Apes Are Us

Forrest explains our taxonomy.

Meetup at the Clarity Café.

(Long post-LATimes) Hiltzik: Annexation would be good for the U.S. - Los Angeles Times

Here's Hiltzik's tongue-in-cheek assessment of Felon 47's quest to conquer more countries.

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Vice President JD Vance arrives at the remote Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28, 2025.

(Jim Watson / Pool Photo)

According to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Greenland and Canada have everything to gain and nothing to lose from being annexed to the United States.

“Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe,” Vance said at America’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland last week. Denmark, which oversees Greenland’s administration, hasn’t kept Greenland “safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, China and other nations,” he added. 

Trump talks as though Canada’s becoming the 51st state would be an economic win-win for both countries.

— Danielle Martin, expert on Canadian healthcare

Leaving these assertions aside, it’s proper to note that the influence exerted by annexed lands is a two-way street. 

And that’s why the U.S. should annex — needs to annex — both Greenland and Canada. Let’s start the process without delay.

The principal gain for Americans from making both countries part of the U.S. comes from their social policies. In both countries, they’re better than America’s in many respects. They cover more residents, provide greater benefits and have more support from political leaders across the partisan spectrum.

Let’s take a closer look at what Americans can learn from its putative new territories.

We’ll start with Canada. 

Like the United States, Canada provides old-age pensions, though unlike in the U.S. these are partially paid out of general tax revenues. Canadians also can receive unemployment relief and workers’ compensation. The difference between the effectiveness of the two countries’ government pension programs can be measured by comparing their poverty rates for residents ages 65 and over. In Canada it was 14.5% in 2019-2022, in the U.S. it was 23.1%.

There are several notable differences between the American and Canadian safety nets. One is a child benefit. Canada provides parents as much as $7,787 Canadian (about $5,438 in U.S. currency) per child for children through age 5, and $6,570 Canadian (about $4,600) for children ages 6-17. The benefit phases out for those with incomes over $67,000 (about $47,000).

The U.S. child tax credit is currently $2,000 a year per child and is scheduled to drop to $1,000 in 2026. It phases out for couples earning $400,000.

Perhaps the most significant difference concerns the countries’ government healthcare programs. Canada’s system is a single-payer program, with the government paying for most necessary care; households can buy private plans to cover services that aren’t part of the government system, such as vision and dental services and outpatient prescriptions. But all Canadians are covered by the government program.

American politicians have tied themselves into knots trying to find negative things to say about Canada’s universal single-payer healthcare system. 

A sterling example was provided by then-U.S. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who during a 2014 Senate hearing grilled Danielle Martin, a Canadian expert on healthcare policy, about the supposed shortcomings of the Canadian system. Burr homed in on Canadians’ most common complaint about their system: the long waits for some services, largely resulting from a shortage of primary care doctors.

“On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year, do you know?” Burr asked Martin, with a smirk suggesting he had just unshipped a “gotcha.” Martin batted it right back: “I don’t, sir, but I do know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.”

As Martin had said in her prepared statement: “We do not have uninsured or underinsured residents. We do not have different qualities of insurance depending on a person’s employment.... At substantially lower cost than in the U.S., all Canadians have health insurance and need rather than wealth is what drives access to care.”

The Canadian government pays for reproductive healthcare, including abortions. There are no gestational age restrictions, although most abortions are performed during the first trimester and those after 23 weeks require specialized care. There are no criminal penalties for performing abortions. 

Those are obvious differences from the American experience. By law, federal funds can’t be spent on abortions. Since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision in 2022, individual states have imposed their own restrictions on abortion, sometimes by outlawing the procedure outright and even exposing those who perform abortions to criminal charges.

The consequences for maternal health in the U.S. have been horrific. In Canada, according to 2023 statistics, the maternal mortality rate per 100,000 live births was 12.22. The U.S. rate that year was 18.6. 

More worrying was a trend seen in Texas, among the states with a strict ban on abortions, where maternal mortality rose sharply to 28.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, a year after Texas banned abortions.

The social safety net in Greenland is a bit harder to analyze. For the most part Greenlanders enjoy the benefits of Danish policies. 

Greenland’s social environment is also different from Denmark’s — its Indigenous population, which has its own social mores, is larger as a proportion of the population, and residents are concentrated in the giant island’s southwest. The island has a population of about 60,000, about a third of whom live in the capital, Nuuk.

Denmark’s social policies are among the most socially liberal in the world. According to a government website, tax-funded benefits for Danish citizens include paid parental leave that can total almost a full year, subsidized day care, a universal single-payer healthcare program with no copays except for prescriptions; dental care is typically provided by private plans. All medical and nursing education is free. 

Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage law, but collective bargaining agreements have resulted in a standard minimum of about $15.57 (U.S.) an hour — more than in most jurisdictions in the U.S., where the mandated federal minimum is $7.25 an hour.

