Category: Trump and Trump-hatred

How academic elites see the river of federal tax dollars that Harvard has been receiving

by philg

A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:

the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.

(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:

Nobody has ever explained to me how this is consistent with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Maskachusetts General Law, Section 98.)

She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.

The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:

  • I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
  • Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
  • A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
  • The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)

Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:

<title>Harvard Gazette &#8211; Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research &#8212; Harvard Gazette</title>

and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:

Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…

We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:

The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.

It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.

The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.

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What are your favorite NPR stories?

by philg

With the hated dictator threatening to defund NPR (NBC), let’s have a quick survey regarding favorite NPR articles for the working class taxpayer to fund.

Here’s one that I received recently from a friend in San Francisco (he’s a closeted Deplorable because diversity is our biggest strength and also anyone who didn’t vote Democrat has to be fired):

The peasants had to pay the following elites, apparently, to obtain this valuable lesson:

  • Alejandra Marquez Janse (writer)
  • Patrick Jarenwattananon (writer)
  • Asma Khalid (writer)
  • Catie Dull(!) (illustrator)
  • an uncredited editor
  • some web nerds ($150,000/year total compensation when considering salary, benefits, pension?)

Readers: Please add some links to favorite NPR stories!

Related:

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The Barbra Streisands of medicine: ob/gyns

by philg

Barbra Streisand is famous for promising to move to Canada, but then living quietly under two Trump dictatorships. See “‘I really will’: the stars who didn’t move to Canada when Trump won” (Guardian, 2018), for example:

Who are Streisand’s counterparts in the world of medicine? Ob/gyns. “Ob/Gyns Mostly Stayed Put After SCOTUS Overturned Roe, Study Finds” (MedPageToday, April 21, 2025):

There was no population-level ob/gyn exodus away from abortion-restrictive states post-Roe.

From the quarter right before the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision through the end of the study in September 2024, 95.8% of ob/gyns remained in states that protect access to abortion, 94.8% remained in states threatening bans, and 94.2% remained in states with abortion bans, reported Becky Staiger, PhD, of the University of California Berkeley, and colleagues.

“The only statistically significant difference suggested that the share of physicians who are ob/gyns decreased less in threatened states than in protected ones, opposite to the expected finding if ob/gyns were leaving states where abortion is threatened,” the authors wrote.

(I apologize for the hateful language in which “abortion care” is presented without the “care”.)

The full article says “Numerous media reports have described physicians leaving states where abortion is banned in response to these concerns, including cases of retirement or migration”.

Where should an ob/gyn passionate about delivering abortion care have moved? Maskachusetts law allows abortion care at 37 weeks of pregnancy or even more if a single physician believes that the abortion care will preserve “the patient’s … mental health”:

If a pregnancy has existed for 24 weeks or more, no abortion may be performed except by a physician, and only if in the best medical judgement of the physician it is: (i) necessary to preserve the life of the patient; (ii) necessary to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health; (iii) warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis; or (iv) warranted because of a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.

(Abortion care is “on demand” through 24 weeks.)

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If Congress repealed the Refugee Act of 1980 would the fight over migrants between the Trump administration and the court system end?

by philg

The court system has been obstructing the Trump administration’s attempts to deport various classes of undocumented migrants who are here in the U.S. One might imagine that making a deportation decision would be a simple process. A migrant who lacks either a visa or a green card is ineligible for U.S. residence and, therefore, he/she/ze/they can be deported. Because, however, any migrant is entitled to make an asylum claim, e.g., as Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia did in 2019 (eight years after illegally entering the U.S.). At that point, some folks reasonably argue that “due process” requires U.S. government workers to determine whether the tale told by the asylum-seeker is true (see Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)). It’s unclear why anyone thinks truth determination is possible. Only one side of the story is available, i.e., from the migrant who stands to gain four generations of a work-optional lifestyle (entitlement to public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone). It’s an absurd farce in which the winners are those with the best acting skills, but it’s guaranteed to be an expensive farce with hundreds or thousands of hours invested by lawyers on all sides (government, migrant, judges) for each migrant whose status is determined. Other than high fees, the one thing all of these lawyers will have in common: none will have any clue about what actually happened on the other side of the world 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

(Another farcical element is that nothing stops a Salvadoran from claiming that El Salvador, 20X safer than Baltimore or Washington, D.C., is too dangerous and that therefore he needs to live right here in the country where most of the most violent Salvadorans now reside.)

