Author: sauer@technologists.com

NY Times: For U.S. and China, a Risky Game of Chicken With No Off-Ramp in Sight

Neither side wants to look weak by backing down on tariffs. But if their trade relationship collapses, the global consequences could be profound.

A doubling of American tariffs on Chinese goods. Nationalist Chinese bloggers comparing President Trump’s levies to a declaration of war. China’s Foreign Ministry vowing that Beijing will “fight to the end.”

For years, the world’s two biggest powers have flirted with the idea of an economic decoupling as tensions between them have risen. The acceleration this week, in both actions and words, of their trade relationship’s deterioration has made the prospect of such a divorce seem closer than ever.
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Ken Klippenstein: Pentagon Prepares for Trump to Go Berserk

Unprecedented number of B-2 bombers amassed for Iran strike

In the largest single deployment of stealth bombers in U.S. history, the Pentagon has sent six B-2 “Spirit” aircraft to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The long-range bombers, which are uniquely suited to evade Iranian air defenses and can carry America’s most potent bunker busting weapons, flew in from Missouri last week in a little noticed operation.

The B-2s carry not just bombs, but a message for Iran: “do you see our sword?,” as one retired general told Newsmax this week.
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Steven Beschloss: The Resistance Must Be Loud and Clear

The “Hands Off!” protests on Saturday demonstrated the potential of collective action
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On Saturday, millions of Americans—including many of you—proved we are not about to let a despotic minority of self-serving oligarchs and kleptocrats, miscreants and sycophants determine our future without a fight.
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Of course, we knew the nation’s top vandal was not listening. He was fiddling around on his Florida golf course, amusing himself with Saudi financiers and other golfers, and pocketing millions at Mar-a-Lago fundraisers.
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But the coming phases of mass protest will require being more precise. Elon Musk must be removed, for example.
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Washington Post: Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad

Since Trump took office, the park service — an agency charged with preserving American history — has changed how its website describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow

For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.

Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.

The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 4, 2025

The stock market rout continued today. As expected, China announced retaliatory tariffs in response to those President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Chinese leaders say they will impose a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods imported into China next Thursday. Apparently, Trump did not think China would respond to his tariffs, and tried to sound as if he was still in control of the situation.

Trump is spending a long weekend in Florida, where he is attending the LIV golf tournament at his Doral club. But at 8:25 this morning, he reposted on his social media channel a video in which the narrator claimed that Trump is crashing the markets on purpose. The video claimed that legendary investor Warren Buffet “just said Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over fifty years.” It went on to explain how “the secret game he’s playing” “could make you rich.” Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway quickly denied Buffett had said any such thing as the video claimed. “All such reports are false,” it said. In March, Buffett called tariffs “an act of war, to some degree.”
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Atlantic: The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

April 3, 2025 – The chaos inside the White House national-security team persists.

For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. … Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. …

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired.
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Daily: Complete And Total Incompetence As Trump Slaps Tariffs On Penguins

The Trump White House announced tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands. The problem is that no people live there.

Trump’s big “Liberation Day” tariffs event was a disaster. Instead of getting the country excited, Trump revealed that he has come up with an entire delusional fantasy world about tariffs that rewrites American history.

No one is sure how Trump’s White House came up with their list of reciprocal tariffs, but on the final page is the Australian territory of the Heard and McDonald Islands.

The White House Rapid Response X account posted the list of nations that will be getting hit with tariffs, and on the last page are the Herald and McDonald Islands.
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The human population of the islands is zero.

Penguins inhabit the islands.

Donald Trump held a big event in the Rose Garden to slap tariffs on a bunch of Antarctic penguins.
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Bulwark: ‘People Will Die’—RFK Jr. Guts America’s Health Bureaucracy

Stunned experts fear major damage to U.S. health, science, and expertise.

On Tuesday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services informed thousands of employees they were losing their jobs. The notices came by email and, in one sense, they were not a surprise. Last Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs were imminent, as part of a broader restructuring designed to shrink the department’s total workforce by 25 percent.

But it’s one thing to know those layoffs are coming, quite another to learn about the real people who will no longer have jobs, the real positions that will no longer exist, and the real divisions that will no longer operate as they did before.

The sheer breadth of the cuts is staggering: The layoffs affected agencies that exist to fight deadly pathogens, to protect the nation’s drug supply, to finance and carry out cutting-edge research—along with countless other divisions and offices that touch everything from rural health to early childhood care.
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Steven Beschloss: Trump Broke What Wasn’t Broken

Canada’s Prime Minister says the “old relationship” with America “is over” and “the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.” The road to repair will be long.

No one voted for Donald Trump to destroy America’s relationship with our good neighbor and top trading partner, Canada, but here we are. The words last week of Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, make clear that the road to repair will only reopen once Trump no longer occupies our White House.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said, following a meeting with his cabinet to discuss Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threats. “It’s clear the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations, we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards.”

This comes in the wake of not only 25 percent tariffs affecting key industries and goods, but also Trump’s idiotic insistence that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
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NPR: Trump executive order seeks to ‘restore’ American history through Smithsonian overhaul

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Vice President Vance to eliminate “divisive race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo.
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Performer and cultural strategist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, former head of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, said the wording of the executive order is ill-informed.

“ To say the Smithsonian Institution has an anti-American agenda is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of what America’s supposed to be,” Joseph said.

Joseph and six other members of his team were laid off earlier this week as part of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the cultural center.
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