FOREIGN PRODUCERS REALLY DO PAY THE TARIFFS

Conventional wisdom is that foreign countries do not pay the tariffs; importers pay them, and then pass them on to consumers. Various estimates claim that 95-99% of Trump’s tariffs are paid by consumers.

So now that the tariffs have been declared illegal, import companies are lining up to claim refunds on the tariffs they were forced to pay illegally. However, various websites are crying foul, saying, “Hey, it was really the consumers who paid those tariffs, so why pay refunds to the importers? In fact, the American taxpayer, who paid the higher price, is now asked to bail out the importers, who levied the higher prices on consumers in the first place. The taxpayers are being hit twice for the same price rise.”

But it’s a whole lot more complicated than that. The real losers are the foreign producers, because the tax on their products makes them lose sales. Too high a protective tariff may force the foreign producer to lose their entire US market. That could be a huge loss.

I live in Cambodia, where garment factories form a large part of the country’s GDP, mostly through sales to the US. I have seen garment factories forced to close, because Americans can no longer afford tariff-taxed Cambodian products. The garment industry in Cambodia has lost millions of dollars to Trump’s tariffs.

The winners are the American producers of competing products (just as Trump wanted). Consumers find American products more attractive than the (taxed) foreign imports. Not only do American sales rise, but the producers, without foreign competition, can now raise their prices.

What about tariffs on products that cannot be produced in the US, like coffee or bananas? If the price of coffee goes up, Americans will buy less coffee, or may switch to tea. At least they can switch to coffee from lower tariff countries, since Trump levied the tariffs unequally. The real losers are the high-tariff countries who must now sell less coffee.

Importers, who have simply passed the tariffs on to consumers, cannot claim injury from the federal government, so they should not be allowed to sue. Only the foreign producers should sue for damages. Of course, consumers, who have lost big time, will have trouble individually suing the federal government.

For those of you who like Econ 101 graphs, here is the situation:

Originally, the supply graph S meets the demand graph D in equilibrium point A. With the tariff applied, the supply graph moves up to S’. The new equilibrium point B shows a higher price than point A, but with a lower quantity of sales, Q2. It is that lower sales figure of Q2 that makes the producing country lose money.

MAGA’S NEW EPSTEIN TUNE

Ever since the Epstein files became prominent, MAGA’s response, echoing Trump’s, has been “It’s all a hoax.  Fake news.” That wall is starting to crack.

With the release of 3 million out of a total of 6 million pages of documents, MAGA cultists must be realizing that the hoaxsters wouldn’t print 6 million fake pages. Furthermore, why would they then go and redact most of the fake stories they had invented? Seeing the redacted pages on TV forces the MAGA cultists to admit that maybe they are real.

Moreover, more and more CEOs, royalty, celebrities, and politicians around the world are resigning because their names have been linked to Epstein. They wouldn’t be resigning if it was all a hoax, would they?

I have seen a few recent Facebook posts from MAGA cultists, who are now saying, “Yes, the files are real and some famous people were doing some really bad things. But our hero Trump would never do anything like that.” Pam Bondi declared, under oath, that there is no credible evidence that Trump committed any crimes.

At her infamous hearing, she was shown dozens of testimonies from victims implicating Trump himself. The DOJ response to these horrific accusations is that the FBI (Patel) or the DOJ (Bondi herself) had received the complaints and judged that they were of no merit. Therefore, they do not constitute credible evidence against Trump.

Every article I read on this subject contains an obligatory disclaimer about Trump, something hilarious like “Jane Doe reported to the FBI that Trump had raped her three times, but this does not constitute any suggestion that Trump did anything wrong.” Without that ridiculous disclaimer, Trump would sue the writers of the article.

That seems to be MAGA’s fall-back position: that Trump was friends with a lot of those evil people, including Epstein, but never did anything wrong himself. Those flight manifests from Epstein’s private plane may be real, but they don’t prove that Trump did anything wrong.

MAGA cultists may admit that Epstein and Trump threw parties,

but Trump did nothing illegal there.

I think it was clever of DOJ to release 38,000 mentions of Trump in the files – the least damaging ones they could find. They couldn’t possibly be believed if they redacted ALL mentions of Trump. MAGA can now say, “Nothing to see here.” However, it’s now widely accepted that his name appears over a million times, so that the other 962,000 have been redacted. Those must be the really juicy ones.