How did we get to the point that every migrant who strolls across the border can impose a $1 million cost in legal fees on the U.S. taxpayer? Professor of Constitutional Law Dr. ChatGPT, JD, PhD explains that we can thank the noblest of all U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter:

The premise of the asylum framework seems to be that Earth is generally too dangerous to be occupied by humans with the exception of the United States, which is the only safe place. World population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion people and 4.4 billion in 1980. Today, despite the fact that almost every country is officially deemed too dangerous to inhabit, the human population is somewhere between 8 and 10 billion (nobody knows).

Republicans have control of Congress right now. Instead of these constant fights with the courts regarding whether anyone can be deported, wouldn’t it make more sense for Trump to ask Congress to repeal the Refugee Act of 1980 and pass a new law that says “The United States does not offer temporary or permanent residence on the basis of an asylum claim and, in fact, does not offer asylum. It is a shame that various countries at various times have problems, but Americans hope that people who live in those countries will cooperate to work out their problems.” Asylum-seekers wouldn’t be disadvantaged by such a change because anyone who wants to seek asylum can do so in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, etc.

Loosely related… (source)

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The old white Democrats who wanted public schools closed for 18 months now gather en masse without masks

by philg

As a keen follower of The Science, my main take-away from the Democrats’ nationwide anti-Trump mass gatherings was “Why aren’t they wearing masks?”

A sea of old white people crammed together (source), none of them masked:

These are the same people who demanded that public schools be closed for 18 months, and that peasants be ordered to wear masks outdoors. Old white Democrats demanded that, except for mostly peaceful BLM protests, the subjects would be forbidden to assemble more than 25 people outdoors (Maskachusetts December 2020), or no more than 3 households (California, October 2020), or no more than 10 people from 2 households (Colorado, October 2020)).

What happened to The Science?

Montpelier, Vermont, formerly a center of the mask religion:

The Righteous in Boston have their Palestinian flag and they say “Trump is Stupid”, but they aren’t smart enough to wear masks:

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Manufacturing Discontent

by philg

A California Democrat posted “Holocaust book, Maya Angelou’s autobiography among nearly 400 items pulled from Naval Academy library in DEI purge” (CBS) to a group as an example of an outrage committed by Donald Trump. His introduction to this article: “Ahhhh…shades of the Mao Tse Tung-led purge by the Chinese Communist Party of books they didn’t like during the “cultural revolution”…”. From CBS:

Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. … In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials..

Some Jewish Democrats in the group agreed with him that these book removals were an outrage on a similar scale to what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Let’s have a look at the very first book of the headline, Memorializing the Holocaust. According to Amazon, the full title includes the word “Gender“, a word that appears 15 times on the selling page, and the book is properly categorized in “General Gender Studies”. The author is “Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies”. Here’s the Amazon description:

How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.

The book is so important to our wider culture and has touched its readers so deeply that, after 15 years on Amazon, it has garnered exactly zero reviews. (Maybe it is required reading in some college-level gender studies courses? The book is “57,829 in Books” for sales, much higher than Queer Black Dance, featured in an independent bookstore.)

I find the CBS article and the reaction to it interesting because they show how easily discontent can be manufactured by our media. Nobody in the group, other than me, bothered to find out whether the “Holocaust book” was about the Holocaust. All of the Democrats accepted CBS’s headline characterization of the book and reflexively condemned Trump and Hegseth.

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If consumption taxes and carbon taxes are good, why are tariffs bad?

by philg

We’re informed by America’s expert class that Donald Trump’s tariffs, money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use here, are disastrous.

We’ve been informed for 30 years by America’s expert class that consumption taxes, such as sales taxes, airline ticket taxes, gasoline taxes, etc. are good. In fact, one way to make America better would be to have a European-style 20 percent value-added (consumption) tax, i.e., money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use domestically (and also when a domestically produced item is purchased). Trump’s 10 percent general tariff plus California’s 10 percent sales tax rate (varies a bit by city/county) comes pretty close to the European average of 22 percent consumption tax (VAT).

