinion piece by Max Primorac (who clearly favours the red team!) in The Hill entitled “The PEPFAR industry has launched a hysterical campaign against accountability”. It captures the other side of this political coin rather too well:

The real driver of this campaign is the foreign aid industry, which currently stands to lose billions in taxpayer funding. Both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives recently ripped the foreign aid industry for its high overhead charges, which sometimes exceed 50 percent of their total grants.

• Far more relevant, and far closer to the standards of journalism, is this piece by Emily Bass entitled “Life With Less PEPFAR: The First 100 Days in Tanzania and Uganda”, which is grounded in fact, and identifies some of the issues that actually matter in this case:

The United States is not and should not be the leading voice defining the future in these respective countries, and American media coverage could benefit from balancing stories about what has been lost with America's pullback with explanations about what remains in terms of the country's leadership and community systems. Based on what I heard, country governments can do more to work with affected communities to devise acute and chronic plans for stabilizing programs. The United States and other donor countries have a role to play in steadfastly stating the evidence that community-led services deliver impact.

• I also went through the academic journals. This paper by Herbert Duber, Thomas Coates, Greg Szekeras, Amy Kaji and Roger Lewis in The Journal of the International AIDS Society is typical of the research on this topic. It’s entitled “Is there an association between PEPFAR funding and improvement in national health indicators in Africa?” and concludes:

Overall, countries in the WHO Africa Region showed a small worsening in health outcomes status when all indicators were analyzed together and weighted equally. However, more health indicators improved than worsened over this six-year period. A comparison of PEPFAR focus and non-focus countries found no significant difference in the fractional change among 13 of 14 health indicators during the study period.

• Then I found something extraordinary - two papers whose authorship included the current head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya. From 2009, this paper co-authored with Eran Bendavid entitled “The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa: An Evaluation of Outcomes” concluded that PEPFAR reduced deaths from AIDS by a measly 10%, and had no effect on the prevalence of HIV whatsoever.

• The same two authors returned to the topic in 2012, adding Charles Holmes to the project, with results published as “HIV Development Assistance and Adult Mortality in Africa”. It finds that PEPFAR is associated with a small mortality reduction, but even this finding is less than robust, as per this remark:

Our estimates of all-cause adult deaths averted and HIV-specific deaths averted are consistent with either positive, negative, or no spillover mortality effects associated with PEPFAR.

• So here’s the truth of the matter, as best as I can ascertain. Foreign aid from the US and elsewhere has been ploughed into Africa for decades, but produced only modest results (10% reductions in deaths from AIDS, no definitive evidence of reduction in all-cause mortality) at a cost of around $120 billion. USAID funding was only 40% of the US’s contributions to PEPFAR, as the CDC supported the majority of the work, and no country’s AIDS medication supply is wholly dependent upon US funding. There’s no sign of an imminent collapse to the AIDS support networks in Africa, but people on the ground in Africa are concerned that drug distribution is being prioritised over more effective community measures.

• The aid money paid to help Africans with AIDS has had both positive and negative effects in Africa, and cannot be considered an unalloyed success by any reasonable means, although it has supported a well-paid NGO network who have by far the most to lose from these funding cuts. Which leads us to our next topic…

US: Skulduggery

Whether it’s the politicians, the corporations, or the NGOs, the astonishing thing about the nefarious dealings in the US isn’t so much that they happen but that nobody seems terribly bothered by any of it except when it flatters their partisan sensibilities.

• Let’s start with a corporate horror story: Wells Fargo, in a report by Eric Salzman at Racket News:

The past two decades have been tough ones for Wells Fargo and the many victims of its sprawling crime wave. While the banking industry is full of scammers, Wells took turning time honored street-hustles into multi-billion dollar white-collar hustles to a new level... I imagine if Wells were in any other business, it wouldn’t be allowed to continue. But Wells is part of the “Too Big to Fail” club. Taking away its federal banking charter would be too disruptive for the financial markets, so instead they got what ended up being a seven-year growth ban. Not exactly rough justice.