It will be hard to dislodge the MAGA cultists from their latest fall-back position. What could force them to change their minds?

The next big step may be the release of unredacted files by European governments. Not only will Trump’s most horrible misdeeds come to light, but there will be corroborating testimonies supporting these stories that will cross-check. How will MAGA react to that?

Another development will be that some of the guilty villains will be perhaps arrested, or if not, at least forced to testify. These important people will carry far more credibility than the women victims, especially if their testimony supports that of the victims. They may be important people whom MAGA can believe.

For example, the former Prince Andrew has already been identified and has lost heavily. What more would he have to lose by testifying against Trump or others? And how about Howard Lutnick, whose story about just visiting Epstein’s island for lunch with his family has absolutely no credibility? If he becomes too much of a laughingstock or liability, he may be forced out and might then testify against Trump and other cabinet members.

I think that the final position of the MAGA cultists will be, “Well, maybe Trump did some bad things when he was younger, but he’s straightened out after realizing that America is broken, and he is doing his best to fix the country, as only he can.”

HOORAY FOR BAD BUNNY!

Prior to the Superbowl halftime show, MAGA critics were shouting that a Hispanic performer was a divisive influence. “Why didn’t the NFL choose someone who spoke English?” An article in the Atlantic states that MAGA voices attacked the “crazy” decision by the “woke” NFL to book someone who’s not “a unifying entertainer.” 

It turned out that Bad Bunny staged an exuberant, positive show, full of joy and happiness, as he emphasized not only the unity of the United States, but the unity of all ‘American’ nations in the two Americas. The 127 million viewers came away feeling pumped up.

On the other hand, the opposition halftime show, with only 5 million viewers, was a bit of a bore. Its featured artist, Kid Rock, did not inspire unity.

Kid Rock (not even from the USA) is not a unifying figure.

We knew Trump would write something nasty about the show. The real reason for his angry response was that, for once, Trump wasn’t the center of attention. Trump has to make everything about HIMSELF.

Bad Bunny’s positive show was a rare island of feel-goodism in a sea of American gloom. Everything in the news these days is negative, from ICE murders to record job losses, from Trump’s constant anger to the horrific Epstein files.

A recent Economist/Yougov poll about the direction of the country showed a negative-to-positive result of 33-61, a spread of -28.

Studies reported in Fortune show that the long-term gloom is even worse. The most recent measures show that while current life satisfaction has declined over the last decade, future optimism has dropped even more.

“While current life is eroding, it’s that optimism for the future that has eroded almost twice as much over the course of about that last 10 years or so.”

That’s why Bad Bunny’s show was such a light in the darkness for millions of Americans. Give him credit for not dwelling on the negatives. He could have badmouthed Trump, bemoaned the economy, or brought up Trump’s misadventures in Venezuela, Greenland, etc. That’s what many people expected, but he didn’t take the bait.

Maybe this show will be a first step towards a more positive attitude, not just about the future of the US, but about the unity of all the diverse peoples in the Americas.

FREUD’S ID-SUPEREGO-EGO MODEL IS USEFUL

I just had the following experience:  lying in bed, I thought of a cold beer I had in the fridge, and also that I had some muesli and milk. I thought, “Wow! A cold beer would taste mighty good about now.”  But then I thought, “The muesli and milk would be a lot better for my health.” I finally decided, “The beer can wait for another day, but the milk might go bad if I don’t drink it.”

Which would you choose, a cold beer or muesli and milk?

This mental debate reminded me of Freud’s model of the mind — id-superego-ego. Wanting a cold beer represents the id of raw desire; the health benefits of muesli represent the morality of the superego, and the rational choice of the muesli represents the adjudication by the ego.

The id-superego-ego model can be quite useful in describing our thoughts. Many decisions are a struggle between a physical desire and a moral principle, adjudicated by some rational decision. Two separate parts of the brain are struggling, and the decision is made by a third part in order to balance or satisfy the other two.

I remember watching cartoons in my youth, where a character had a devil whispering in one ear, “Go ahead and do it; no one will find out,” while an angel whispers in the other ear, “You shouldn’t do that; it’s not right.” That’s the id and the superego speaking, while the character has to decide which ear to listen to, so that the decision represents the ego.

