The ‘Origins’ man
Listening to a terrific podcast conversation between David Runciman and Adam Rutherford about Darwin’s The Origin of Species sent me searching through my photo archive for this — a window of an antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge.
Quote of the Day
”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- William Faulkner
Something that nobody in Silicon Valley gets.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Cathal Hayden and Eamonn McElholm | Farewell to Ireland
Make America make again? Yeah, by manufacturing pipe dreams
Yesterday’s Observer column:
Trump’s obsession with tariffs goes back a long way. In his book Fear, about the first Trump administration, the journalist Bob Woodward told of how Gary Cohn, the president’s then chief economic adviser, repeatedly tried to explain to Trump that his “antiquated vision of roaring industrial chimneys and clanking steelworks busy with grateful blue-collar workers was no longer applicable, or indeed desirable, to an America reinventing itself in service industries and hi-tech products”. And when, exasperated, he asked the president why he held these views, Trump replied: “I just do. I’ve had these views for 30 years.”
So here we are. But instead of steel mills, Trump and his crew have now begun thinking that the Apple iPhone not only should, but could, be manufactured in the US. The other day, when the White House press secretary was asked whether Trump thought that iPhone manufacturing is the kind of technology that could move to the US, she replied: “Absolutely. He believes we have the labour, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it.”
This is, to put it politely, baloney…
Long Read of the Day
Living in interesting times
Charlie Stross wondering if the US is moving into a “pre-revolutionary crisis”.
Of the anti-Trump demonstrations at the weekend, I have to say that despite estimates of 3-5 million marchers, my Sunday thoughts were, “it’s going to suck to be them.” The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.)
But all that has changed because Trump has completely shat the economic bed. I’m not going to re-hash the reasons why everyone stopped using tariffs as an instrument of trade policy, let alone taxation, nearly a century ago. But the epic stupidity of asking ChatGPT how to use tariffs to balance a trade deficit and then accepting its incorrect answer and using them to set policy is jaw-dropping even by Trumpian standards. But what happens next?
Well, maybe what happens next is already becoming visible to a sharp-eyed observer like Charlie:
One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law. (This was part of the Project 2025 plan, incidentally.) SecDef Hegseth has already purged the top legal counsel for the Army, Air Force, and Navy to prevent them from blocking “orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Go figure where all this is going.
I love Charlie’s blog. And his intuitive understanding of what’s going on — typical of a fine sci-fi writer. He was the one who, ages ago, correctly characterised big corporations as “Slow AIs”, a metaphor I have ruthlessly borrowed for many talks since.
Apropos the title of his Substack post… *Heffers, the venerable Cambridge bookshop now owned by (I think) Waterstones, is selling some lovely offbeat greetings cards, of which this one is irresistible.
Needless to say, I’ve bought a few.
My commonplace booklet
Trump’s abrupt (possibly temporary) ‘retreat’ from his tariff impositions after the bond market reined him in, made me think of the DownFall Meme. I’m sure some jokers are already working on it in this particular context.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Cass Sunstein has a Substack. And it looks interesting (which is not surprising, given how smart he is). For a scholar of his his eminence he doesn’t sound pompous. I first thought that when I heard an anecdote he told about himself and his wife, Samantha Power. She was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2008 and whenever the UN was in session she and Cass stayed in a suite in a posh New York Hotel, where he discovered that he was known to the hotel staff as “Mr Power”. One morning, when she was at the UN, he went down to the Lobby and asked the concierge to call for a taxi for him. “Sure thing, Mr Power,” said the chap. “No, no”, said Cass, my name is Sunstein.” “Well now”, said the concierge, “that’s weird: you look just like Mr Power”.
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!