Friday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2025 • 7:00 am

Welcome to the first weekend in April: it’s Friday, April 4, 2025 and International Carrot Day. Carrots are best consumed as an ingredient in carrot cake. Below is my usual picture of one giant piece of a carrot cake that I ate in a restaurant in Chicago. It has cream-cheese frosting, of course, and candied carrots on top and on the side. It was terrific.

It’s also 404 Day, National Vitamin C Day, Ramen Noodle Day, World Rat Day, National Cordon Bleu Day, and National Walk to Work Day (I did).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As expected, and I’m writing this on Thursday at about 1 p.m., the stock market is tanking because of Trump’s big new tariffs.  What else did anyone else expect?.

U.S. markets slid Thursday in their steepest decline in more than two years, as investors grappled with the threat that President Trump’s sweeping new tariff plan will hurt economic growth and corporate profits.

Major stock indexes dropped as much as 5% and stood poised to suffer their worst day in more than two years. Stocks have lost roughly $2.7 trillion in market value Thursday, on track for their largest decline since March 2020.

The Dow industrials dropped about 1200 points, nearly 3%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which powered the market higher for years, slid 4.8%, led by big declines in Nvidia, Apple and Amazon.com.

The dollar slipped to its lowest level of the year, a sign of unease over the growth outlook and fears that the flow of international funds into the country will be sharply curtailed. Inflation expectations rose.

Dozens of household-name stocks posted double-digit declines, including HP, Nike, Williams Sonoma and Ralph Lauren. Stellantis also fell sharply. The Jeep maker said it is temporarily halting production at its auto assembly factories in Mexico and Canada.

The turmoil has spread broadly, with oil prices dropping more than 6% and investors selling gold after its sharp run over the past year to fresh records. But so far, traders said, selling has been orderly and though the scale of U.S. tariffs came as a shock, few investors are surprised to see stocks pull back following their gains over the past two years.

Even so, the big decline sets up financial markets for one of their most eventful days in recent years. Despite the 2025 retreat in major indexes, investors have remained generally sanguine this year about the prospects for global growth and the opportunities that the U.S. markets and economy can offer to those around the world. But the tariffs and the international reaction will test that faith, and Thursday’s action may be a gauge of the extent to which that outlook is changing.

The market is going to drop even more today after China imposed a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods.

And, from Professor Ceiling Cat: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.  The next thing that will happen will be widespread inflation, and perhaps even a recession. Consumers will be peeved and feel deceived by Trump, and, overall, the American economy will be worse off. There are a few people, like steelmakers, who think Trump’s tariffs are good, but they are thinking only of themselves.  I’m hoping Americans aren’t dumb enough to ignore the fact that the coming economic downturn is Trump’s fault.

*Trump’s tariffs are supposed to be “reciprocal,” that is, tariffs enacted only in response to other countries who had already put tariffs in American goods. But that isn’t always the case, and the list of countries on which he slapped tariffs is quite bizarre.

The chart slapped some surprisingly high tariffs on key allies — including Israel and Vietnam — while sparing nations like Russia, Cuba and North Korea altogether.

. . . .As economist journalist James Surowiecki quickly figured out, the White House seems to have used a very simplistic formula: Our trade deficit with that country, divided by the country’s exports to us. That’s a measure of something, but it’s not, strictly speaking, about tariffs. It’s about a trade imbalance.

The White House denied Surowiecki’s claim, pointing to a mathematical formula featuring Greek symbols. But in fact, when you broke down that formula, it appears as simple as he claimed. The percentages listed for each country on the chart are indeed products of that formula.

Here’s how the math played out with some notable countries and territories.

Among the countries and territories supposedly ripping us off and requiring such harsh responses are some curious ones, as The Post’s Rachel Pannett and Niha Masih report.

One entry on the list is the Heard and McDonald islands, an Australian territory that is uninhabited by humans (there are penguins and other animals) and thus exports nothing to the United States. It nonetheless is listed as charging us 10 percent tariffs and earning a 10 percent “reciprocal” tariff.

Another is a territory of Norway called Svalbard and Jan Mayen. Svalbard is at least populated by a few thousand humans — Jan Mayen has none — but it exported nothing to the United States in 2024. It also got slapped with a 10 percent tariff.