Our elites also say that what would really deliver us the paradise on Earth to which we are entitled is a carbon tax. We consume too much, especially of transportation, and the result is epic CO2 emission. A consumption tax, especially for things that have to be transported long distances, would go a long way to healing our beloved Spaceship Earth. A tariff, of course, isn’t a laser-targeted carbon tax, but it is most certainly better than no tax at all for plastic being made in China and then shipped across the wide Pacific Ocean.

Finally, we’ve been told by experts for at least 20 years that we are undertaxed (our structural annual budget deficits certainly lend some credence to this theory!). The government needs more revenue of all kinds so that it can do great things for us.

Trump’s tariffs may simply be a prod to negotiating lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers in other countries to U.S. exports. But even if they were to be applied long-term, based on everything that elites and progressives have previously said, shouldn’t they be a positive for both the U.S. and for the world? Why the hysteria from Democrats when higher tax rates, carbon taxes, and more government revenue are precisely the things that they’ve been asking for?

A neighbor’s house this morning, below. Why wouldn’t a progressive celebrate discouraging the importation of a gas guzzling Porsche 911 like the one in the photo (daily driver parked on the street because the homeowner’s garage is presumably full with the valuable cars). This homeowner could have used a nudge in the direction of a planet-healing domestically produced Chevrolet Bolt instead.

The whole situation is almost as confusing to me as climate change alarmist Senator Mark Kelly’s switch from Tesla to pavement-melting gasoline-powered Chevy Tahoe. Trump has seemingly delivered almost everything that elite progressives have asked for and yet they’re forecasting a doom spiral.

Related:

  • “Trade, Firms, and Wages: Theory and Evidence” (Amiti and Davis 2011), in which economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Queers for Palestine University (a.k.a. “Columbia”), and NBER, found that high tariffs boosted wages for workers “at import-competing firms”
  • “There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness” (New York Times! Guest essay by a young history professor): “They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. … it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. … some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States.” and then the more familiar NYT perspective… “But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing, it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great. … The most valuable asset of the United States is not the dollar but our trustworthiness — our integrity and our values. If the world envisioned by the Mar-a-Lago Accords comes to pass, it will be a sign that not only our currency but our nation has been devalue” (My rating for this last sentence: Completely FALSE! Our most valuable asset is the entire continent that we stole from the Native Americans! As a thought experiment, imagine if the roughly 350 million Americans lived on the territory of Sudan. How rich would we be?)
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How’s the first month of Trump-Vance going? (and was every part of government devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+ advocacy?)

by philg

Other than riling up Democrats into fits of hysteria, has the Trump-Vance administration accomplished anything so far? Or have all of their initiatives been thwarted by judges?

Here’s one where a judge forced the CDC to stick with its old web site (NYT):

A federal judge has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages it has taken down from its website to comply with President Trump’s executive order barring any references to race, gender identity or sexual orientation.

Judge John D. Bates of the D.C. Federal District Court issued the temporary restraining order at the request of a left-leaning advocacy group, Doctors for America, saying the deletions put “everyday Americans and most acutely, underprivileged Americans” in jeopardy.

Let’s look at one that doesn’t seem to fall under the rubric of “race, gender identity, or sexual orientation” .. “Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy” (The Free Press, whose brand is skepticism):

what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.

NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.

The third-of-a-$billion/year enterprise is all about “democracy”, right? What if we check its web site?

LGBTIQ+ communities in Africa are often on the frontlines of the struggle for human rights in the region,” says Dave Peterson, Senior Director of the Africa program at the National Endowment for Democracy(NED). “As one of the most marginalized groups in many countries, respect for the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is a key indicator for the overall respect for human rights and democracy in a society. Attitudes towards the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is gradually shifting throughout the continent, which bodes well for the prospects of greater tolerance and inclusion.

It actually is about gender identity and sexual orientation because there is no “democracy” unless Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion. Without this $315 million/year spend there will be no democracy in Africa.

How much is $315 million/year? Compared to the wired-in federal deficit, almost nothing. Compared to what is needed to start a Silicon Valley company, enormous. Let’s look instead, though, at what kind of work by private sector Americans is required to keep the NED desk workers and their NGO pals comfy. We start by assuming a male working class peasant earning $50,000/year. No female is going to want to marry him due to his low wages (she can gain more spending power by having sex with an already-married higher-income guy in Massachusetts or California) and, therefore, he is going to be a single filer. He’ll pay about $6,000/year in federal income tax (nerdwallet). More than 52,000 peasants, then, have 100 percent of their federal income tax spirited away by NED to proselytize for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. For those 52,000 peasants, not a penny of their tax money will be available to spend on roads, airports, border patrol, scientific research, etc.