• Next up, the ridiculous ‘SALT Deduction’, in a sadly-paywalled story by Charles Lane at The Free Press:

In short, the price of preserving the GOP’s chance to keep its House majority in 2026 could be to shower billions in collateral benefits on upscale San Franciscans and Manhattanites who never voted for Trump and never will, plus public employee unions that undergird the Democratic Party. Another ironic winner could be socialist Zohran Mamdani of New York, who has promised to impose higher taxes if he becomes mayor in the fall. The SALT deduction would blunt the impact on upscale New Yorkers and perhaps keep some of them from abandoning the city. These liberal politicians, individuals, and unions probably won’t even write Trump a thank-you note. They might at least pause to consider how they acquired a self-interest in a certain kind of inequality.

• From Matt Taibbi (and sadly behind a paywall): “Explosive New CIA Report Details Russiagate Fraud” sets up the next story rather well:

Racket readers may remember reports I co-authored with Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag last February, describing how Brennan, Comey, and Clapper “cooked the intelligence” in that 2017 ICA. For instance, the chiefs suppressed junior analysts’ belief that Russia may not have preferred Trump, seeing him as “mercurial,” “unreliable,” and “not steady,” while viewing a possible Clinton presidency as “manageable and reflecting continuity.” The notion that the ICA was manipulated isn’t new, as Aaron Mate at RealClearInvestigations reported the ICA’s preparation “deviated from standard CIA practice,” and similar reports came out via former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, current deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and others.

• Speaking of Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag at Public (again, behind a paywall, but even the free part is worth reading): “Both USAID And The CIA Were Behind The Impeachment Of Trump in 2019”

OCCRP does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change. Sullivan told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.” As such, it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way.

• Yes, you read that correctly: USAID was apparently involved in attempting ‘domestic regime change’. Every story out of USAID has been a scandal, but reporters who are loyal to the blue team have largely just stuck their fingers in their ears and said ‘la la la not listening’. Shameful.

• Taibbi followed up later with “Brennan, MSNBC Can't Stop Lying About Trump and Russia”, which may be worth a read if you’ve been following the legacy media’s frantic attempt to put the stopper back in the djinn’s bottle:

  Attention, believers in the Trump-Russia conspiracy: you are being lied to. Side by side, here’s what you’ve been told, next to the reality that’s being hidden from you.

• Finally on this topic, some potentially good news from the US State Department - which is a sentence I did not expect to ever type. In a release entitled “Making Foreign Aid Great Again” the US government finally admits that its policy of ‘charity’ towards Africa and elsewhere has been fantastic for establishing well-paid NGO sinecures for compliant cronies, but has produced only marginal and debatable benefits:

Equally importantly, the charity-based model failed because the leadership of these developing nations developed an addiction. State Department research finds the overwhelming sentiment in countries formerly receiving USAID funding is for trade, not aid. After engaging with nations across Latin America and Africa, we have consistently heard that developing countries want investment that empowers them to sustainably grow—not decades of patronizing UN or USAID managed support. The Department has consistently heard the same from people in these nations: a Zambian man told American diplomats it would be more helpful for his countrymen to learn how to fish than to be supplied with fish by the U.S. Government, an Ethiopian woman said she viewed the mutual benefits of investment as superior to the one-sided nature of aid, and too many other examples to recount.

• There is a growing resistance to aid organisations in Africa and elsewhere, which have caused far more problems than they’ve addressed. I heartily recommend listening to the Africans on these issues, it’s sobering.

US: Blue Team Blues

Still waiting for signs of life in the opposition!

• Over the last month, I read a lot of depressing articles about the mess the blue team has made of itself. The phrase ‘purity spiral’ was often used by critics, while supporters resorted to.. erm... more colourful phrasing!

• This Washington Post piece by Hannah Knowles and Dan Merica (this link is via MSN so you don’t have to register for the noisepaper) struck me as an interesting attempt to create an impression of a nascent centrist movement in the blue team - I’ll believe it when I see it!

• Apropos of this, check out this intriguing discussion of what an ‘80% centre’ party would look like from John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot:

As you can see, the “80 Percent Party” platform includes a fascinating mix of positions that cross traditional partisan and ideological lines to represent a core agenda of common-sense beliefs about what the government should be doing—steps like deporting criminals, limiting congressional terms, banning junk fees, ensuring health care and prescription drug affordability, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. Just below the 80 percent threshold are two other issues with high public consensus: (1) raising taxes on the wealthy and (2) banning trans athletes from women’s sports.