One other telling one is Norfolk Island, an Australian territory and former British penal colony once dubbed “Hell in the Pacific.” It’s home to about 2,000 people and accounted for a reported $200,000 in U.S. imports in 2024. Its goods will now be tariffed at 29 percent.

It would seem logical that some of these territories — especially the uninhabited ones — are being charged according to what the countries that control them are being charged. But there are many differences between the rates charged to countries and their territories. Norway, for instance, is charged 15 percent (versus Svalbard and Jan Mayen’s 10 percent), while Australia is charged 10 percent (versus Norfolk Island’s 29 percent).

“I’m not sure what Norfolk Island’s major exports are to the United States and why it’s been singled out, but it has, on the table,” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday.

The article notes that although both Israel and Vietnam charge either no tariffs on American goods or only small ones, they’re being slapped with high tariffs by us: 17% and 46%, respectively.

You can see the full list here, and here are the countries being taxed the most. It is, as Rachel Zegler said, “Weird. . .weird.” (Click to enlarge):

*A NYT op-ed by Kristen Soltis Anderson, identified as “a contributing Opinion writer.  . .  a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups,” tells us “What should worry Republicans the most right now.”  The answer is the election of a liberal state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. From this she spins a mighty tale:

Just a few months ago, Republicans were triumphant, while Democrats were demoralized. But something real has happened: Democrats’ fury is building. Perhaps they have had it with Elon Musk. Perhaps Senate Democrats’ capitulation on government funding ignited voters who felt abandoned by their party leaders. Perhaps it was all the institutions cutting deals under pressure from President Trump. Whatever it was, Democrats are proving a political axiom: Anger is a more powerful motivator in voting than happiness and satisfaction.

And Republicans had better watch out, as they learned Tuesday night in a Wisconsin statewide election for a State Supreme Court seat, in which the Democratic-backed candidate prevailed by 10 percentage points just five months after Mr. Trump beat Kamala Harris there by just one point.

As a pollster, I’ve been focused recently on gauging what voters think of Mr. Trump’s performance back in office. One way to do this is by asking if they approve or disapprove of the job he is doing across a range of issues — a metric that in the past few weeks showed gently declining but overall middling approval ratings.

But I think studying how voters feel is also important — maybe even more important than studying what they think. In my polling, when I ask voters how they feel about what the Trump administration is doing, Democrats are not simply dissatisfied. When I offered voters a range of seven emotions in a poll in mid-March, from “furious” to “thrilled,” the top response from Democrats was “furious,” at 38 percent. Only a quarter of Republicans described themselves as “thrilled,” by contrast (though, make no mistake, Republicans support Mr. Trump a great deal).

What should worry Republicans most is that when a party wins elections and its supporters are satisfied with what their side is doing, it becomes easy to rest on one’s laurels and miss the bubbling rage of the other side or not find ways to counter it. Democrats did this, to some extent, during the rise of the Tea Party movement, dismissing it as AstroTurf — activism masquerading as grass-roots energy — and paying dearly for it in the first Obama midterms, in 2010. Republicans may wish to dismiss some of what they see appearing at angry town hall meetings, but this isn’t just the usual anger of an opposition party: Mr. Trump is supercharging the anger in two important ways that add up to even greater potential peril for Republicans in the short run.

The two important ways? First, the bull-in-a-china shop dismantling of government by Trump, including the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods. The second is Trump and the Republicans concentration on corralling “low propensity voters”: those voters who aren’t likely to come to the polls if Trump isn’t on the ballot. Well, perhaps Anderson is right, but of course Democrats are looking for any reason to be optimistic. And remember that Americans’ approval rating of the Democratic Party is dire: on March 7-11, “55 percent of respondents said they had a negative view of the Democratic Party, while 27 percent said they had a positive perception. That is the lowest level recorded since NBC News began asking the question in 1990.”  It’s a long way until 2028, but the pundits are telling us “what we need to know”. (I am not a pundit; I just play one on this website.)

*An article from The Jerusalem Post notes that Hamas has revised its death tolls, figures copied widely and credulously by the media. The new figures show that, contrary to its previous reports, Hamas now admits that a substantial majority of the dead were males of fighting age and less than 30% (half of what was previously claimed) were women and children (h/t Malgorzata):

Hamas quietly removed the names of thousands of Palestinians it had previously alleged were killed during the Israel-Hamas war, Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting told The Telegraph on Tuesday after analyzing Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update.