I’m sure you have seen images like this.

Freud is out of fashion these days, but I think he should be listened to more attentively. Equally out of fashion is another major work of Freud’s: Totem and Taboo. This work has been heavily criticized by sociologists, but it is worth delving into because of its originality of thought. Read it with a grain of salt, but be prepared for stimulating insights worth examining.

Anyway, the next time you have a decision to make, it might be useful to examine which side represents the id and which side represents the superego. Be aware of which part of your brain wins out.

CURRENCY DEVALUATION IS A TARIFF

Trump has recently claimed that it would be a good thing if the US dollar depreciated. This is a common argument because if the dollar depreciates, it makes US exports seem cheaper and more attractive to foreign countries, while it makes imports more expensive, thus discouraging Americans from buying foreign products.

It’s quite a valid argument. Several years ago, many countries realized this and began a ‘race to the bottom’, trying to beggar their neighbors in lowering their currencies. The result was that nothing changed. If country A takes steps to lower its currency against country B, and if country B takes the same steps to lower its currency, the two actions cancel each other out.

Suppose, then, that Trump manages to devalue the US dollar by 10%. That means that the Chinese yuan and others will rise by 10% against the dollar. An American company that wants to buy a Chinese product (in yuan) will have to pay 10% more for the product.

In other words, a 10% tariff.

In fact, it’s a 10% tariff on every country and every product at the same time. That’s not very useful, if Trump wants to punish selective countries or selective products. That’s why he hasn’t focused on devaluation.

However, it appears that Trump is getting his devaluation anyway. The US dollar has dropped 11% against a basket of major currencies in 2025 and is poised to drop even further. It is currently at a 4-year low.

Many countries, alarmed at Trump’s erratic policies, are dumping their dollar holdings in the form of US Treasuries in favor of other currency-denoted assets. With all the selling, the US dollar will surely decline, and if the US loses its credit rating, the dollar could really plummet.

The US dollar has been propped up by interest rates that are higher than many other countries, including Japan. Japanese investors may buy dollars with their yen, in order to gain that higher interest. This is known as the ‘carry trade’.

If Trump succeeds in coercing the Fed into lowering rates, the carry trade may lessen or disappear. That will make the dollar less attractive and will therefore lower its value.

In sum, if Trump lowers interest rates, it will devalue the dollar, which, as a tariff, will represent a tax on Americans in the form of higher prices for foreign goods. Of course, as we have seen from Trump’s tariffs so far, while some foreign companies still sell their product in America at higher, taxed prices, others will simply withdraw from the American market because their products cannot compete.

This all sounds good for the ‘America First’ crowd. A weaker dollar will make US products more attractive, and may induce foreign companies to make their products in the US. Still, without foreign competition, American companies can charge higher prices.

There are many products that are difficult or impossible to produce in the US. How about coffee or bananas? A weaker dollar will make those products more expensive, in other words, a tariff on those products.

Also, world oil is priced in dollars. If the dollar declines, countries, including the US, will have to pay more dollars for that barrel of oil. That means global inflation.

And, just like tariffs, a lower dollar will be a tax on American consumers, who will have to pay higher prices on foreign goods, or else higher prices on American-produced goods with no foreign competition.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH BEAUTY

Every morning I walk over to the local pagoda. After some Qi Gong meditation, I just sit on the swing, drinking in the beauty of the place. Not just the visual beauty, but the sounds, especially some 20 identifiable surround-sound bird songs.

My swing at Wat Kandal

This right-brained experience leads my left brain to analyze just what this experience of beauty is really all about.

Here is my simple-minded theory of art: the artist has a vision in his mind (perhaps visual, but maybe musical or poetic), which he then transcribes, using his technical skills, so that the recipient will appreciate his vision. Art is thus a communication between artist and recipient, and the value of that art is judged both by the richness or depth of the original vision, together with the technical skill used in transmitting it.

Of course, each recipient will appreciate different aspects of the message, because they bring their own background to the experience. That is why Plato insisted that “Beauty is in the mind of the beholder.”

What was the original vision of this artist?

