104 and Counting

Tariffs on Chinese goods are going to 104 percent.

China now faces another 50% in tariffs after Beijing missed a noon deadline to withdraw the retaliatory import taxes it imposed on the United States.

The new tariffs will go into effect at 12:01 am, the White House said. That brings the total tariffs on all goods from China coming into the United States to 104%.

Trump placed a 34% increase on China when he announced his tariff plan on Liberation Day. That was on top of 20% import taxes rolled out earlier this year on Beijing.

The president, on Monday, pledged another 50% tariffs after Beijing responded to his tariff threat with a 34% increase on U.S. goods coming into China.

Well, the Chinese can’t say they weren’t warned. I warned them, on their state TV, nearly nine years ago, that President Trump would wage, and would win, a trade war against them. None of the Chinese or Hong Kong economists agreed, of course, but what was obvious then is even more obvious now.

When you’re running a trade surplus, you can’t win a tariff battle. Reciprocal tariffs are not a viable weapon for the country doing most of the exporting, because the importing country benefits from protecting its manufacturers.

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The Ultra-Rich Condemn Robin Hood

A host of American financiers and billionaire investors have criticized President Donald Trump over the sweeping tariffs he announced last week, calling the measures “poorly advised” and warning of serious consequences for the US economy.

In other news, the American Society for Surprise Sex condemned the President’s new executive action establishing stronger penalties for rapists, with automatic life-in-prison for anyone convicted of sexual assault on a minor. ASSS spokesman George “Rape Rape” Martin decried the measure, calling it: “poorly conceived” and warning that it would have a depressive effect on novelists who are struggling to complete their books.

This meme fairly well characterizes the state of popular and media discourse about the tariffs.

Free trade is an absolute evil and an obvious lie. Both Ian Fletcher and I have conclusively, and separately, proven that it cannot deliver the promised benefits while the costs will eventually be unsupportable for any nation. If, for some reason, you are still a believer in the concept of free trade, I suggest reading my three-part critique of Henry Hazlitt’s orthodox case for free trade, in which I point out the multiple errors in the argument that was presented as the best possible case for free trade.

If you want more detailed demolitions of the concept, read WHY FREE TRADE DOESN’T WORK by Ian Fletcher and ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE by me and Dr. James D. Miller, PhD.

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The Last Librarian

We shall conclude the game with a style wherein there is no point in even trying to pretend you will not recognize.

The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays

The first thing you should know about the Bibliotheca Absurdia is that it doesn’t play by the rules of time, physics, or basic human dignity.

The second thing? It has a very aggressive late-fee policy.

I found this out the hard way when I walked in to return A Brief History of Time Travel (That You Weren’t Supposed to Read Yet)—three centuries overdue—and the Librarian hit me with a glare that could’ve curdled dark matter.

“You,” she said, adjusting her glasses in a way that suggested imminent violence, “are exactly why we can’t have nice spacetime.”

The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays was a tall, no-nonsense woman with a bun tighter than the plot of a Kafka novel and a name tag that just read “MRS. P.” (The “P” stood for something eldritch. I’d asked once. She’d sighed and stamped “DON’T” on my library card in response.)

I slid the book across the counter. “Look, I meant to bring it back, but there was this whole thing with a paradox, and—”

She held up a hand. “Save it for the Temporal Arbitration Board. Your penalty is Section 37-C: Community Service in a Doomed Timeline.”

I groaned. “Not the French Revolution again.”

“Worse,” she said, grinning. “Beta Reading.“

Behind her, a shelf of half-written universes groaned in existential dread.

Why This is Pure Scalzi

  1. Snarky, Conversational Voice
    • Scalzi’s protagonists talk like this—witty, self-deprecating, and deeply unserious about cosmic horrors.
  2. High Concept + Low Stakes (At First)
    • A library that loans out time-travel manuals and punishes lateness with doomed timelines? Classic Scalzi absurdity (see Redshirts’ meta-narrative or *Kaiju Preservation Society’*s glorified animal control).
  3. Bureaucratic Satire
    • The Temporal Arbitration Board and Section 37-C are peak Scalzi. He loves mocking institutional absurdity (Lock In’s healthcare dystopia, The Android’s Dream’s diplomatic nonsense).
  4. Pop-Culture-Literate Humor
    • The Kafka joke, the “DON’T” stamp—Scalzi embeds geekery like a DNA splicer (Agent to the Stars was literally about Hollywood aliens).
  5. Women Who Won’t Suffer Fools
    • Mrs. P. is a Scalzi archetype: the competent, exasperated authority figure (Colonel Rigney in Old Man’s War, Kiva Lagos in The Collapsing Empire).
  6. Sudden Scale Shift
    • Starts with a late book, ends with erasing universes—a trademark Scalzi pivot from silly to epic (The Last Emperox’s galaxy-spanning collapse… over paperwork).

How This Differs From Other “Librarian” Versions

  • Vs. Correia: Zero bullets. All bureaucracy.
  • Vs. Miéville: The weirdness is fun, not oppressive.
  • Vs. Day: No moralizing—just chaotic neutral mischief.

Speaking of other Librarian versions, the 7th Librarian was indeed me, although stylistically limited to my pair of Maupassant-inspired short stories, and my new best friend explains what the clues were:

Why This is Vox Day

  1. Polemical Bent
    • Maupassant’s naturalism and irony are preserved (the detached scholar, the creeping horror), but sharpened by Day’s polemical bent—the library as a metaphor for “forbidden knowledge” corrupting arrogant moderns.
  2. Reactionary Themes
    • Lefèvre embodies the enlightened rationalist humbled by forces he dismisses, a recurring Day trope. The librarian, an ancient, knowing woman, represents traditional wisdom scoffing at his hubris.
  3. Provocative Imagery
    • The human-skin ledger and God’s erased days are classic Day-isms—shocking, sacrilegious, and designed to unsettle progressive sensibilities.
  4. Ambiguous Supernaturalism
    • The horror is implied, not explained. Day often uses unseen, malevolent forces to symbolize ideological enemies.
  5. Anti-Enlightenment Subtext
    • The library punishes curiosity, a theme Day explores in works like Throne of Bones—a rejection of modernist “progress” in favor of primal, even punitive, truths.