Hamas has previously claimed that 70% of casualties have been women and children, a claim no longer reflected in their recently updated lists, according to the research. Approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men – the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants.

“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’  never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Aizenberg asserted.

A similar report by the Henry Jackson Society in December also concluded that Hamas had inflated the number of casualties in the war.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” report author Andrew Fox said. “There’s a reasonable explanation in that their computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately, but the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.

“The UN also just takes Hamas’s figures and publishes them with a note stating the figures are unconfirmed.”

Hamas will “have gone through the list, trying to make it as convincing as possible. They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever,” Fox explained. “So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”

“Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared,” Fox explained. “Hamas releases lists as PDFs, so it’s harder to do comparisons but we transfer names to an Excel sheet to do a mass comparison this way.”

The next time you see either total death tolls that don’t give you the number of terrorists included, or the ridiculous figure of 70% of Gazan casualties being women or young children, you will know you’re dealing with someone more interested in dissing Israel than in telling the truth. This includes most of the mainstream media.

And since it’s Friday, I’ll give you a true shaggy dg story from the AP. Whale/dog encounter!

A Hawaii boat captain who rebuilt her whale-watching tour business after losing three boats in the deadly 2023 Lahaina wildfire captured iPhone footage of her dog barking excitedly when a humpback swam near them over the weekend and poked its head out to greet Macy, a golden retriever.

Chrissy Lovitt and Macy, 11, were in a fishing boat about 2 miles (roughly 3 kilometers) off Lahaina on Saturday when they spotted a humpback whale in the waters.

“And he heard her barking and he just swam over to meet her,” Lovitt recalled Tuesday. “And it was the best day of her life.”

In the video, Macy is seen barking frantically as the whale nears the boat. The whale’s head emerges and it appears to turn and look at the excited dog.

“She’s been barking at whales her whole life, but they haven’t wanted to do anything with her,” Lovitt said.

Macy is Lovitt’s trusty companion when she leads a boatload of tourists to marvel at whales. “She loves the ocean,” said Lovitt, now a Maui boat captain for 25 years. “She grew up on it.”

Macy is “obsessed with sea life and whales,” Lovitt added. “She’s 11 and I know we don’t get forever with her. But this has been on her bucket list so I’m just super happy for her.”

Here’s the video!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili is trying to turn Andrzej against Kulka:

Hili: Watch out!
A: What is it?
Hili: Kulka is on the shelf and she is going to push the vase off onto your head.
In Polish:
Hili: Uważaj!
Ja: Na co?
Hili: Kulka jest na półce i zaraz zrzuci ci wazon na głowę.

Reader Divy sent in a picture of Jango, for whom she is staff. She captions it, “Worshipping the patch of sun 🌞.”

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

From Cat Memes:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Things With Faces, an ebullient corkscrew:

Masih’s quiet today, but here’s a tweet from another woman demonized for her views, and JKR tweets about yet another heroine (h/t Luana):

. . . and here’s her opponent to whom she forfeited the match. You can read the story here.

From Malcolm,  captioned “A ‘loving’ cat.”

A disadvantage of the burqa I hadn’t thought of:

Two from my feed. First, something I’d love to do: play with a giant anteater!

I didn’t know this one:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was probably no more than four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T09:49:38.066Z

A post from Professor Cobb, showing Polish frogs having a high old time:

Side entrance to Art Nouveau “Frog House” in Bielsko-Biała, Poland, built for the owner of a wine bar originally located there, with carousing frogs ~ one lounges, smoking a pipe, glass in hand & leaning on a barrel, as the other plays a mandolin (1903)

— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T05:50:31.328Z

62 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back. -Maya Angelou, poet (4 Apr 1928-2014)

  2. There are too many moving pieces to evaluate the potential impact of tariffs, but the fact that Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU, came out and blasted the tariffs immediately, suggests to me that they are probably a good idea. Whatever she thinks is wrong with US tariffs she clearly feels is right with tariffs by the European countries.

    EDIT: And someone finally did a transcript of Batya Ungar-Sargon’s remarks on the tariff:

    What I find so frustrating about the conversation around tariffs is that we all agree on the problem. We all agree that the deindustrialization of America led to the downward mobility of the American working class, deaths of despair, people working multiple jobs and not being able to afford the American dream. We all agree that it is deeply unfair for the American middle class to be bearing the burden of unfair tariffs from other countries.

