Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 3, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, April 3, 2025, and National Burrito Day. Here, in Bridgeport, not far from me, is Chicago’s biggest burrito: 2 feet long and about 7 pounds. (It’s also about $60.)  Bring the family!

It’s also Good People Day, World Party Day, National Chocolate Mousse Day, and Fish Fingers and Custard Day, celebrated today because. . . :

Fish Fingers and Custard Day commemorates the introduction of the Eleventh Doctor on the television series Doctor Who, as well as the memorable fish fingers and custard scene from the episode in which he arrives. The episode, which was released on April 3, 2010, is the first from Series 5 of the show, and is titled “The Eleventh Hour.” BBC declared the first Fish Fingers and Custard Day to take place on the second anniversary of the release of the episode. The following year, Birdseye even put the Doctor, who was played by Matt Smith, on their boxes. The day is marked by people eating fish fingers and custard and sharing photos and videos of them doing so.

Posting will be light today as I have breakfast with the University President (for all emeritus professors) and then a memorial service for a colleague who recently died.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Actor Val Kilmer died on Tuesday night. He was only 65, one day shy of being ten years younger than I.  It was apparently the effects of throat cancer:

Val Kilmer, the charismatic actor whose baritone voice and range propelled him to stardom in roles such as Batman and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in the “Top Gun” films, died April 1 at age 65.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Kilmer died in Los Angeles, citing an email from his daughter Mercedes Kilmer, who said he was “surrounded by family and friends.” The cause of death was pneumonia, the news agency reported.

Mr. Kilmer’s “indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations,” said the official X account for the “Top Gun” franchise. “RIP Iceman.” The U.S. Naval Institute paid tribute to his portrayal of a Navy pilot in the movies. Director Francis Ford Coppola — who worked with Mr. Kilmer on the 2011 horror film “Twixt,” in which the actor played the writer Hall Baltimore — said Mr. Kilmer was “a wonderful person to work with” whose “talent only grew greater throughout his life.”

Once described by the legendary film critic Roger Ebert as “the most unsung leading man of his generation,” Mr. Kilmer also played the swordsman Madmartigan in “Willow” (1988), Elvis Presley in “True Romance” (1993) and Jim Morrison in the Oliver Stone film “The Doors” (1991).

The actor was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and had surgery that led to his recovery but reduced his ability to speak naturally.

In his 2020 memoir, “I’m Your Huckleberry,” he wrote that he sounded like a “buffalo,” or “Marlon Brando after a couple of bottles of tequila.” The cancer made speaking “an hourly struggle,” he wrote.

Here’s pretty good remembrance video from Entertainment Tonight. It’s sad to see the effects of the cancer on his voice, but he was brave enough to appear in a “Top Gun” movie with a hole in his throa, speaking very hoarsely.

*More on this later: Trump is about to wreck people’s jobs and well being by imposing a 10% tariff on all imported goods and additional tariffs on goods from 60 other countries.  He had to declare a “national emergency” (which really is his own Presidency) to get this through:

American importers, for example, will pay an additional 34 percent tariff on products from China, some of which already face 45 percent fees. Vietnam, which the administration says has become a transshipment point for Chinese companies seeking to dodge U.S. tariffs, will see its goods hit with a new 46 percent tariff. Cambodian goods, likewise, will be charged an additional 49 percent levy.

. . . . The early reaction from mainstream economists and business groups was grim, while industries that will enjoy new protection against foreign competition applauded. Although Trump’s announcement came after financial markets had closed, premarket trading pushed U.S. financial markets sharply down late Wednesday.

“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

*Tuesday saw an election in Wisconsin for a judge on the state’s Supreme Court, and Elon Musk put a lot of money and effort into electing a conservative judge, even offering a million-dollar check for those who supported that judge. But no dice; the liberal judge won handily. And that has people wondering whether Musk’s escapades (he also donned a cheese hat) is really helping Trump or the Republicans. (For sure it seems that liberals hate Musk more than Trump.) From the WSJ  (article archived here):

After a costly Wisconsin loss, President Trump and Republicans have a big decision to make about Elon Musk: continue to leverage his fame on the national stage or try to politely ask him to stay backstage a bit more.

Musk’s deep financial and personal involvement in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election proved to be a political liability for the GOP, boosting votes for Democrats more than Republicans compared with a similar election two years ago.