Free Speech: Germany

Several depressing pieces from Eugyppius on the dire situation in the Federal Republic of Germany…

• “We have established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation” by Eugyppius

Plainly, none of this is reducing the amount of ambient Nazi phraseology on the internet. If anything, the tactics before us have only served to increase the circulation of these darkly magical incantations. These morons have raised “Alles für D–” from near total obscurity to a household proverb in the space of just a few years, and they’ll keep going... We have established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation, and for the foreseeable future we just have to live with that. It sucks.

• “Stefan Niehoff, the German pensioner famous for a meme calling Robert Habeck a moron, is found guilty of five criminal retweets and one criminal reply and fined €825” by Eugyppius
  Contains strong swearing

He retweeted an old photograph of clerics offering a Nazi salute with a caption implying that present-day ecclesiastical condemnations of Alternative für Deutschland represent a related tendency. He retweeted an image of Hitler shaking some cleric’s hand, apparently to make the same point. He retweeted a “then/now” meme, with somebody in an SA uniform under the “then” caption and an Antifa rioter under the “now” caption.

After a few hours the court found Niehoff guilty for his Hitler reply and his other three Hitler retweets, and slapped him with a fine of €825.

• “German police conduct coordinated nationwide raids for the pseudo-crime of ‘hate posting’ in their ongoing battle against freedom of expression” by Eugyppius

Obviously, internet “hate” has not quadrupled since 2021. The only thing that has increased is the quantity of resources being used to hunt down and punish social media users.

• And from Paul D. Thacker at The Disinformation Chronicle, a piece that works as a segue into the next topic: “German Public Television Reports on the Wuhan Cover Up”

“Science has not covered itself in glory,” Nano notes. Several scientists wanted to publish their suspicions that the pandemic from a the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but their papers were rejected. Those who spoke up, nonetheless, were called “conspiracy theorists” and faced personal attacks. “I have never seen science so compromised,” said Gunther Theissen, chair of genetics at the University of Jena. “Some scientists have managed to manipulate public opinion, including politicians and the media.”

Medical Research and ‘the Nonsense’

There’s a growing momentum right now: the pharmaceutical corporations find their wretched hegemony threatened. This is long overdue - but by heavily funding the blue team, they managed to neutralise challenges from the left. But hubris still evokes nemesis…

• “The Plot to Get RFK” by James Lyons-Weller via The Brownstone Institute suffers from an inability to verify the authenticity of the memo at is heart. It looks legitimate though:

This isn’t a war against misinformation. It’s a war against public transparency in science. BIO fears Kennedy not because he is wrong, but because he has exposed the scaffolding of a regime that substitutes marketing for medicine. He has publicly pledged reforms that, if enacted, could disrupt the financial and regulatory relationships this memo appears to protect by requiring the firms actually follow the rules.

• Next up, a pair of worrying papers…. Firstly, James Thorp, Claire Rogers, Kirstin Cosgrove, Steven Hatfill, Peter Breggin, Drew Pinsky, and Peter A McCullough have a paper entitled “Association Between COVID-19 Vaccination and Neuropsychiatric Conditions”. It uses the US VAERS data to show that the vaccine candidate for SARS-CoV-2 failed the standard FDA and CDC safety test conditions. Now people have been saying this for years, but this is the first paper I’ve seen that actually applies the FDA/CDC methodology directly to the VAERS data. The results are shocking:

We found multiple concerning safety signals within the CDC/FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) related to COVID-19 vaccinations and neuropsychiatric disorders. The CDC/FDA consider a proportional reporting ratio (PRR) ≥ 2 to indicate a safety signal breach… The authors identified 47 lower-level group terms (LLT) associated with cognitive-neuropsychiatric disorders within VAERS. When all 47 LLT were combined and COVID-19 vaccinations were compared to influenza vaccines, the proportional reporting ratio (PRR) was 115 (95% confidence interval: 85.1–156, p-value: <0.0001, Z-score: 30.8).

• A reminder: the threshold for safety signal is two. This study, which does nothing but follow the existing protocol found a proportional reporting ratio of 115. I concur with its conclusion that these (failed) vaccine candidates need to be withdrawn.

• Secondly, from Vibeke Manniche, Tomáš Fürst, and Peter Riis Hansen entitled “Rates of successful conceptions according to COVID-19 vaccination status: Data from the Czech Republic”. This research confirms a suspicion many researchers already drew attention to (although not, of course, media attention):

The total fertility rate in the Czech Republic decreased from 1.83 births per 1000 women in 2021, to 1.62 in 2022, and 1.45 in 2023,12 and, therefore, self-selection bias does not seem to fully explain the observed association between vaccination status and SC rates… We conclude that at least from June 2021, SC rates in the Czech Republic for women vaccinated against COVID-19 before SC were substantially lower than for those who were unvaccinated before SC. These hypothesis-generating and preliminary results call for further studies of the influence of COVID-19 vaccination on human fecundability and fertility.