Now, back to the pagoda experience. Is the beauty I experience in nature the same experience as seeing a Monet Water-Lily painting, or listening to a Bach fugue? I believe it is. It is the appreciation of some aspect of the mind of the creator, perhaps ‘through a glass darkly’. Creator? Yes, I’m coming down on the side of Creationism. However, while the usual argument for Creationism is that the universe is too complex and orderly to have created itself, and therefore must have been created by something, my argument is that the universe is beautiful, and that beauty is communicated to us from some mind, or what I might call Ubermind, or pure Mind.

I conclude that my experience of beauty at the pagoda is a glimpse into the Creationist Mind. In fact, those of us who have had ‘peak experiences’ may realize that such an experience is a union with, or incorporation into, that Mind.

[Note that I am not connecting this to religion, which I feel is far removed from Creationism.]

This connection between art and Creationism was expressed by Beethoven:  when he said, “Bach is the immortal God of harmony.” Bach himself wrote, “Harmony is next to Godliness.”

TRUMP IS NOT GOING SENILE. HE IS BECOMING MORE SCHIZOPHRENIC

I’m not hearing the word ‘schizophrenia’ in the media. The media are full of descriptions of Trump’s ‘cognitive decline’. I think this term misses the mark. He is not just slowing down in his mental processes; he is actually insane, psychotic. In fact, his schizophrenia is becoming more and more pronounced and serious. That’s quite different from senility.

The Mayo Clinic includes these identifying marks of schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia can seem to lose touch with reality, 

  • Delusions. This is when people believe in things that aren’t real or true. For example, people with schizophrenia could think that they’re being harmed or harassed when they aren’t. They could think that they’re the target for certain gestures or comments when they aren’t. They may think they’re very famous or have great ability when that’s not the case. Or they could feel that a major disaster is about to occur when that’s not true. Most people with schizophrenia have delusions.
  • Disorganized speech and thinking. Disorganized speech causes disorganized thinking. It can be hard for people with schizophrenia to talk with other people. The answers people with schizophrenia give to questions may not be related to what’s being asked. Or questions may not be answered fully. Rarely, speech may include putting together unrelated words in a way that can’t be understood. Sometimes this is called word salad.
  • Negative symptoms. People with schizophrenia may not be able to function in the way they could before their illness started. For example, they may not bathe, make eye contact or show emotions. They may speak in a monotone voice and not be able to feel pleasure. 

Psychiatry.org has similar descriptors:

  • Delusions are fixed false beliefs held despite clear or reasonable evidence that they are not true. Persecutory (or paranoid) delusions, when a person believes they are being harmed or harassed by another person or group, are the most common.
  • Disorganized thinking and speech refer to thoughts and speech that are jumbled or do not make sense. For example, the person may switch from one topic to another or respond with an unrelated topic in conversation. The symptoms are severe enough to cause substantial problems with normal communication.

I don’t need to go into detail about how these symptoms apply perfectly to Trump’s behavior. Take his recent letter to the Prime Minister of Norway. That was not cognitive decline; it was delusional. He mixed up Norway with Denmark. He really believes he ended 8 wars and has brought inflation down.

I think that Europe has figured this out, as more and more I am seeing words from them like ‘mad’, ‘insane’, ‘crazy’, ’irrational’, etc. Even a senile person can still make rational decisions, but a schizophrenic person will say and do the most ridiculous things. Trump is living in a dream-world of his own making.

Therefore, in thinking about today’s politics, we should treat Trump as a madman, not as a doddering old man. A madman is probably more dangerous than a senile person, in that his actions are unpredictable and on a grand scale. Consider the following about Trump:

  • His speeches are becoming more and more rambling and incoherent. He threatens more and more violent actions.
  • His actions in Venezuela, Greenland, and Minnesota are becoming more and more unhinged.
  • His delusions about ending 8 wars, being under attack by everyone, or producing an A++++ economy are getting wilder and wilder. A senile person would not attack Greenland, but a madman might.

By the way, I have often compared Trump to the mad Roman emperor Caligula. Today I looked up what happened to Caligula. He was assassinated.

Caligula named his horse as a Roman Senator

WOULD TRUMP STAGE HIS ASSASSINATION?

I am not addressing the question of whether or not Trump DID stage a fake assassination.

I have read the conspiracy theories of how his ear healed miraculously fast, and how he stood up with his famous fist-shake even as the assassin was still possibly shooting. However, for me, the deciding factor of the authenticity of the act was that real bullets were fired and at least one real person was killed. Surely, I thought, Trump would never include real human death as a stage prop for a faked assassination.