While the GOP may still be eager to tap into the fortune of the world’s richest man for campaign money—he was the largest 2024 election-cycle donor, contributing close to $300 million to help Trump and other Republicans—the party may be less excited to see him play frontman the way he did in Wisconsin.

In private, some Republicans and White House officials have expressed worry that Musk could continue to cost them in elections. His attacks on Social Security are spooking GOP lawmakers, and the image of him holding a chain saw over his head is also likely to be one Democratic ad makers will use in 2026.

“Federal employees are a whole lot more popular than Elon Musk,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who recently conducted a survey looking at feelings about federal workers and the role Musk is playing in downsizing the size and scope of the U.S. government. “The chain-saw approach that Elon Musk is using is simply not popular and that is very clear in the data.”

There is no question Musk is popular with Trump’s MAGA base, a group also heavily supportive of the role he is playing in slashing the federal government. During Musk’s appearance in Green Bay on Sunday evening one pastor asked to say a prayer for him as the audience fell silent to listen.

But he doesn’t appear to play well in general-election-type races like the one in Wisconsin, where liberal Judge Susan Crawford beat conservative Judge Brad Schimel by 10 percentage points.

There’s a bit of good news for Republicans from Florida, but it doesn’t outweigh the result in Wisconsin:

Republicans held on to two congressional seats Tuesday in Florida, albeit by smaller margins in what have been traditionally deeply red districts. But the Wisconsin race was the biggest contest on a day that was the first major electoral test of Trump’s second presidency.

This was the most expensive judicial election in American history, and it doesn’t make Musk look all that influential.  As the pollster said, “Federal employees are a whole lot more popular than Elon Musk.” It’s tough having a gazillionaire represent a party that is supposed to be catering to the welfare of the average American, and it doesn’t help when he takes jobs away from thousand of such Americans and then cuts million-dollar checks for people who vote his way.

*Douglas Murray has a new book out about his experiences in Israel during the year after the war started in 2023. It’s called On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the future of Civilization, and there’s an excerpt in the Free Press.  An excerpt from an excerpt:

Throughout this year of war, friends and family occasionally remarked that I had changed. Readers sometimes noticed it too, observing that I seemed to have lost some of my usual pessimism. I noticed it myself, and there was a reason for it. I was getting an answer to a question that had always troubled me.

Like most people of my background, I grew up with family stories of those who went away to war in 1914, and those who went to war again in 1939. On my father’s side alone, my grandmother lost her father at sea in World War I and her brother, also in the navy, in the 1940s. The fight against tyranny had been real. And all the generations who have come after have asked themselves: What would we do if our time came?

At one point in the early months of the conflict, I was in a street in Tel Aviv and a taxi driver recognized me. We started talking, and I learned that he was a veteran of the wars of 1967 and 1973. Then he said something that made my eyes prick: “I owe the younger generation an apology.” I was startled, but he continued. “I thought they had become weak,” he said. “I thought they just wanted to party in Tel Aviv or be on TikTok or Instagram. But I was wrong. They have stepped up. They are magnificent.”

Everything I saw in the wars around us confirmed this. I thought of all the heroes—all the young men and women who were just like the people I knew outside of Israel, but who were having to do things these people couldn’t imagine. Other young people, at institutions across the West, were judging the actions of their contemporaries in Israel. They were throwing slur after slur at them and reigniting every blood libel of the past in a modern guise. They should have looked at their contemporaries in Israel not as scapegoats but as an example. Whatever the years ahead hold for the West, I know that Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, and America should be so lucky as to produce a generation of young people like the one Israel has.

During that year of war, I also realized that I had found the answer to a question I had mulled over for almost a quarter of a century. All my adult life I had heard the taunt of the jihadists: “We love death more than you love life.” I had heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan, several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments. And it had always seemed to me almost impossible to counter. How could anyone overcome a movement—a people—who welcomed death, who gloried in death, who worshiped death? Was it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West could not possibly win?

That is what I feared for many years. Yet in the year after the October 7 attacks, what I saw was hope. Of all the Israeli soldiers I met, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none took pleasure in the task they had to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted must be protected. They know that you won’t have the ability to party, fall in love, grow a family, or live a meaningful life unless they are willing to fight for it.

Murray is an eloquent writer, and of course is a non-Jewish conservative, but I admire him for standing up for Israel when such a stand is guaranteed to bring great opprobrium to a British writer, as indeed it has.  But he’s on the right side of morality.

