PLEASE DO.

A Northern Star editorial raises a simple plea, "Anderson pool should be reopened."

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE, WITH CHARITY TOWARD ALL.

Maybe it's time to dial back the "existential threat to democracy" talk.

Before the Democrats ham-handedly eased Our President into retirement, Common Dreams contributor and Indiana political scientist Jeffrey Isaac mused, "We are experiencing a perfect storm of democratic crisis."  He wrote that column before the Republicans convened in Milwaukee, prefacing the perfect storm passage with "It is certain that Trump and the GOP will play [being shot at] for all it is worth during next week's four day Republican national convention in Milwaukee. Meanwhile Joe Biden's candidacy totters amidst worries about his age and mental acuity, opening up real divisions within the Democratic party that need somehow to be closed."  It appears as though the Democrats are quickly promoting the vice president, whilst avoiding either the controversy of invoking the 25th Amendment or the reality of a death in office.  I repeat, it was an unforced error to keep the sitting president incommunicado rather than to have him claim to be able to finish his term yet acknowledging the remorseless logic of the actuarial tables.  Perhaps he'll provide clarity this evening.

Mr Isaac is attempting to square the circle that is "Republicans Threat to Our Democracy^(TM) Democrats Not."

Spirited, sometimes heated, disagreement is part of the creation of policy.  Gunfire and firebombs, not so much.

FA HU FORAY, TA HU TARIFF.

Perhaps there's a Hu or two in Jinhua who likes Christmas a lot, but if you run the Christmas tree factory there, the Grinch is correct and it comes in a box.

U.S. retailers are almost completely reliant on China for Christmas decorations, where they source 87% of such goods - worth roughly $4 billion. Chinese factories are also heavily dependent on the U.S. market, where they sell half of what they make.

If Americans want new Christmas decorations this year, they will have to pay a lot more for them - if they can find them on the shelves at all.

"So far this year, none of my American customers have placed any orders," said Qun Ying, who runs an artificial Christmas tree factory in the eastern city of Jinhua.

"Of course it's about the tariffs. By mid-April all the orders are normally finalised, but right now ... it's hard to know if any orders are coming. Maybe American customers won't buy anything this year."

There might be bargains on Chinese decorations in other countries, or business opportunities for local artisans in the States.  If your string of icicle lights is hopelessly tangled, dear reader, you might be out of luck.

In Shaoxing, some 160 kilometres (100 miles) away from Jinhua, factory owner Liu Song was confident his business can cope by trying to sell more to Russia, Europe and Southeast Asia, which together take 75% of his products already.

"We are worried that U.S. orders will come down," he said, while adding: "We will definitely win this trade war."

Jessica Guo, who also manages a Christmas tree factory in Jinhua, said she was just notified by an important U.S. customer that it is pausing a 3 million yuan ($408,191) order for which she had already spent 400,000 yuan on materials.

In Tom Clancy fiction, consumers spontaneously stopped buying Chinese goods, and perhaps that is still in order after that lab leak.  This time around, though, perhaps Our President is counting on China going broke before their treasury liquidates all the Treasuries.

[Guo] expects that order will soon be cancelled and worries about her business.

"My peers and I rely on U.S. orders to survive," Guo said. "This will inevitably affect a lot of people. No one can escape."

Economists say the trade war will shave 1-2 percentage points off Chinese economic growth this year, exacerbate industrial overcapacity issues, threaten jobs, and further fuel deflationary forces.

As Chinese exporters sell less to the U.S., which last year bought goods worth more than $400 billion, they will have to compete ever more intensely on prices in other markets.

This will hit their already-thin profit margins and force them to cut costs at home, economists say.

Guo's 10,800-square metre (116,250-square foot) factory employs 140 people regularly, but that number can hit 200 in peak production season over the summer. This year she does not expect to need extra workers.

"Losing the U.S. market will definitely impact many people’s jobs," said Guo.

There aren't that many Hus in China who buy pre-lighted artificial Christmas trees, which are apparently made only in China.  But the kind of Christmas that comes in a big box retail store apparently relies heavily on those small Chinese factories.

Shifting production to the U.S., one of Trump's goals in imposing tariffs on China and almost every other country in the world, is not feasible, says Jami Warner, executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association.