Denmark recently liberalized its abortion law, raising the right to obtain abortion upon request to up to 18 weeks of pregnancy from 12 weeks, beginning June 1. Girls ages 15 or over don’t need parental consent. Abortions are free, covered by the government program. 

The maternal mortality rate in Denmark is about 5 per 100,000 live births but may be higher in Greenland, where medical care is less accessible in remote communities. 

The political cultures of the U.S., Canada and Greenland (or Denmark, if you prefer) are also divergent. Those other countries don’t seem to have the same proportion of crass blowhards in their political structure as the U.S. That’s not the same as saying they don’t have any crass blowhards in politics — Canadians will remember the escapades of former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or the efforts by former Quebec Premier Rene Levesque to have his francophone province secede from English-speaking Canada.

Once all these factors are considered, another question arises: Why stop with Canada and Greenland? There are other countries that have managed to score higher than the U.S. in terms of the happiness of their populace. 

The list has been led for years by Finland, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, among others. On this roster, the U.S. ranked a dismal 24th in 2024, behind Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and, indeed, Canada. 

Think of it this way. Going only by which countries might teach us how to make our people happier, if we could only make them part of the U.S. — the number of candidates for annexation comes to 23, not just two. Trump and Vance need to get down to work.

(Long Post...LATimes) Trump administration ends funding for legal representation of 26,000 migrant children

By Clara HarterStaff Writer   

March 21, 2025 11:43 PM PT

Children and adults wait in lines for donated food at a makeshift camp for migrants near the U.S.-Mexico border on May 14, 2021, in Reynosa, Mexico.

(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)

The Trump administration on Friday ended a federal contract that provides legal representation to nearly 26,000 migrant children who entered the United States without a parent or guardian, a move immigration attorneys say will leave children vulnerable to rapid deportation.

The contract provided funding for attorneys to represent minors who are under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement — at least 4,000 of whom reside in California — in immigration court. 

Many of these children do not read or speak in English, and some are too young to read or speak at all, according to Joel Frost-Tift, an immigration attorney with Public Counsel.

“It’s going to have a devastating effect on our clients,” Frost-Tift said. “Immigrants are five to six times more likely to succeed in their case if they’re represented by an attorney, so if they lose representation, that’s going to be really damaging for their case.”

Public Counsel currently represents around 200 unaccompanied migrant children in Southern California. Frost-Tift said attorneys will continue to fulfill their ethical duty to assist with these cases for now, but without new funding it’s unclear how long they will be able to do so. 

It’s a quandary that around 100 legal aid organizations across the country now find themselves in after learning that the federal contract for children who cross the border without a guardian — which was up for renewal on March 29 — was terminated.

Last month the Trump administration temporarily halted all work completed under this contract. Days later, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reversed that decision.

Now many legal organizations are urging the Trump administration to once again reverse course.

“The administration’s decision to end these services undermines due process, disproportionately impacts vulnerable children, and puts children who have already experienced severe trauma at risk for further irreparable harm or exploitation,” Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, said in a statement. “We urge the administration to reverse this decision.”

The Acacia Center for Justice receives around $200 million in federal funds annually and subcontracts with nonprofits to secure legal representation for around 26,000 migrant children. 

On Friday, it was informed by Health and Human Services that it can continue offering its “know your rights” free legal clinics to migrant children, but it must stop paying for their legal representation.

Aber said attorneys don’t just help children navigate a tumultuous legal system, but they also help protect them from human trafficking and abuse.

Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, also decried the impact of the funding cut on the safety of migrant children. She said it will make it “all but impossible” for children to appear in court at their immigration hearings or remain in touch with immigration agencies.

“It severs key lines of communication and coordination between vulnerable unaccompanied children and the institutions in place to ensure their protection,” she said in a statement. 

Unlike in criminal court, individuals in immigration court do not have a guaranteed right to an attorney. 

Children can avoid deportation if they are able to meet one of the requirements to obtain special immigrant juvenile status in court. For example, they can prove they were a victim of crime or human trafficking, were abandoned or abused by their parents, or were prosecuted in their home country.

But obtaining this status is nearly impossible without an attorney. 

Children represented by an attorney show up to their immigration court hearings around 95% of the time, while those who don’t have an attorney show up around 33% of the time, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. 

In the past several years, thousands of children have been deported after failing to show up to their immigration hearings. Last month the Trump administration directed immigration agents to track down and deport unaccompanied migrant children, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by Reuters.

Attacking vulnerable communities and people in need is so playbook for this hateful, vile administration. Thanks, Republicans.

Here is some helpful information about the times we're living through from a history professor.

“Beckett reminds us of the metaphysical vastness that the stage can contain.”

Context is Queen.

Neil deG.

Chaos and disorganization in the MAGA Civil War.