Anyone outside the US would think that Trump is in serious trouble. His promise to reduce the price of eggs on day one has backfired, and even his most hard-headed cultists are beginning to see that the tariffs are raising prices, not lowering them. His promise to end the Ukraine war within 48 hours has […]
Category: Politics
TRUMP’S TARIFF FORMULA AND CAMBODIA
Trump slapped Cambodia with one of the highest tariffs, because, he claimed, Cambodia poses 97% tariffs on the US. When you look at a list of Cambodian tariffs on US imports, you see meats and food products at 15%, with other products at 7-15%, nowhere near the 97% calculated by the Trump team. So I […]
THE CONTINUING SIGNALGATE COVER-UP
The media continue to focus on trivial questions such as “What is the definition of ‘classified’?” The Trump administration, with media complicity, has done a masterful job of steering discussion away from the central issue — that of posting sensitive information over unsecured platforms. I have yet to hear anyone ask either of the following […]
SIGNAL-GATE — THE REAL QUESTION
I’m quite amused to watch the Trump team squirm to lie, downplay, cast blame, etc., to get off the hook for the egregious leak of secret information. The media are going berserk painting the administration as a bunch of incompetent bumblers. However, the Trump team is craftier than that. They have managed to focus the […]
A CAMBODIAN PERSPECTIVE ON TRUMPISM
I’m watching the Trump circus from afar here in Cambodia. I am observing a couple of Trump actions in light of my experiences in Cambodia. First, I have witnessed NGOs that purport to help disadvantaged people. Some of them (not all) spend 20-30% on the people, and 70-80% on themselves. The people, who don’t […]
TRUMP’S ECONOMIC WARFARE AGAINST SMALL COUNTRIES
There has been a hue and cry from economists that consumers will pay for Trump’s tariffs in the form of higher prices. China does not pay the tariff on Chinese products. Parenthetically, I note that since the introduction of tariffs on China, the Chinese stock market has been going up, while Wall Street has been […]
I USED TO WORK FOR USAID
Foreign aid has always had its detractors. Many people feel either, “Why should we be giving aid to those ungrateful shithole countries?”, or else, “USAID is such a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, it’s just another big, wasteful black hole for tax dollars.” Well, I want to share my experience working for USAID some years ago […]
THE DEATH OF EVIDENCE
Aristotle: you don’t hear much about him these days, mostly because most of his writings are taken as just plain obvious. You can yell at me for trying to reduce Aristotle’s entire opus to one short parable being bandied about the internet these days: it’s the one about two men in a room arguing about […]
THE SECOND COMING OF TRUMP
I’ve been seeing all sorts of postings on Facebook and elsewhere, pointing to Jan 20th as “The start of a Golden Era”, “the day when eggs are 99c a dozen and gas $2 a gallon,” “the day the world will stop laughing at the US”, “a new dawn”, etc.etc. All this really smacks of an apocalyptic […]
WHAT’S WITH THESE PRO-TRUMP BILLBOARDS?
I’m getting bombarded with Facebook posts showing billboards with pro-Trump messages, usually referring to some Golden Age starting on Jan. 20. There are several Facebook pages posting these, but one main one is Next Chapter. Go look for yourselves. There are two very strange features common to most of these billboards. First, the photos appear […]