"They certainly can't be made in the United States. There's no manufacturing, the technology isn't here, the labour market isn't here," said Warner.

Warner, who expects significant, but hard to estimate, price increases, says 80% of all Christmas trees displayed in the U.S. are artificial. The pre-lit trees, which is most of them, are only made in China.

She decries her industry becoming collateral damage in a geopolitical fight.

"What our members make and sell are not strategic products," said Warner.

"We're not threatening. We're a happy, joyful business. We'd like to stay in that joyful business."

The local home improvement stores start setting out their Christmas stuff sometime around Labor Day.  Yes, seriously, the Hallowe'en stuff is often marked down the last week of October.  We'll see how the Festive Season supply chain shakes out, and whether that will affect the blinging out of the houses nearby.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

CAN WE PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT 2028 ALREADY???

The world is about to get really fair, very fast.  America is done apologizing for its interests.

Buckle in. "If Trump can pull this off, he has an excellent chance of winning the contest of the century."  Destruction is easy.  There are no utopias.  "Overall, we are far better off and stronger than the doomers will tell you."

Politics, on the other hand, can be hard.  "Trump supporters have enjoyed a heady three months of action on DEI, antisemitism, energy, NGOs, deregulation, border control, Hamas, Houthis, and more, but solidifying those changes will require a strong economy, support from friendly nations, and continued Republican control of Congress."

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THE REAL DEBT CEILING IS CREAKING AND GROANING.

The real debt ceiling is not a line item in a Washington document.  It can crash in at any time.  "And it will, as Veronique de Rugy cautions.  'For all the excitement about the incoming administration and a return to the 2019 economy, market stability rests on the precarious assumption that the government will eventually put its fiscal house in order.'"

RONALD REAGAN CALLED, AND HE WANTS HIS SKEPTICS BACK.

Once upon a time, the so-called concerned scientists had doubts about the Strategic Defense Initiative.  The concept might not yet work at scale, and yet it works in smaller scale.  The doubters raise the same objections as they did forty years ago.

“President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy. The apparent successes of Israel’s Iron Dome system are not relevant to US homeland defense. Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster than those Iron Dome is built for. Homeland missile defense requires an entirely different kind of defense, and because ICBMs carry nuclear-armed missiles, it needs to be very reliable and effective. Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat. A UCS-MIT technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures to fool midcourse defenses like the current homeland defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Proposals to get around those weaknesses by building space-based missile defenses have repeatedly been abandoned because they are expensive, very technically challenging, and readily defeated. Trump’s idea of a space-based missile defense is a bad investment.

“Longstanding US policy has been to focus on defense against a small number of missiles from a non-peer state like North Korea because trying to build a defense against the missile arsenals of an advanced state like Russia is technically unachievable, economically ruinous and strategically unwise. Russia and China already appear to be building new types of weapons with the purpose of defeating or avoiding missile defenses. Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the US safe from nuclear weapons.

There was a time when Patriot was impractical.  It's worth remembering that "concerned" is a weasel word, and the history of missile-defense skeptics overlaps with that of unilateral-disarmament advocates, and forty years ago that class of worry-warts served as useful idiots for the crumbling Soviet Union.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TARIFFS: CALIBRATION.

Let the record show that Our President has revised his ukases on tariffs.  "Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries, hits China harder with 125%."  It might take most of the ninety days for those negotiations with other countries to achieve some sort of agreement, and there is a line from a Tom Clancy novel about the, um, endowment of the Chinese regime that is rattling around in my mind.

Let us also note that it is folly to expect trade flows involving a country whose currency is a reserve currency for international settlements to balance.  Somebody who does not live in that country has to obtain that reserve currency somehow, which means selling goods to obtain the currency, either to hold qua currency (I once knew how many dollars were circulating outside the United States without turning up in the domestic velocity calculations) or to hold securities denominated in that currency.  One reason that Tom Clancy line keeps buzzing in my mind is that as of this afternoon, China's bankers have not been offloading all the Treasuries they hold.

PUBLIC MONEY BUYS COURT INTELLECTUALS.

My reservations about spending my tax money thusly are pragmatic.

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."

But have a notionally Republican president take the subsidies away from those hedge funds with classrooms that call themselves prestigious universities, and cries ring up to heaven.

Reason's Robby Soave quotes Laura Kipnis on the matter of those court intellectuals.  "Universities were bending over for federal funds long before Trump."