Great composition, with the flag perfectly placed. Staged?

Since then, I have seen evidence that maybe even that human death could have been planned as part of the act.

I have seen mostly innocent Venezuelan fishermen blown out of the water just as a prop in Trump’s anti-Maduro theater. That includes the two unarmed survivors clinging to their wrecked boat, who were killed in cold blood as part of Trump’s theater.

More recently, I have seen ICE agents shooting and murdering innocent American citizens, all with Trump’s blessing. Thirty-odd people have died in ICE custody, and Trump only encourages more of the same. Human life means nothing to him. Innocent lives are expendable as part of the political game, aimed at instilling fear in the population.

Within minutes of Reneé Good’s murder, Trump coldly came out with some lies about her running over the ICE agent, and falsely branding her a ‘domestic terrorist’. He showed no compassion for the murder of the mother who had just spoken calmly to the ICE agent. When video after video showed that her car had not touched the agent and that he shot her from the SIDE, fake AI videos started appearing on the internet, showing a speeding car ramming into someone. That didn’t convince many people, so the latest ploy is to claim that the agent suffered ‘internal bleeding’.  Trump has been flooding the internet with that one. It appears on my Facebook every few minutes. No one believes that one, either, especially as it now emerges that he was taken — a week after the shooting — to an administration building, not a hospital. All these machinations show just how far Trump will go to cover up a murder, with no compassion for the victim.

The kidnapping of Maduro in Caracas was labeled just a police action to arrest a criminal. Buildings were bombed and over 100 people – civilians, soldiers, and even Cubans – were killed. But according to Trump, that’s not an act of war. Those deaths were just collateral damage in going after Maduro.

Most gruesome is the Snopes fact check as ‘true’ of the following:

In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice released an FBI tip in which a complainant alleged President Donald Trump witnessed her uncle kill her newborn child and dispose of the body in Lake Michigan when she was 13 and being trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein.

That may not actually have happened, but it corroborates his pattern of horrible acts done with no apparent feeling.

So now, having observed Trump’s callous willingness to kill people as part of his theater games, I think that he could easily have arranged his own fake assassination to include the killing of an innocent bystander, to make the plot more believable. Again, I’m not saying that actually happened that way, but I now think that Trump has the psychopathic coldness to murder as many people as he wants in cold blood, in order to further his political games.

TRUMP’S INCREMENTAL CREEP

Everyone is talking about the murder in Minneapolis, so I guess I’d better weigh in. My point here will be Trump’s incremental creep of outrage. He engages in some outrageous behavior, faces no consequences, and so is emboldened to creep to the next stage. When he faces no consequences for one action, that action becomes the new norm and sets the stage for the next outrage, raising the new norm a notch further.

Take Venezuela. First, he murdered the fishermen in international waters. No consequences. New normal. Then he murdered the survivors of his bombing. Outrage, but no consequences. Next, he pirated two oil tankers and stole the oil. New normal. Then he went into Venezuela, bombed the city, killed over 100 people, and kidnapped their president. No consequences. New normal. You can see that he will be emboldened to some new outrage:  invade Greenland? Fully invade and occupy Venezuela? Attack Cuba or Columbia? And when he gets away with that, he will proceed to the next stage of normality.

Bombing Caracas. A police action to arrest a suspect?

Now for ICE: he started with the deportation, with no due process, of mostly undocumented immigrants to that Salvadoran torture gulag, and got away with that; Next, he set up his own horrible concentration camp at Alligator Auschwitz. (A lot of people thought that was shut down, but it wasn’t. It’s still operating, run by the state of Florida rather than the federal government.) Next, he started detaining and deporting US citizens, and children with cancer, at the same time that SCOTUS was declaring that he could detain and deport anyone who LOOKED like an illegal.

Next, ICE started beating up and manhandling its detainees. At least 31 died in detention in 2025, according to Reuters.

Numerous reports from detainees, human rights advocates and lawmakers have denounced the horrible conditions people face inside immigration detention centers.

New normal. Finally, ICE has murdered an innocent US citizen in cold blood. Outrage across America, but no consequences, as Congress and MAGA sink to this new normal. The ICE murderer will probably go Scot free. That will lead to the next incremental creep.