*Cory Booker, a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, wound up giving the longest speech in Senate history: a 25-hour jeremiad against President Trump. It was of course a bit of a stunt, but it did get attention, and attention might help push him to a Presidential candidacy in 2028. From the NYT (article archived here):

Senator Cory Booker’s staff members described a nagging fear as they worked for a week to fill 15 binders with enough material to cover what would soon become a history-making, 25-hour speech.

What if no one listened?

Their worry was short-lived. By 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 16 hours after Mr. Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, had begun railing against President Trump’s policies on the floor of the U.S. Senate, roughly 14,000 callers had left messages on his office hotline, aides said. Before he finally stopped speaking, the office had fielded 14,000 more.

For 25 hours and five minutes, Mr. Booker, who will turn 56 this month, did not sit or exit the Senate chambers to eat or use a bathroom. His speech broke, by nearly an hour, a record set 68 years ago by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a segregationist who at the time was trying to block civil rights legislation.

Americans noticed. The social-media-savvy senator streamed the speech live on his TikTok account, where it garnered more than 350 million “likes.” And more than 110,000 people were watching on YouTube when Mr. Booker ended his speech in much the same way he began: with an homage to a mentor, the civil rights pioneer John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who spent three decades in Congress.

“Let’s get in good trouble,” he said, borrowing Mr. Lewis’s famous call to action.

Many of those watching appeared to revel in Mr. Booker’s stamina and moxie.

“New respect for New Jersey,” a YouTube viewer wrote in a live chat message two hours before the senator stopped talking.

. . .Mr. Booker’s oratorical marathon covered plenty of turf, serious and less so. He detailed his concerns about cutting funding for education, health care and medical research and recounted moving stories about the effects the administration’s policies were having on his constituents. “This is a moral moment,” he said repeatedly.

But he also filled some of the time in other ways. He waxed poetic about M&M candies — first produced, he noted, in Newark. He resurfaced jocular grudges from his days playing football at Stanford University. And he tackled an abiding New York sports riddle.

“The Giants and the Jets play in New Jersey,” he said. “There’s only one football team in New York, and that’s the Bills.”

Here is the last 3½ minutes of his speech.  It’s a good ending, but I’m not going to watch the rest of it!

*The CDC recommends that all adults over 50 get shingles vaccine, and the gold standard now, which I’ve had, is two doses of Shingrix.  (I had a substandard vaccine before that.) The first shot made me a bit ill for a day, but, hearing what shingles is like from people who have had it, I was delighted to be vaccinated. Now, since the readers here are in the Boomer demographic, you have another reason to get your shingles shot:

 A vaccine to fight dementia? It turns out there may already be one – shots that prevent painful shingles also appear to protect aging brains.

A new study found shingles vaccination cut older adults’ risk of developing dementia over the next seven years by 20%.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is part of growing understanding about how many factors influence brain health as we age – and what we can do about it.

“It’s a very robust finding,” said lead researcher Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University. And “women seem to benefit more,” important as they’re at higher risk of dementia.

The study tracked people in Wales who were around 80 when receiving the world’s first-generation shingles vaccine over a decade ago. Now, Americans 50 and older are urged to get a newer vaccine that’s proven more effective against shingles than its predecessor.

The new findings add another reason for people to consider rolling up their sleeves, said Dr. Maria Nagel of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who studies viruses that infiltrate the nervous system.

Two, two—two preventions in one. You can read the Nature paper here, but be aware that it’s about neurotropic herpes viruses, which, of course, are the cause of shingles (and chickenpox). GET YOUR SHOTS NOW IF YOU’RE OF AGE!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Szaron are plumping for some good noms (beefsteak is Hili’s favorite food):

Hili: We have an important question.
A: What question?
Hili: Can you buy yourself two beefsteaks and give one to us?
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy do ciebie ważne pytanie.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Czy możesz sobie kupić dwa befsztyki i dać nam jeden?

*******************

From Cat Memes:

From Things With Faces, a mayonnaise goblin:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs; and WE MEAN IT! (Putting ketchup on dogs is a capital crime in Chicago.)