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TARIFFS: COMIC RELIEF.

All hail the bipartisanship!

Perhaps if you read your own deep thot tweet you'd realize that Trump is is on the same idiotic page as Pelosi, Obama, Biden, and Bernie Sanders https://t.co/0BQhMQ47hw

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 4, 2025

It prompts Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson to ask,

So why does the left not simply claim that its prior support of tariffs was wrongheaded? (See the now-ancient denunciations by Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders of Bush-era “free trade,” deindustrialization, globalization, and lost jobs.) Now, the left supports… what exactly? Mini-tariffs? No tariffs? Reciprocal tariffs?

He has a number of other observations, to which we might return, after considering the comic relief.  Reason's Eric Boehm sees everything but coherence.  "This isn't about reciprocity or lowering trade deficits or encouraging businesses to move supply chains away from potential adversaries. It is just pointlessly, mindlessly destructive."  In another article, he notes, "Trump seemingly lacks any awareness about the economic costs of his tariff obsession, and he does not have a strong sense of intellectual consistency. At this rate, American businesses and consumers should prepare for four years of uncertainty, higher costs, and logical contradictions."  And Noah "Noahpinion" Smith has discovered Trumpy officials sounding a lot like the self-styled progressives with their "nobody needs" assertions.  "[S]ome Trump officials have even resorted to telling Americans to suck it up and accept lower standards of living — Treasury Secretary Bessent has declared that 'Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.' (This would come as news to many Americans.)"

CONFESS YOUR SINS, AND THROW YOURSELF ON THE MERCY OF THE REFEREES.

It used to be that scholarly journals practiced double-blind refereeing, in order to protect the novices from being held to higher standards than the established stars.  (And yes, that might cut both ways, higher education being the menagerie of professional jealousies that it can be.)  But if you want to work the referees, dear reader, consider adding a positionality statement to your acknowledgements.  "Positionality statements makes transparent how the identities of the authors relate to the research topic and to the identity of the participants. Scholars are not mandated to disclose any aspect of their identities, only encouraged. They may choose to disclose one or more of their identities, in as much or as little detail as possible."

That Michigan Med's advice to authors invokes a Sage article ought be warning enough.  "A positionality statement makes clear how the identities of the authors relate to the research topic and to the identities of the participants, and how these identities are represented."

CRY "HAVOC!" AND UNLEASH THE FOURTH TURNING?

That might be what Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg is getting at in "Ripping Off the Bandaid."

Let's note that the political class have been keeping asset bubbles inflated for a quarter of a century now.  On Monday, when the major stock indices dipped into bear market territory, at close they were still trading at twenty times earnings or so.  There's either been a redefinition of long-run equilibrium in price-earnings ratios, or getting back to that historic tendency to trade at thirteen to fifteen times earnings is going to be really scary.  There are a few other dangerous forces at work: the real debt ceiling is still waiting to crash in, although so far the communist government in China has not announced that they will not purchase any more Treasuries.  That country is getting old before it gets rich, and Mr Berg suggests that staying out of Treasury auctions will hurt the ChiComms more than it hurts the States.  "To force China into a recession that they can just not afford (if their exports are strangled, they are screwed blue), which might have the salutary effect of helping prevent WORLD WAR F**KING THREE in the Taiwan Straits."

I'd only note that it's when countries get desperate that they act out on the world stage.  Imperial Japan had to expand the boundaries of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere precisely because the sanctions on oil and other raw materials were starting to pinch.

Living in interesting times, indeed.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TARIFFS: COMPLICATIONS.

We'll let Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter ask the first question.

I don’t understand why all the people who have suddenly become furious supporters of free trade were not outraged by the unfree trade practices of other countries against the United States.

I keep asking, but no one can explain why it’s good for America to accept non-reciprocal…

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 3, 2025

Russ Roberts, who runs the Econ Talk pod-casts, answers. "When other countries do stupid things, it’s a mistake to imitate them. Increasing tariffs to their levels just makes us poorer, overall. Helps certain Americans though. But not a strategy for growth or prosperity overall. Learn some economics."

GENO AURIEMMA'S COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE IS IN COACHING.

He's frustrated by his sport's lack of a value proposition.  "Geno Auriemma blasts NCAA on women's tournament: 'Their experience sucks compared to the men's'."

