Are you kidding? This week's news roundup of preposterous news - more tariffs, invading Iran, crashing the economy. Plus today's wildfires update

More damned tariffs?

So on Thursday this happened:

Trump’s Tariff Pivot: ‘Forced Labor’ Duties Hit 60 Nations as Global Levy Expires The clock just ran out on Trump’s temporary 10% global tariff—but the White House isn't dropping its trade shield. Taking effect at the exact minute the old levy expires at midnight Friday, 60 trading partners will be slammed with new 10% and 12.5% "forced labor" duties, covering a staggering 99.4% of all U.S. imports. The Legal Workaround After the Supreme Court struck down Trump's sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs in February, the administration needed a new weapon to maintain its tariff floor. Enter Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. By accusing trading partners of lax enforcement on forced labor bans, the White House is effectively keeping its baseline tariffs intact while sidestepping the legal vulnerabilities that doomed its previous attempt. The Breakdown The 10% Tier: Hits major partners like Canada, Mexico, Britain, India, and Argentina. The 12.5% Tier: Targets the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (when combined with existing rates). The China Factor: Beijing faces a 12.5% rate driven by U.S. allegations of Uyghur forced labor—a claim China fiercely denies. The ultimate goal? Push Chinese tariffs back up to the 20% ceiling agreed upon in a late-2025 trade truce. What Gets a Pass? To prevent domestic economic shockwaves, the administration carved out massive exemptions. Oil, gas, fertilizer, specific foods, and USMCA-compliant goods are safe. Products already hit by Section 232 national security tariffs—like autos, steel, aluminum, and copper—will also avoid the double-tax. Global Pushback The maneuver sparked immediate outrage. Norway, Australia, and Brazil slammed the duties as unjustified, while Canada offered a muted but firm response. At home, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey warned the tariffs will drive up costs and cripple American competitiveness: "Nobody can afford this." The Bottom Line Trade lawyers call the Section 301 maneuver a "sledgehammer." It seamlessly replicates the tariff rates of the expiring levies but is far harder to kill in court. As one trade expert noted, the administration gets to keep its baseline tariffs, and judges will be highly reluctant to block a crackdown on forced labor.

- Adrian Macovei

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This explains all the new tariffs. And you must take notes because this WILL be on the test!


I think most Canadians are coming around to the idea that there's not going to be any tariff deal with Trump because he is incapable of giving up his tariff boogey-man addiction. Not to mention that the United States is desperate for money now - they need to collect as much tariff revenue from importers as they can get.

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In The Globe and Mail, Robyn Urback describes Canada as an abused girlfriend who has finally kicked the bum out:

...U.S. President Donald Trump is inspiring Canada to cut its hair. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, obviously; he’s too busy starting wars he can’t finish and threatening to dramatically raise prices of everyday goods for his people. But what he is also doing – and what he has been doing since he returned to the White House – is forcing Canada to become a stronger, better country. Because we never want to end up in this sort of relationship again....
... After years of kicking the can down the road on military procurement and underfunding the Canadian Armed Forces, Ottawa is finally committing to purchases and spending real money on defence. It’s something we should have done a long time ago, but we just assumed our boyfriend would have our back if we got into trouble. But this guy has shown us why you shouldn’t rely on any man.
We’re diversifying our trade partners, looking beyond the U.S. to regions including Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. We’re scrapping counterproductive legislation. We’re finally getting serious about increasing our resource exports, about building pipelines, and breaking ground on other big projects.
We could be doing more, of course; there are still plenty of regulatory barriers (for example, Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, which can still be bypassed for a project deemed in the national interest), as well as red tape and other barriers impeding investment and production in Canada. But we’re seeing more action on these files in a year than we have seen in the last decade. And paradoxically, it’s thanks to Mr. Trump.
Indeed, the Trump effect has been to force Canada to confront the rules and policies that are keeping us from being our best selves. One of the most obvious policies is supply management, which artificially raises the prices of dairy, eggs and poultry across the country to placate what is perceived as a powerful voting bloc. It is unlikely the federal government will dismantle that now, however, since Mr. Trump specifically identified dairy as a trade irritant and Ottawa will not want to give him the win....