*Here’s Masih, interviewed on Meet the Press by Kristen Welker, ragging on the Biden administration for offering her only “witness protection,” but mostly on the Trump administration for negotiating with Iran (I don’t think we are doing that, though, are we?) But she’s right: there’s no point to negotiating with Iran over nukes: they will develop them come hell or high water! As Masih says, “I am a loud woman.”  I really admire her. And if Iran gets nukes, it’s bye-bye Israel.

From Luana, a funny tweet:

From Barry, “Downfall” à la Musk (it’s also on YouTube here):

For those who have asked for a YouTube link: youtu.be/v1UODyy-jng?…

— Brian White (@brianwhite.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T13:07:49.321Z

Two from my feed:

The bears fattening up for hibernation (probably filmed last fall):

One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted:

This Hungarian Jewish woman was around 30 when she died in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T10:11:30.995Z

Two posts from Professor Cobb. First, a very weird custom:

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T18:04:29.026Z

The issue of Nature with the Watson/Crick and two other DNA=structure papers. I was too young to read the journal then, but note how ugly it is, with a cover full of ads and nothing about DNA!

The cover of the issue of Nature that featured the three back-to-back articles on DNA structure from Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Stokes, Wilson, Franklin and Gosling.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T10:47:21.188Z

47 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    I am only one, / But still I am one. / I cannot do everything, / But still I can do something; / And because I cannot do everything, / I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. -Edward Everett Hale, author (3 Apr 1822-1909)

    1. If memory serves me, Hale delivered a stemwinder of a speech at Gettysburg before Lincoln delivered his Address.

      Am reminded of “Invictus” (“bloodied but not bowed . . . I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul”) and also Jefferson’s prose which composer Randall Thompson used as the libretto of his “Testament of Freedom”:

      “The God who gave us life gave us liberty. At the same time, the Hand of Force may destroy but cannot disjoin them.” (Were it not for singing this in the at-the-time unfashionable university glee club, I would have never known about it.)

  2. I’ve had shingles three times (leukemia messes up immunity) and found it very painful. Surprisingly a relatively mild ophthalmic outbreak was far more painful than the previous one in the S3 dermatome—look up where that is and use your imagination! So I’ve had two doses of Shingrix and would strongly recommend you do the same if you qualify. When kids who have had chickenpox vaccine grow up there will be one less thing for them to worry about. I bet that’s something anti-vaxx parents don’t consider.

    1. I don’t think that’s correct, Christopher. Children who have had chickenpox vaccine are not protected from getting shingles later in life, any more than are those who had natural chickenpox. All need Shingrix when they come of age. Sorry if I misunderstood your statement.

      The rationale for chickenpox vaccination is that even though chickenpox is usually a mild disease, occasional children will have severe complications which the vaccine will spare them the risk of getting. A disease that everyone gets is worth preventing if even only a small percentage get really sick. Additionally, chickenpox is not endemic in some tropical countries, particularly islands. Immigrants who catch chickenpox as adults can get really sick, particularly if pregnant.

      The CDC does not endorse the claim that chickenpox vaccine protects against shingles. All adults over 50 should consider Shingrix, and younger if immune-compromised. We won’t know if chickenpox vaccine offers any protection against shingles at all for several years yet, until the vaccine cohort ages into their shingles years. The way to bet is that it does not. Whether the child has anti-vax parents or not, he will still have to make an independent adult decision to have Shingrix.

      https://www.cdc.gov/shingles/vaccines/index.html

      1. My assumption, which I believe logical, is that children who cannot catch chickenpox will not be harbouring the virus in the spinal roots. Time will tell.

        1. From Grok: Now, about the chickenpox vaccine and its effect on shingles: it’s not a simple yes-or-no answer. The chickenpox vaccine, introduced in the mid-1990s (e.g., Varivax in the U.S.), contains a live, weakened (attenuated) version of the varicella-zoster virus. It’s highly effective at preventing chickenpox—about 90% or more in most studies. Because it drastically reduces the chance of getting chickenpox in the first place, it logically reduces the risk of shingles indirectly, since fewer people end up with the virus lying dormant in their nerves.

          However, here’s the wrinkle: the vaccine itself introduces a weakened form of the virus into the body. In rare cases, this attenuated virus can still establish latency in the nervous system, just like the wild-type virus from natural chickenpox. If it reactivates later, it could theoretically cause shingles, though this is much less likely than with the natural infection. Studies show that shingles from the vaccine strain is milder and occurs at a lower rate compared to shingles from wild-type chickenpox.
          So, does the chickenpox vaccine prevent shingles? Mostly, yes—by preventing the initial infection that sets the stage for shingles. But it’s not 100% foolproof because the vaccine strain can, in rare instances, lead to shingles itself.