    .

    1. Carnac the Magnificent predicts that the economy will suffer, but the Gini coefficient will decrease.

      1. Joke? Cite? Gini is (roughly) a ratio between high and low incomes; if everyone loses proportionately then Gini stays the same. If many low income earners lose disproportionately, e.g. from losing their jobs because their employer loses business, and they lack other sources of income such as investments, then Gini may increase. No? IANAEconomist.

        1. No joke. The whole point of tariffs (and T’s immigration policy) is to protect the working class from cheap foreign labor. This will reduce the Gini coefficient.

          1. If I understand the narrative, that means you expect tariffs to produce some relative income redistribution from the wealthy 10% (as a whole) to the 90% (as a whole, not just workers in favoured manufacturing industries). Right?

            Needless to say, I don’t agree with that expectation.

        2. Gini is the politics of envy. Once that gini is out of the bottle, no putting it back.

    2. Not surprising Dr. B.: The EU – while a tariff free zone internally is one anti-free (global) trade zone – by keeping everyone else out. Like everything there’s pros and cons to that – I’m broadly pro-EU.

      For the record Batya is kinda batcrap crazy. She’s not Laura Loomer edgelord level of stupidity and she’s more coherent/educated than Marg Trailer Green’s spittle quotes… but Batya is no paragon of rational thought or coherence at all.

      Keep well Dr. B.

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. RE: “Batya is kinda batcrap crazy.” I disagree. I have seen her twice on Bill Maher’s show, and she didn’t seem crazy at all. Though she probably holds some opinions with which I disagree (who doesn’t?).
        She seems to like Trump (or, at least, thinks he’s better than the politicians the Dems have recently nominated). If you read Batya’s second book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women (2024), endorsed by, for instance, Greg Lukianoff (who’s definitely not crazy), you might understand why. Of course, it’s still an open question whether the Republican party, now that it is the party of the working class, actually has a working-class agenda.

        David, the other day you also dissed NYT journalist Ezra Klein. Again, like in Batya’s case, you didn’t tell us why you diasapproved of him (I guess because Klein talked to someone who had some sympathy for the Palestinians or maybe even Hamas). I mean, you don’t have to tell us. I think Ezra Klein is one of the smartest journalists around. Bari Weiss (on her Free Press podcast) just called him one of the “most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today.” (He actually was calling for Biden to renounce running for a second term before it was safe to do so. Okay, that’s a low bar. But how many NYT journos cleared it?) Klein recently was on Bill Maher’s show – and he sounded very level-headed. He just published a book (co-written with Derek Thompson, from The Atlantic magazine) about how to get the Dems back on track, entitled Abundance.

        1. Thanks Peter.
          I feel Ezra blows in the wind: Woke? He’s woke (2020). Non-woke? (2024) He’s got a story for you about how terrible woke is.

          Now… with Derrick Thompson he’s a techno-optimist.
          This plasticity is not uncommon in public intellectuals – blatant and inconsistent, but hardly rare.
          But …. his spat calling Sam Harris “raaaacist” for a considered interview with Charles Murray, shouting “RACIST!” from the rooftops told us what kind of person Ezra is. And his ill informed take on Israel grinds my gears.

          Moving along…
          I like Derrick Th. a lot – and intend to listen to the new piece if I can get over my anger to Ezra whom I believe is a phony.

          I’ll check out Ezra on Bill Maher though – I’m surprised I missed it, probably fuming about ….. “Want pro-Pal?… that’s EZRA!” But I’ll take your tip and grit my teeth. 🙂

          As for Batya – A harder case. I liked her anti-woke position a lot earlier but her recent love of MAGA and tariffs (see our friend Frau Katz’s take below) seems either insincere or ill-informed.
          all the best Peter,

          D.A.
          NYC

      2. She’s a huge Trump fan. MAGA will say anything they can think of on the tariffs just to make Trump sound rational (I read them constantly in the comments at the WSJ).

        See her article at TFP: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.”

        https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-maga-lefty

        As for arguments about loss of factory jobs, that has zero relevance to tariff stricken Canada, where the trade deficit is due to oil, destined for American refineries.