In the Toronto Star, Justin Ling suggests Canadians re-invigorate our Buy Canadian campaign:

...Prime Minister Mark Carney, for his part, seemed to be at a loss this week. He’s given up plenty to placate Trump, having dropped Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, axed the Digital Services Tax and given the U.S. a cut of revenues from the Gordie Howe International Bridge we paid for. Yet we find ourselves in the same miserable position. Asked what he was planning to do next, Carney didn’t have an answer.
Canadians will clamour for a response, as we’ve done before. Those not keen to capitulate will demand we impose tariffs of our own. “We can’t keep rolling over,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on Tuesday. The weaker-spined among us will continue to pretend Ottawa, not Washington, is the problem. “Why would you want to fight with your largest trading partner?” asked Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has already put U.S. booze back in his province’s liquor stores.
Both options are bad. Retaliatory tariffs would blow up trade negotiations and extinguish any chance of salvaging CUSMA. Backing down would be cowardly — and it would also require us, inevitably, to deprioritize our other burgeoning trade relationships, in particular with China. Merely plodding along won’t cut it either. We need to fight back strategically.
To do that, we should borrow an idea from the British Empire and found the Free Trade Marketing Board. The political classes have enough work to do seeking out new trade partners and negotiating with a madman. We should pick up some of the slack. Carney ought to put out a formal request to premiers, mayors, business owners and consumers nationwide: buy from our friends, not from the U.S.
After all, Canada has a secret weapon, one that gives us some advantage over our southern neighbours: solidarity...

An invasion of Iran?

I keep seeing posts about how Trump and Hegseth are considering landing troops to fight in Iran. Are they nuts?

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And of course, here's my Robert X. Cringley story again - if America thought the Viet Cong were patriotic fanatics, they ain't seen nuthin' yet...

When thinking about how long a war with Iran might last, and how bloody it might be, I remember this cautionary tale that I first read some 22 years ago.
2004 was also a time of US scare-mongering about Iran, because some in the Bush administration were pushing to widen the War in Iraq. This article is an old column from a publication called I, Cringely: The Pulpit, written by journalist Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely.  It is long out of print, but I found it on the Wayback Machine.
The excerpt was nominally about the 2004 re-election of Bush, but it also featured Stephens' description of a horrific 1986 incident in the Iran-Iraq War:

If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end?
I can tell you it ain't us.
Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.
I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.
Welcome to the New Morality.

Trump doesn't get it either. Nor do Hegseth or Vance or Rubio or Gabbard.

Those thousands of boys died for nothing only 40 years ago - their parents and brothers and sisters are still in Iran. Can you imagine, after Minab and all the bombing so far in this war, how much the people of Iran now hate the United States and every other state around the world who supports the US military in this war? 

IFLA sums it up:

...The Trump ledger: hundreds of billions in deployments and munitions, American soldiers coming home in flags, an ally’s drinking water on fire, a quarter of the planet’s oil supply held hostage across two straits simultaneously, petrol prices detonating in an election cycle, and recession warnings stacking up like cordwood. All because this gullible prick sat through a Netanyahu slide deck and came out the other side thinking he was Eisenhower. No defined victory, no exit ramp, and a historical record so grim you could read it by braille: Afghanistan swallowed 20 years and coughed up fuck all. Vietnam, same story with worse music... wait, no, better music, worse everything else. Iraq birthed ISIS. Libya’s still a failed state with a coastline. And the Emperor Commodus of Covfefe surveyed that flawless 0 and 4 record of American wars of choice and thought: you know what this list needs? Iran, the hardest cunt in the yard, plus a bonus round against mountain fighters in Yemen who have never once lost a siege they started. These people are so dense they bend light. NASA could use the Situation Room as a gravitational lens and save a fortune on telescopes.
Zero sum doesn’t begin to cover this shitshow shemozzle. This is negative sum, everybody bleeding, and the drongo who lit the match bleeds hardest, because the Houthis were already living in rubble and the Iranians have been under siege since 1979. Those two can absorb pain like a bar mat absorbs beer. The United States runs on cheap fuel, cheap shipping and consumer confidence, and all 3 are currently copping rocket fire while the bloke in charge 3am rage posts through it.
The Gate of Tears. That’s what Bab el-Mandeb means in Arabic. The old sailors named it for the ships it drowned. Turns out it was just waiting, all these centuries, for a presidency worthy of the title.

Crashing the economy?
For the last year, I've seen predictions of economic disaster for the United States - because AI investments will crash, because US deficits are enormous, because the world wants to sell its US dollars, because Trump's Iran War will destroy the Middle East, amd so forth.
Nobody seems to know whether any of this will happen - September and October are the usual times for market crashes, when companies are issuing quarterly reports and trying to determine whether they will survive the year.
But with the bunch of thieves, sycophants and know-nothings now running Washington, what are the chances that everything will be just fine?

Me, joking: I can’t believe we chose “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally” Conservatives, dead serious: it was a tough choice, but I’m glad we picked “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally”

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— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 5:59 AM

Canada will be on its own.

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Today's Wildfire Update

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There are serious wildfire problems in Europe:

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