          1. Yes, that can happen. When I had chickenpox (long before the varicella vaccine) I had only two spots and did not feel ill, but plainly it was the real thing since I’ve had shingles since.
            It is also possible to have a forme fruste of shingles, where the virus is stopped as it grows down the spinal roots, causing characteristic pain but no rash as it never reaches the nerve endings. This is called zoster sine herpete.

  3. It appears that Trump’s tariffs are arrived at by:

    (1) Calculating America’s trade deficit with a given country, as a fraction of imports from that country. (2) Asserting (wrongly) that that percentage is the “tariff rate” that that country imposes on America (the actual rates are much lower). (3) Dividing that number by two and declaring that as the tariff rate.

    1. I’ve always figured that if other countries want to give us stuff like TVs in exchange for little green pieces of paper that seems like a good deal.

      1. That’s exactly right! Trading dollars for real goods is not a losing proposition.

        We do want to make sure we have plenty of good jobs here in the U.S., of course.

    2. What? I thought that when he presented the tariffs on US goods that these were indeed actual tariff rates, not balance of trade calculations. That’s not a reciprocal tariff; I’m not sure what you would call that number!
      My Trumpian coworker has been saying this morning “if they’re going to tax us 40% on stuff imported into their country, then it’s only fair that we tax 40% on stuff coming here”, but based on what you’re saying, his argument is not sound.

      Any idea as to who invented this calculation and the economic theory behind how this will improve things?

      1. Yep, that’s the point. The Trump team are presenting this as simply reciprocal tariffs: if they put tariffs on American goods then we’ll put the same on theirs.

        But that’s not what’s going on. The tariffs are actually retaliation for trade imbalances (and thus an attempt to eliminate trade imbalances), not retaliation for tariffs.

        The rationale is thus an attempt to on-shore jobs, such that more stuff gets made in America. Of course that stuff will then be much more expensive, because American salary levels are generally much higher.

        I’m not aware of any economists who are arguing for this, it seems to be coming mostly from Trump himself.

  4. I happened upon this great video clip of Life’s Too Short – this is an The Office style show – in which Val Kilmer showed up :

    x.com/davidmaegraith/status/1907292551201309174?s=46

    … that’s it – I wrote a long explanation/background, but deleted it.

  6. Im not sure the WSJ article came through clearly, It’s sorta fuzzy, let’s try a correction for the Iron Law of Leftist Projection (bold added, sentences adjusted) :

    “After a costly Wisconsin win, Democrats have a big decision to make about George Soros and his Open Society Foundations: continue to | politely ask him to stay backstage a bit more | or try to | leverage his fame on the national stage.”

    FTFY WSJ.

    1. Normally I wouldn’t take the bait, and perhaps I’m just being dense, but . . .

      Your point is?

          1. The example in plain English is in the WSJ passage as compared with its inversion.

            Enemy political targets are isolated for criticism, while the desired politics is, in this case, concealed in thought. Things are put upside down.

            In abstract terms, this is how descendants of Kant and Hegel’s Left (his term) thinks – dialectically – a transformation of thought – to a higher sublated state of understanding : billionaires are evil political operatives except for billionaires with Leftist Ideals.

        2. Since I can’t comment on your most recent reply, and I can’t seem to let this go . . .

          Please furnish a link to a video of George Soros dancing on stage with a chainsaw as he celebrates 10s of thousands of people losing their jobs. Or of Soros on stage in a state in the midst of a Supreme Court election, describing the potential election of a conservative judge as a threat to civilization. Oh, and is there evidence of Soros offering $1 million checks to left-wing voters?

          Just because you can swap the words around doesn’t mean the equivalency exists in reality.

          Finally, and this is my bias, for sure, but I don’t want a someone who inherited vast wealth and who also seems neurologically unable to empathize with other humans anywhere near my democracy.

  8. Get your Shingrix shots! I’ve had shingles three times, but only very mild cases, presumably because I had my Shingrix shots. (Of course I can’t be certain that Shingrix helped, because I don’t know what would have happened had I not been vaccinated.)