The next step may be the murder of multiple protesters. It almost happened in Portland, where two protesters were shot but not killed. Of course, ICE and Trump will claim ‘self-defense’ and that the protesters were radical leftist Antifa terrorists. Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and Congress will defend that view, and Trump will proceed to the next level of outrage. Eventually, I see something like the following:

Some critic of Trump, say, Zohran Mamdani, will be detained by ICE agents, who will provoke some sort of confrontation as an excuse to murder Mamdani (in ‘self-defense’, of course). Or it might be Gavin Newsom, or James Comey, or Letitia James. And Mike Johnson and MAGA will applaud all of this, waiting for the next escalation.

Here’s a final thought: I notice that ICE agents wear uniforms that say “Police – ICE”. They are not police and do not have the authority of the police. Is this not an illegal ploy to intimidate people into believing they must take orders from ICE agents? An ICE agent ordered Good to get out of her car. She did not have to follow his illegal order, but the ‘Police’ tag was designed to intimidate her into doing so.

ARE CAMBODIANS REALLY BUDDHISTS?

Here’s an interesting hypothesis: the behavior of followers of any religion is diametrically opposed to the main principles of their religion. For example, the main message of Christianity is “Love thy neighbor.” But today’s Evangelicals harbor an intense hatred for blacks, Hispanics, Moslems, LGBTQs, and anyone not exactly not like themselves. Not to mention the Inquisition, the Crusades, witch-burning, the rack, etc.

One simplistic explanation is that religious people go through all the pious, symbolic motions, and therefore believe they are ‘saved’ and excused from all sorts of heinous crimes.

So what about Cambodian Buddhism? The main message of Buddhism is renunciation, detachment, aloofness, and not needing too much or becoming too attached – the ‘Middle Way’. When I look around and see Cambodians making $500 a month driving $40,000 cars, I see conspicuous consumption, not Buddhist moderation. I see debt up to their eyeballs, leading to all kinds of stress, all in the pursuit of image. Thousands of Cambodians are spending $500 for vanity license plates. Buddhist Cambodia is one of the most highly indebted countries in the world.

Cambodians are greatly attached to their families – not just to their immediate families, but to their extended families, who form the social safety net that the government cannot provide. They have one of the lowest divorce rates in the world. And yet, one of the pivotal incidents in the Buddha’s life is the ‘Great Escape’, in which he abandons his wife and baby in the middle of the night. He wanders around, unattached, for the rest of his life. Cambodians today clearly do not condone such behavior.

Prince Siddhartha (later to become the Buddha) abandons his wife and baby.

I attended a Cambodian wedding last week, in which a father wanted an impressive wedding for his son, and spent more than he could afford. He was hoping the wedding guests would defray the costs, as is the custom in Cambodia. He came up short by some $3000, and it nearly drove him crazy that he could not pay it. While the wedding followed all sorts of Buddhist rituals and traditions, it was not, in spirit, a Buddhist wedding.

There is, however, at least one tenet of Buddhism in which Cambodians believe and act accordingly: Karma. During the Thai border war last month, there were constant referrals to the horrible karma coming to the Thais. After the Khmer Rouge debacle, Cambodians kept asking themselves what they had done wrong, perhaps in previous lives, to merit such horrible karma at the hands of Pol Pot.

Cambodians spend a lot of time and effort at ‘gaining merit’, i.e. good karma. The daily tradition of monks begging for alms is not considered begging at all, but the monks offering people the opportunity to gain merit through their donations.

Rich men and politicians build elaborate stupas or other monuments to the Buddha (and also to themselves), in hopes of gaining merit.

Angkor Wat copy mausoleum of Oknha  & Mrs. Net Yang, Wat Kandal, Battambang

If you go into any pagoda, you will probably see paintings or sculptures or doors or windows with an inscription stating who paid for it and how much they contributed. This is a sort of conspicuous consumption and gaining merit all wrapped up in one.

Typical donor plaque, Wat Kandal, Battambang (note Thai baht)

Cambodians, therefore, do not really adhere to the Buddhist principle of renunciation. However, they can be partially excused because the Buddhist ‘religion’ is far greater than just the original Buddhist philosophy. Some people will argue, “But Buddhism is only a philosophy, not a religion” Just go to any pagoda and you will see that Buddhism is indeed a full-blown religion, which often has little to do with the Buddha’s philosophy.