• And now two more pieces from The Disinformation Chronicle dealing with the corruption of academic journals. First up, Paul D. Thacker interviewing the new head of NIH Dr Jay Bhattacharya in “NIH Director Details Crack Down on Fees Monopoly Publishers Charge American Taxpayers”:

In any case, [Science, Nature, Scientific American and other such periodicals] are very obviously partisan political organizations rather than simple scientific organizations. They rely on their long history of publishing excellent science as a fig leaf for the raw, partisan politics that they’re trying to play. It’s very unfortunate, because science is not a partisan activity. Science is an activity that both parties - in fact, all of humanity - has an interest in science.

• Along related lines, Thacker also reports that “Virologist Simon Wain-Hobson Calls Out Corrupt Journals: Nature, Science, and Lancet”:

The German newspaper, Berliner Zeitung, has been publishing some pretty amazing dives that examine corruption in virology and the science journals that support them, however, these reports by journalist Franz Becchi are not reaching English readers... Back in May, Becchi reported that Science Magazine refused to even consider a study by several scientists that concluded the COVID virus was not natural and shows molecular traces of targeted manipulation, such as that used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The study’s lead author, University Hospital of Wurzburg researcher Valentin Bruttel, told Berliner Zeitung that much of what his study concluded was later confirmed by documents that became public in the United States.

• Thacker's summary says it all: “American media continue to ignore and attack any reporting that doesn’t re-enforce their preferred narrative that the pandemic started naturally.” Not the only aspect of this debacle that’s being ignored, of course. I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the enormous advertising funds that pharmaceutical companies have provided to legacy media…

• I finally found a balanced piece on vaccination! I’ve been looking for a long, long while… It’s a guest post from a doctor at Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths:

I did my own research after seeing how easily they were willing to force Covid vaccines on people who didn’t need them. The conclusion I came to was I think similar to where you are, which is that most of the scheduled vaccines don’t do nearly as much harm as their detractors say, but also don’t offer much benefit either. So I decided to follow the Danish vaccine schedule for my now 6 month old, which is the lightest in Europe and obviously lighter than the US, and also gets the jabs a little later than the US schedule.

• Berenson mentions that Vinay Prasad (the FDA’s new regulator of biologic medicines) is proposing an A-B test between the Danish and the US vaccination schedule, which is an excellent idea!

• Finally, back to a theme I addressed very early in Stranger Worlds: First Do No Harm, this time from Cory Rohlfsen at Sensible Medicine:

Without the acknowledgement of fallibility, the ethical practice of medicine becomes an expert class, unidirectional endeavor. With societal trust, we have something to build on. With an embrace of fallibility, progress in medicine becomes a dynamic, bi-directional, and (at least) honest conversation, rooted in error detection and disclosure.

• This avoids touching the live wire, which sooner or later is going to have to happen. Trust in medicine will not be restored without a reckoning, and no amount of political heel-digging can prevent this.

Robots

I’ve been reluctant to share essays by ‘John Carter’ of Postcards from Barsoom, not because he’s not often insightful, but because I find his right-of-centre political stances to be all-too-frequently wince-inducing. But this piece “AI is doing to the universities what Gutenberg did to the monasteries” overcomes my reticence:

Artificial Intelligence promises to rot our brains in the same way that automobiles and labour-saving appliances rotted our bodies. It will be the easiest thing in the world to let the AI do all of our thinking for us, and because we are by default a lazy species, most of us will do just that. This will very rapidly turn the brains of much of the population into overboiled instant ramen, capable of little more than doomscrolling and writing the occasional prompt. Grok, is this true?

In it, the pseudonymous author suggests that the Large Language Models may put the universities out of business - or at least, substantially change what they do and how they do it.

Puppies and Kittens

The thing about images like the above, is that it could have been generated by a machine and how would we know…? But at least we are being called upon to question the veracity of what we encounter now. For too long, we’ve accepted too much at face value. The future we must build together will be more sceptical, but we will still find such pictures cute, even when we doubt their origin.

With unlimited love,

Chris.