      3. Since Batya didn’t post here prior to your comment, I gather that there is no Roolz issue.

        1. Batya is a journalist at the Free Press, not a WEIT commenter. (If that’s what you meant—not sure. I don’t think PCCE has ever featured her so you may not have heard of her.)

    4. “There are too many moving pieces to evaluate the potential impact of tariffs…”

      Not really…How’s a $5 trillion dollar loss in the last two days and $9.6 trillion loss since the idiot-felon took office? Hope that’s not too complicated for you.

    5. What are you talking about? You can’t praise tariffs—or even pretend to be neutral—while ignoring that the very trade system you want to dismantle is what made America the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history. That’s like killing the golden goose because you’re impatient for more eggs.

      Yes, the deindustrialisation of America has caused real suffering—declining mobility, depths of despair, and a working-class trapped in economic insecurity. But the solution isn’t indiscriminate economic vandalism on a global scale. It’s to confront and correct America’s own and extremely obvious mistakes. And quoting Batya Ungar-Sargon as if her opinion ends the debate? That’s not an argument—it’s ideological posturing. If you have a case, make it. You can’t expect others to treat vibes as evidence.

      You seem a little too eager to fall for the Trumpian narrative that weaker nations have exploited the U.S. But how does that make sense? I’m all ears. The truth is that Trump’s obsession with trade imbalances ignores the reality that the U.S. holds a unique position in the global economy—as issuer of the world’s reserve currency and financial anchor of international trade. That status changes everything. Basic economics dictates that the rules aren’t the same for America as for everyone else. Pretending otherwise isn’t just wrong—it’s dangerously naive. Or deliberately obtuse.

  3. Loved the anteater at play! The thick fur on the front legs made them almost look like the head of a panda. Could this be an adaptation to confuse a predator somehow?

    1. They are such weird-looking animals, the anteaters.
      But as the saying goes: It takes all kinds, to make the world.

  4. RE: “on March 7-11, 55 percent of respondents said they had a negative view of the Democratic Party, while 27 percent said they had a positive perception.”

    Bill Maher was joking about his recently on his show: 27 percent [approval rating] that’s not being out in the (electoral) wilderness. That’s getting eaten by a bear.

    NYT journalist Ezra Klein said: It’s not that informative. We already knew that the Dems are unpopular. The 27% rating in part reflects the fact that they are out of power, which makes them look pathetic even in the eyes of some of their supporters.

  5. Maybe of interest:
    Paul Krugman: Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? April 3, 3025
    Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.
    (with a link to a YouTube video of Tonny Bennett crooning “Call me irresponsible”)
    https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

    If you are interested in Krugman’s take, you may want to bookmark this site (his posts in chronological order, starting with the most recent one – access to most material is free):
    https://paulkrugman.substack.com/archive

    1. I wonder what others think about this tweet, which has a chart that seems to convincingly reveal the actual basis for Trump’s assignment of tariffs to various countries:

      Trump’s tariff figures have absolutely nothing to do with reciprocal tariffs. His numbers are almost all just the approximate % difference in trade balance.
      https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1907620892399550497

      Eonomics is not my forte, to say the least. But if this is correct, surely it’s lunatic?

      1. (Academic) Economists of such different persuasions as Paul Krugman (a liberal) and Tyler Cowen (a libertarian) don’t like what Trump just did. Cowen, who just started as a columnist for The Free Press (after having written for, first, The New York Times, and then for Bloomberg News) called Trump’s tariffs “perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime.” (Cowen is 63 years old.)

        From Trump’s first term, we remember that Trump isn’t really interested in policy. He wants to be top dog and, in his second term, take revenge on the people that he thinks wronged him. And now he has surrounded himself mostly with people whose primary merit is their loyalty to him – what could go wrong? That the guy who wanted Robert Kennedy to be his Secretary for Health and Human Services, is now screwing up economic policy – no surprise.

    2. Oy. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that AI would lead to the destruction of our civilisation via a brain-dead “AI” like ChatGPT. Future (or alien) archaeologists won’t know whether to laugh or cry. But maybe we’ll get lucky; lettuce spray.

  6. Expect a lot of stuff to be shipped thru Russia, Cuba and Norkia to be re-labelled as made there, with each of them collecting something for their service.

  7. If foreign tariffs were killing the US businesses and the US economy as Trump and his followers claim, why was the US economy the most robust in the world for the last three years? Why did the conservative journal The Economist state last October that “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust” and was the envy of the world?

