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Of all of the recent announcements, since the new Administration, I would probably say the most earth-shattering politically in sort of the context of the American political Zeitgeist, I would say probably one of the biggest things that we have seen in the last month since Mr. Trump returned to office was this USAID situation. The shutdown, drawing everybody home and then now they are making all these revelations of all this money that was spent and things.

I have got to tell you the most disappointing aspect of this for me, and it's reflected in the thumbnail and I want to give some context on the thumbnail. I'm going to go ahead and put a link in the description below over to a clip. That's actually from Law and Order which when I was a kid, that was actually one of my favourite shows, I used to watch with my grandmother before she passed away. I think I've seen every episode of the original Law and Order. The later episodes kind of got a little, some of them were okay, but it wasn't like it was. They tried to kind of serialize it towards the end. I won't digress into my criticism of the late Law and Order period, but this is kind of the middle Law and Order period, kind of the optimal Law and Order period and that show was on for nearly two decades, I think a quarter century or something. In any event, the point I'm trying to make is in the video they are talking about a crooked DA and when you watch the clip if you want to, you can see that's what's going on here. And the DA, the former DA was crooked - the guy that's in the thumbnail - and I'm not glorifying being a crooked DA, that's not what I'm saying here, but he gets very angry at one point because, he became crooked because he needed money, and it's wrong, we all know it's morally wrong, he shouldn't have done this and all of that. But there's this one scene where he is talking to this other lawyer who has kind of gotten disdainful and haughty towards him even though they were once friends. And I can understand, this person thinks he's been corrupted or whatever, but he gets angry because he's talking about basically he's a lawyer and he's like, 'hey I'm working lawyer and the person he's talking to, the other prosecutor who they were once friends, is somebody that has a lot of independent wealth and they are basically just sort of working, not exactly a part-time thing or anything, but they're not working because they need the money. This line has stayed with me much of my life, this whole line of, "you never had to sweat out a paycheck". I hear that in my mind over and over every time, I think the line in the scene is he says, "you are a dilettante, you've never had to work, you never had to sweat out a paycheck" and again he is doing this out of a kind of indignation that stems from his own corruption where he is trying to find anything to blame someone else for his own conduct. And again, the corruption of a DA, that was bad, a District Attorney, that's not my point though. But let's invert that and let's pull that notion out, that notion that you have to work for a living, that you have to make your own money. 

The most disappointing thing in the fallout from this USAID thing is, and I don't have any hard and fast evidence of this, but long story short many so-called colleagues, whatever, folks I've known over the years, acquaintances, friends that I thought were having to make a living for themselves out here on their own like I do, which say whatever you will about me good, bad, indifferent, I have had to make my own way in the last 17 years. I built this business by myself. I have had help especially in the later years, but the first years it was me, primarily me. I was doing US Immigration work. I had some help on the Thai side getting my Company and Work Permit stuff set up and I had a Thai Attorney, initially one and then it grew out, that were working with me but it fundamentally was me that built this firm. I've been through thick and thin; I've had very lean times here. I remember when the exchange rate went upside down and it was pretty hard to hang on here. Back when it was like 28 and change Thai baht to the USD you couldn't get people to really purchase a lot of Legal Services during that time period. That was about a year. We held on; I managed to make it barely and then we went into COVID. I thought that was going to destroy us. We managed to manage to hang on but again it destroyed a huge segment of our practice. We adapted; we moved on.  These folks that have just been taking a paycheck and then pretend, I guess LARPing is the right word, another word for it is lying to the public that they are anything other than somebody who is pulling in a paycheck as a sinecure from one source while pretending to earn their living abroad in another way. And while again, I don't know what everybody was doing and all of this, but I have real problems with everything that has happened in USAID where they are just spending taxpayer money; they are sending these people out there. Here's my question. What if somebody was taking money - I hesitate say under the table, there's nothing nefarious in this from the American standpoint - if you are duly signed on to provide services to the Government, whatever, but long story short is is it right that it looks to me like USAID was sending folks out into the world to effectively LARP and pretend - LARP is sort of an acronym, it is a modern acronym for Live Action Roleplay - LARPing as professionals or this, that and the other thing when in reality they had a steady paycheck from elsewhere. And this is what drives me nuts in the aftermath of this USAID thing. Here I've been out here for 17 years and I have had to sweat out a paycheck; I haven't asked for anything from Uncle Sam, and now I am finding out my Government was giving money to people to possibly directly be in competition with me or at least ostensibly, therefore warping the market when it comes to me trying to ply my trade that I am not taking any money from the taxpayers to go out and do.

Everything about this USAID thing has just been one giant disappointment to me in virtually everything that has to do with everything I have ever known about the Americans abroad, frankly. But the most galling thing is the smug condescension from a bunch of people who weren't really working for a living the way that they claimed to be and were taking a Government sinecure. And then to sit around and tell a working person who isn't gaining those benefits, that they are doing it somehow wrong, or they need to be more open to "true competition" in this market. I don't know what to say. Disappointment is really the only word.