    The tariffs are in, and I can’t bring myself to look at the reaction of the stock market. Such a stupid action. And lazy. The right way to improve trade relations is to negotiate with your trading partners for a better deal for the U.S. The wrong way is to threaten the world with a catastrophe.

    I’ll probably get Douglas Murray’s book. I didn’t know that he had written one, so thank you for making us aware.

    1. Murray is also author of a book entitled The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022). It has 6,000 ratings on Amazon, average is 4.5 out of 5.

      He’s also the author of 2 other books: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

      I haven’t read any of them.

      1. You should, Peter. They’re all excellent. Of course he is a conservative so I’m not in total alignment with all his ideas but he is an amazing writer and speaker.

        Many of his warnings – years earlier than people thought about these things have become true. He is a quality intellectual we all need.

        D.A.
        NYC

    2. Dow dropped 1400 S&P fell 4%. Trump is an idiot. Can we still say that or do we risk export? 🤔

      1. The US has a long tradition of high tariffs, going all the way back to the early years after the Revolution. Quote from Abraham Lincoln “Give us a protective tariff, and we shall have the greatest nation on earth”. The low tariffs after WWII should be seen as anomaly. First, driven by the anti-communism of the era. Later, as a consequence of neoliberalism. Anti-communism effectively died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Neoliberalism is in disgrace. The politics of this period are driven by US opposition to China. That makes US tariffs much more likely irrespective of who is President.

        1. That isn’t what everyone else is saying, and one should wonder why.
          I would question the assumption that what was optimal 80 or 180 years ago is optimal now.

        2. “That makes US tariffs much more likely irrespective of who is President”

          Sure, I can agree with this, but not the way Trump is doing it. Didn’t you read what Coel wrote upthread? You really should before you continue apologizing for Trump’s idiocy.

  9. I just received a better report from Grok about the reciprocal relative to unilateral aspects of Trump’s tariffs than I have seen in any of the political reporting. Whatever else one might praise or denounce in his actions, it has been valuable in drawing attention to the disproportionate tariffs that many of our allied trading partners impose on the United States. As Grok put it: “Allies aren’t innocent here. The EU, Japan, and South Korea—all U.S. security partners—have higher tariffs on various U.S. goods than the U.S. does on theirs.”

    I’m curious how people would handle that if they were in policy positions. Do you stick with the status quo, even if it is at the expense of American workers and industry? How do you reshore production of critical defense and industrial products? Do you even believe there is a problem?

    I have no more expertise here than the average informed adult (and a too-long-ago econ undergrad degree to which I paid little attention), but I am trying to get past the reflexive “Trump is bad; Trump is stupid.” That could all be true, but I really prefer solutions to diatribes. Anyone have any?

    1. The question, to me, is whether reciprocal tariffs are effective economic policy.
      True, other countries have imposed higher tariffs on imports from the US than the US has on imports from other countries, but we have still had the strongest economy by far vs other nations.
      Additionally, consumers are only hurt by higher prices on goods; we grumbled about high inflation raising prices during the Biden years, and recently about the increase in the price of eggs, so why is it now OK to artificially raise prices across the board on almost everything we buy, leaving us less money to invest?
      If Japan wants to force their citizens to pay more for US goods, why should we force our customers to pay more for Japanese goods just to spite them?

      I think you can find more coherent arguments against tariffs, including against reciprocal tariffs, from Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Adam Smith argued against tariffs in most cases but recognized that in some cases of national interest that some could be adopted. For a summary of those views, you can ask Grok – I’ve found that to be the best of the current crop of AIs.

      I’ve always been a staunch free-market proponent. My prediction based on this is economic downturn, maybe even disaster, for at least the US and potentially globally. Friedman made a case that the Smoot-Hawley acts tariffs were a contributing cause to the great depression (along with monetary policy).
      I’m looking at the coming months and years as an experiment to either refute or validate my anti-tariff / free-market philosophy. My 401(k) hopes I’m wrong!

    2. Free trade makes everyone better off at the Pareto equilibrium, meaning, an economic distribution in which you can’t make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. Countries that can’t make TV sets the most cheaply import TV sets from the country that does. Countries that can’t make anything the most cheaply either live with that, and make only the things they are least bad at — cars maybe but but not TV sets — or the workers decide they will accept lower wages so they can make TV sets competitively. But a tariff on foreign TV sets would be the wrong approach, Pareto-wise, because it would hurt foreign TV-set makers and make TV sets more expensive for Americans. Whether Americans bought tariffed foreign ones, or had to pay higher prices for domestic ones because the tariffs avoided the workers from having to reduce the price of their labour, wouldn’t matter, (although the domestic TV-set makers union, supporting tariffs, would disagree.)