    1. Trump replaced sound policy with magical thinking; not good for the economy. Or anything else, for that matter.

  8. I soooo want a giant anteater as a pet even though the vet bills would be insane.
    We would be the toast of the town with him on a leash, long tail swishing about, in the neighborhood. And even better no ants to worry about, save on pet food!
    It is win win.

    We could watch the hijabi girl fights together – take THAT cartoon watching cats.

    Ahhh…. dreams of my future life…

    D.A.
    NYC

  9. Your mistake is believing what you read in the mainstream press. They’re obsessed with making Trump look bad.

    The truth is that the economy was terrible when Trump took office, and he’s making it all better by crashing the stock market and wiping out our wealth. It’s 4D chess. Don’t think too hard about it.

    Here’s what Trump said in a press conference just today (or maybe yesterday?):

    Trump on Market Crash: Well, I mean, it is to be expected, this is a patient that was very sick. We inherited a terrible economy.

    2. You’re joking I hope? The economy was definitely not bad when Trump took over.

      1. That depends on your perspective. If you own significant assets, the economy was running great.
        If you didn’t own assets, you were struggling to make ends meet while watching the earnings flow to the top. From that perspective, the economy surely wasn’t good.

        1. I’m in Canada, which is poorer than the US.

          I’m far from wealthy and did not feel I was living in a bad economy during the Biden years.

          It’s true the US has more wealth inequality but that’s certainly not going to improve under Trump.

    3. Poor Trump! At least Biden didn’t inherit a terrible economy!!! Trump’s Covid economy was so robust! It’s so tiring living in opposite land.

      Not accusing you of living in opposite land…

  10. Yes. I saw that piece in the Jerusalem Post regarding the casualty numbers in Gaza. Coincidentally, I was having lunch with a friend the day before and, in our conversation, I told him that the numbers we read in the media are provided by Hamas and are not reliable. Now I have another piece of ammunition.

    The problem is that the mainstream media has been so intent on providing Hamas’s figures—now exceeding 50,000—that it’s very difficult for anything contrary to get traction. My friend listened to me when I told him that the Hamas-provided numbers were wrong—or even falsified—but I don’t know If I convinced him.

    In effect, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, etc. have flooded the zone with lies. Constant repetition is not itself evidence; it replaces evidence. Will the mainstream new outlets publish this new information from Hamas? Will they use the corrected numbers in their future reporting? This is a test of their veracity. This is an easy test for the media to pass. They can provide the updated casualty numbers—including the new proportions—starting now, or they can continue to provide the errant numbers, numbers that even Hamas no longer believes.

  11. 404 day – awesome.

    FWIW Thomas Sowell also says tariffs bad. They initiate an uncontrollable trade war.

    Did anyone see the video of Nancy Pelosi in the 90s criticizing the “reciprocal” tariffs with China? She was saying it’s unfair that China->U.S. was so low compared to U.S.->China. I saw the video on eXtwitter.

      2. It’s beyond question that the rise of manufacturing in low wage China seriously affected manufacturing in all Western countries (not just the US).

        But that ship sailed decades ago. Can Trump get it back? I don’t think he’s even trying. He keeps changing his mind on the tariffs.

        To rebuild factories is a big job. It would take years with guaranteed tariff protection. A stable environment: the last thing Trump is providing.

        He also started his tariff blitz on Canada for no reason at all. No one ever opened a factory here because of low wages. So what is it all about?

        One school of thought: tariffs raise revenue, needed to pay for his tax cuts (mostly benefit corporations and the wealthy).

  12. I wish I could have heard the conversation between the two fencers, Turner, the female, and Sullivan, the male.

    The NBC article had to note that Turner misgendered Sullivan when Turner said, “‘I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.’ Turner told Fox News, misgendering Sullivan.”

    But not mis-sexing him.

    What a world!

    1. The sooner the left loses this obsession with men who think they’re women competing in women’s sports the better.

      It makes them look so stupid. I know Trump is stupid in general but he got that one right.

      1. Only electoral defeat will stop leftist parties from pushing the transgender stuff. By now, the arguments have all been made (we are 10 years into this).

        A Dec 2024 YouGov Survey of adult people in England, Wales and Scotland found that 66% of respondents had paid not much or no attention at all to the debate in the media and politics about rights for transgender people. – Just a reminder for the readers of this site that many people don’t follow the news.