JUST VIBES, NOW DEBT.

The moving finger writes, and having writ.

Let’s be real — this was coming.

Gen Z wasn’t into it.

The brand didn’t evolve.

And the culture moved on.

You can’t serve 1980s vibes to 2025 TikTok. pic.twitter.com/0TNbaU70wI

— George M (@GeorgeM_Growth) April 2, 2025

The clientele got older, and they weren't going there for the food.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TARIFFS: POPULAR MYTHS.

If Ross Perot had been correct in 1992, Donald Trump would not have his principal issue in 2016 or last year.

Think about it, dear reader, if there is a giant sucking sound of manufacturing jobs going to Mexico, why is there immigration through Mexico into the United States?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Constitution belongs to the people, not to sophists.  Establishment Republican leaders lost control of their party because they failed to serve their base.  Politicians work for the people.  "Today’s popular leaders like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen are not the people’s last chance. They are the globalist’s last chance."  It's probable that the ban on Marine La Pen running for office will backfire.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

FAIL COLUMBIA.

The university has long been the poster child for what happens when the administration caves to non-negotiable demands from crazy people.  "What began at Columbia as tragedy in 1968 returns today as farce."

MORE ON THOSE CORRODED HORIZONS.

More details are coming out about Amtrak's hasty withdrawal of the Horizon fleet of coaches and business-cafe cars thanks to corrosion.  When I wrote, "The reports are not yet detailed enough to establish any connection between ice and water and electrolytically incompatible metals at cars' ends," I didn't know the half of it.

In response to a set of detailed News Wire questions, Amtrak would only confirm that the cars were sent to the shop after “some corrosion” was detected during a periodic inspection. Once the 1989-vintage cars arrived, however, additional corrosion was discovered by Amtrak inspectors “in areas normally not visible.” The company said it had determined “corrosive effects on structural steel accelerated due to the amount of water, ice, and de-icing treatments that have accumulated over the lifecycle of Horizon passenger cars. That result was verified and confirmed by Alstom, the successor to Bombardier Transportation, the original manufacturer.”

Some things never change.  "Corrosion at the anti-climber is common on North Shore cars, which dealt with Milwaukee road salt each winter, and a weekly exterior washup with muriatic acid."  Thus it's likely that any North Shore car you encounter in preservation has probably had new steel installed above the anti-climber and perhaps on the lower side sheets.  Sometimes, there might be Bondo in there, dating back to the waning days of the North Shore.

Those heavy steel cars tend to hold together pretty well.  The Horizons?

Other sources have told News Wire that the cars were sent to Alstom for the purpose of repairing visible corrosion around vestibules and traps. However, when that process began and cars were removed from their trucks, floors or ceilings reportedly buckled or collapsed. Neither Amtrak nor Alstom would confirm this; Amtrak would only say it is “working with Alstom to examine the fleet and address the findings,” though few movements of Horizon cars have been detected since they were sidelined following the initial inspections.

For the present, Superliner coaches freed up from the Colorado ski trains have been used to protect regional services out of Chicago rather than strengthening long-distance trains.  The DOGE boys don't have to do any special research on Amtrak, its record continues to speak for itself.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TARIFFS: BASIC CONCEPTS.

Yesterday, Our President claimed his tariffs would lead to a new birth of manufacturing prosperity, or something.  Among economists, Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux's sentiment, "Trump Doesn't Understand Trade" garners more agreement.

Because we can never have too many Mark Perry Venn diagrams.  Retrieved from Cafe Hayek.

THE FUNDAMENTALS.

After making history at Yankee Stadium for a number of the wrong reasons, the Milwaukee Brewers won their home opening series.

As the Royals gathered at the mound for a meeting with pitcher Sam Long, Brewers manager Pat Murphy walked out to the on-deck circle to chat with [Brice] Turang. The message clearly worked. On the first pitch he saw from Long, Turang dropped down a picture-perfect cue down the first-base line, allowing Dunn to scamper home without even a play at the plate.

Perfect craftsmanship – just like [Freddy] Peralta in the hours preceding it.

After surrendering more runs in the first four games than a football team with a weak defense, the past two games were a 4-0 shutout of Kansas City followed by that 3-2 win in eleven.  It's a long season, you don't give up on it after a week.