How about the only American enterprises that make our government look efficient? The gravy train for university administrators cannot legally be slowed down (NYT):

(The NYT article headline says there are “Cuts to Medical Research” and only readers who dig into the article learn that “research” itself is not being cut, but only fees that universities tack on to keep a full slate of deans in central administration. As much of what universities do is promote DEI and 2SLGBTQQIA+, it seems fair to say that government paying overhead fees on research contract is another way that the government promotes Rainbow Flagism. See, for example, University of Michigan’s $250 million in spending on DEI (NYT) or MIT’s “Assistant Dean of LBGTQ+, Women and Gender Services”.)

Fair to say that those with entrenched interests in getting money from federal taxpayers are winning so far?

Loosely related… one area of success seems to be in changing minds at the New York Times. “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship” (Feb 15, 2025) is unthinkable heresy. Two constitutional law professors:

In Wong Kim Ark, the leading case on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court explained that “jurisdiction” referred to being born “within the allegiance” of the sovereign. The court held that a child born of parents with a “permanent domicile and residence in the United States” was a birthright citizen. Wong Kim Ark’s parents, as persons who came in amity, had entered into the social compact and were entitled to all the benefits of that compact, including not only the protection of the laws but also the benefits of citizenship for their children. Under the common law, the court observed, “such allegiance and protection were mutual.”

This is also why, as prominent editions of Blackstone’s commentaries explained, invading armies were excluded. “It is not cœlum nec solum” — it is neither the climate nor the soil — that makes a natural-born subject, “but their being born within the allegiance and under the protection of the king.”

For Trump to prevail, all that a modern court needs to do, in other words, is find that undocumented migrants are “an invading army.”

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Trump listens to at least one African in shutting down USAID

by philg

Folks are upset that Trump and DOGE may shut down USAID and cut U.S. foreign aid spending (state-sponsored NPR). This is consistent with a classic 2005 interview “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”. Quotes below, but not in quote style for improved readability (my highlights in bold).

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?

Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there’s a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn’t exist at that time.

Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It’s not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it’s only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why’s that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa’s biggest business. There’s nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

Shikwati: … jobs that were created artificially in the first place and that distort reality. Jobs with foreign aid organizations are, of course, quite popular, and they can be very selective in choosing the best people. When an aid organization needs a driver, dozens apply for the job. And because it’s unacceptable that the aid worker’s chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently — and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That’s just crazy!

A 2017 look at the interviewee:

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What happens at the end of our trade war with Canada?

by philg

Donald Trump has demanded that Canada stop sending us fentanyl and undocumented migrants. (why wouldn’t Canada try to keep at least all of the migrants for itself since we are informed that low-skill migrants make any country richer?) Canada refused to try to do this so Trump has hit them with 25 percent tariffs and now the Canadians are retaliating with their own tariffs (NYT). Do the tariffs keep escalating until all trade stops? Then what? The Canadians (example) seem to think that the less-export- dependent country will cave in (34 percent of Canada’s GDP is exports; 12 percent of U.S. GDP is exports). Americans don’t think or care about this?

What does Canada produce that we can’t make domestically, albeit at a presumably higher price? On their side, why does Canada need the U.S. as a trade partner? If they are all about resource extraction why can’t they sell their extracted resources to the Chinese and Europeans?

To the extent that a reduction in trade with Canada harms New York, Vermont, Maskachusetts, etc., I wonder if the trade fracas will be a net positive for Florida, which doesn’t border Canada and doesn’t get any power from Canada. A righteous New Yorker who suddenly has to pay twice as much for electricity could reasonably consider that the last straw and move to Democrat-dominated Orlando.

Speaking of Florida, here are a few pictures from Juno Beach yesterday, which featured shockingly cold (to Floridians) 72-degree ocean water, a pelican sushi bar, and a lunch menu that RFK, Jr. would certainly appreciate:

Some Canine-Americans who don’t seem to be concerned about a trade war:

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