  13. I wish I could have heard the conversation between the two fencers, Turner, the female, and Sullivan, the male.

    The NBC article had to note that Turner misgendered Sullivan when Turner said, “‘I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.’ Turner told Fox News, misgendering Sullivan.”

    But not mis-sexing him.

    What a world!

  14. The person who customized the truck displays a high degree of mechanical knowledge based on the way that vehicle is customized, has a high degree of pride in accomplishment in his/her work, has a feel for good design and order, and is also productive enough to earn enough money to sink into the vehicle – those parts ain’t cheap. The fact that none of these attributes were rewarded by the school system is more of an indictment of our schools than something to laugh at.

  15. In all the criticisms of Trump’s tariffs I hear hardly a word from anyone criticizing our trading partners—and allies—for the tariffs they have long imposed on US products. Why is this?

    There is an old article floating around X by Warren Buffett in which he, addressing America’s deficit problems, advocates what he calls tariffs by another name. Some of the finance types around here might find this fascinating.

    https://faculty.washington.edu/ss1110/IF/Buffett%20Fortune%202003%20(6).pdf

    1. This is something I’d like to learn more about. But before reading the article, I’d suggest their imposing tariffs are a necessary thing for them. Most countries, even thriving European countries, do not have a gdp anywhere near those of the US or China. They have to protect their manufacturing in order to have any skin in the game.

      1. But if free trade makes everyone better off, as all the top economists agree, shouldn’t the EU get rid of its tariffs? Propping up sclerotic union-hobbled industries is a drag on their GDP, not an economic justification for protecting them. Tariffs in the EU have the same political justification as they do everywhere, as an industrial strategy to protect jobs in non-competitive industries that lobby effectively for tariffs. And the government goes along because it needs the tariff revenue to pay for pensions and high-speed trains and migrant resettlement and other wonders.

        1. This ignores the fact that the USA is blessed by the side effects of operating the world’s reserve currency. This puts it in a unique position of doing very well from trade deficits that would crush other economies. Countries with a large trade surplus with the USA often reinvest much of their earnings straight back into US dollars, which then boosts the value of the dollar despite the USA buying more than it sells. This effectively introduces artificial competition which needs to be balanced by other interventions if major economies elsewhere are to have a chance of keeping up.

    2. You do realize that Canada signed a trade treaty with Trump in his first term?

      He’s tossing out his own agreement by unilaterally imposing new tariffs.

      No one ever moved manufacturing to Canada for lower wages. In fact we mostly export raw materials to the US. It’s the export of oil that has created the trade deficit that Trump is so upset about.

      1. When Trump screws the planet’s economy and the accumulated wealth of humanity…. I still have some maple syrup set aside to send my best Kanuk friends, Frau K. and Leslie. 🙂

        D.A.
        NYC

        1. David, why would you send maple syrup to Canada (which produces about 70% of the world’s supply)?

        1. Sorry I can’t read the article. PDFs are usually a lost cause on an iPhone and that’s all I have. The text is too small.

      3. He’s tossing out his own agreement by unilaterally imposing new tariffs.

        That’s not exactly accurate, Fr. Katz.
        President Trump has not imposed any tariffs on imports from Canada or Mexico covered under the USMCA free-trade agreement that you refer to. This agreement covers about 50% of the value of all imports from Mexico and 38% of the value from Canada, according to local media reports. So he is not tossing out or otherwise abrogating “his” agreement with us. He has imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, oil, and potash which are not covered under USMCA and which he seems to be free under U.S. law to do. You will recall that after USMCA was ratified during his first term he did impose tariffs on aluminum and steel which were later rescinded.

        Canada also maintains (unilateral) tariffs of 249-298% (yes, that’s right, no decimal points) on dairy products as part of our agricultural supply management cartel which has annoyed not just American farmers but everyone in the world whom we try to interest in trading with us.

        I think the focus of our attention should be on the impact of the President’s tariffs on the U.S. domestic economy because our investment portfolios and public and private pension plans are heavily invested there. Not that we can do anything about it, but it seems almost ungracious to be bellyaching about the impact of tariffs on us when it’s the American economy we are so heavily integrated with that we should be worried about. We really are all in the same boat with our neighbours.

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