      That’s the conventional wisdom. If Americans can’t make warships, tanks, aircraft, rifles, and artillery shells the most cheaply, they should buy them all from foreign countries that can? Sure, er, no. Wait. But if America no longer makes steel or electronics, because other countries make those things more cheaply too, it can’t decide to make an exception for military hardware because it can’t manufacture it even if it wanted to.

      There is another more fundamental wrinkle. Unlike economists, we don’t always want the Pareto optimization for the world. For national security reasons, we may want to make ourselves better off than Pareto optimal, even though we know it will make, by definition, other countries worse off. We might even want to crush some of them, to make them too poor to trade with us at all. If they are too poor to trade, maybe they’ll be too poor to make war on us. This is essentially what trade sanctions do.

      The conventional wisdom is that no one wins a trade war, because retaliatory tariffs make everyone Pareto worse off. But that only applies to roughly equal partners who all seek to trade. A massively dominant hegemon that, further, does not need export trade to survive, could win a trade war by inflicting damage to rivals that they can’t effectively retaliate against. The cost is higher prices at home but this could be worth it in some national-interest sense. It’s a political question as to whether the populace agrees.

      1. I was a trader not an economist so no expert in that area Leslie, but your explanation above checks out totally as I understand the issue.

        D.A
        NYC

      3. US steel production in 2024 was around 79 million tons. In 1943, US steel production was around 89 million tons.

  10. I also interpreted Cory Booker’s speech as part of the Booker (2028) campaign. If Booker (and others) don’t speak up, AOC will get the nomination by default. Biden should have replaced Harris with Booker and then resigned back in 2023. Nothing in these observations should be seen as an endorsement of anyone.

  11. Voting in non-presidential-year elections is always light.
    People aren’t that interested in them, except sometimes for issues of local interest. For years, the Democrats have embraced early voting and ballot harvesting while Republicans have stuck to the “it’s your patriotic duty to go to the polls on election day” strategy. These strategies indicate to me that Democratic candidates will always have the advantage when it comes to these off-year elections.
    It’s so much easier to receive your ballot in the mail, take a couple days to research the topics and candidates and then drop it off at the mailbox or township hall when it’s convenient rather than trying to fit a trip in to the polling place after a hectic day at work and then being faced with standing in line while waiting to vote when it’s for some minor candidates or issues you only marginally care about. Plus, our local school system was closed for spring break this week (I assume a lot were nationally), and no parent is going to tell their kids, “sorry, we’re not going to Disneyworld this year because I have to vote on Tuesday”.
    Republicans seem to think they’re somehow sticking it to the Dems by not voting early, and it’s a very misguided strategy that is costing them elections. Score one for the Democrats for staking their claim to early voting so that Republicans actively reject it.

  12. I wish I were still an options/equities trader (if the career hadn’t been smashed by technology – sigh). Turbulent times of high variance like today’s era, thanks to Trump’s chaos… can be extremely profitable.

    As commented above by Darryl – the tariffs are NOT “reciprocal” – their model is broken, rushed and stupid. And doesn’t take into account services, the changed world economy or globalization. Doesn’t consider what it’ll do to our superpower, the world reserve US Dollar (as mighty as our nukes in fact)… or so many other things. Like… really effin’ important things, esp. second order effects, let alone “unknown unknowns”.

    This tariff idea that’s been swimming around Trump’s head since the 1980s is, like everything about him, performative and boneheaded. Bad for business.

    D.A.
    NYC
    (fmr. options trader)

    D.A.
    NYC

  13. ” . . . tap into the fortune of the world’s richest man for campaign money—he was the largest 2024 election-cycle donor, contributing close to $300 million . . . .”

    Does Musk owe the U.S. government/taxpayers any money?

  15. “And ‘women seem to benefit more,’ important as they’re at higher risk of dementia.”

    If women are at higher risk of dementia, then wouldn’t they benefit more by definition? Am I missing something?

    1. Maybe. It could mean that the treatment is more effective for women, in which case they would benefit more. You seem to be thinking that since women have a higher risk, then they would benefit more even if the effectiveness were the same. Two different things. One or both could be true.

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