How This Differs from Other “Librarian” Versions

  • Vs. Correia: No shootouts—just psychological dread.
  • Vs. Miéville: No whimsy; the weirdness is malign and moralistic.
  • Vs. Murakami: No jazz, only Gothic decay.

Want it more Day? Add:

  • A subplot where Lefèvre’s degenerate Diderot-quoting rival gets eaten by the books.
  • A footnote denouncing French secularism.
  • The librarian revealing herself as Lilith in a lace bonnet.

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Disinformation on US Tariffs

The mainstream media likes to talk about “disinformation” on the Internet. But that’s only because it wants to preserve its monopoly. Consider the following description of literal Never-Trumper Ben Shapiro:

Ben Shapiro, a long-time supporter of the president, also smashed the illusion that tariffs are a good business deal for Americans to smithereens, with a startling insight on Monday: ‘Musk is right. Musk happens to be 100 percent right about this.’

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, similarly used his shareholder letter to warn that Trump’s levies would result in ‘inflationary outcome’ both on imports and prices in the United States.

‘The recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession,’ he told shareholders, according to the Washington Post.

Some Republican senators have also voiced their support for a measure that would require the president to inform Congress of upcoming tariffs within 48 hours of them being implemented.

It would also mandate that the tariffs need approval from Congress within 60 days of them being imposed and that Congress could end any tariff at any time.

Meanwhile, a libertarian group funded by Leonardo Leo and Charles Koch has launched a legal challenge against Trump’s tariffs, The Guardian reports.

The New Civil Liberties alliance filed the suit to prevent Trump from imposing tariffs on imports from China, arguing that doing so under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is unlawful.

If you want to better understand the retardery of Clown World and its manufacture of its pet opinion leaders, just look at how it is casting Ben Shapiro as both a) “a long-time supporter” of President Trump and b) an expert on economics.

Now, as it happens, I am both. The Littlest Chickenhawk is neither. I was also much more widely read than Shapiro when we were competing on a level playing field, his readership at WND was always between one-quarter and one-third of mine. But the media needs its puppet mouthpieces, so they elevate these nonentities and then continuously push them in front of the public in order to prop up their Narrative.

The fact is that the tarrif rates announced are a) far too high and b) calculated via an absurd method, and c) irrelevant. The rates are just the God-Emperor 2.0’s usual way of getting his negotiating partner’s to accept his frame by metaphorically slapping him in the face. It’s the start of negotiations, nothing more. And the smarter countries understand this; they are either caving very publicly or refraining from retaliating, because they know US tariffs are a) necessary, b) justified, and c) long overdue.

Not that the media will tell you that, since they have their Narrative to prop up.

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Recognizing Churchianity

Does a Christian Have to Forgive His Son’s Murderer?

No, at least, not preemptively. Any time you see a self-professed Christian preemptively forgiving someone who has neither repented nor sought forgiveness, you should recognize the sulfurous stink of Churchianity.

According to His Word, God doesn’t forgive the unrepentant. Which indicates Man not only doesn’t have to, it means he can’t.

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The Seventh Librarian

The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays

Monsieur Lefèvre had always believed himself a man of reason. A scholar of some renown, he prided himself on his detachment from the superstitions of the common rabble—until the day he entered the Bibliothèque des Dimanches Oubliés, and reason abandoned him like a faithless wife.

The library stood in the forgotten arrondissement of Paris, a place where the cobblestones seemed to whisper of sins long buried. Its keeper was a woman of indeterminate age, her face a map of wrinkles, her eyes two shards of obsidian. She did not speak when Lefèvre entered; she merely smiled, revealing teeth like yellowed piano keys.

“You seek the forbidden,” she said at last, not a question.

Lefèvre scoffed. “I seek knowledge, madame. Nothing more.”

“Ah,” she crooned, stroking the spine of a ledger bound in what appeared to be human skin. “But knowledge is forbidden. That is why they send men like you—men who think themselves too clever to believe.”

He demanded to see the rarest volume in her collection. With a chuckle like dry leaves scraping stone, she led him to a shelf where a single book lay, its cover blank.

“The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays,” she whispered. “A chronicle of all the days God chose to erase.”

When Lefèvre opened it, the pages were empty. Yet as he stared, words began to form—his own name, his secrets, his shames. And then, the laughter started. Not hers.

The library’s.

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I Did Warn Them

I wasn’t even remotely surprised by the SF-SJWs reaction to the triumphant Puppies’ campaigns. But I did find it a little ironic that a group of people who were supposed to be at least modestly conversant with science clearly weren’t familiar with Newton’s Third Law.

The Hugo Awards have been embroiled in controversy too many times in the last decade to have much relevancy anymore. Once known as science fiction’s Oscars, the publishing industry has turned off most casual readers from their incessant political activism and gotten to a point where it’s hardly notice anymore who’s winning these ballots.

Back in 2016, it took a lot of votes to get a nomination for the Hugo Awards. 3,695 ballots were cast for Worldcon that year, and you’d find familiar names for Best Novel such as Neal Stephenson and Jim Butcher among the list of those nominated ,even though much more niche works eventually won…

All of these problems have only compounded in recent years as more people have tuned out.

By the numbers, the best novel category had 3,695 ballots in 2016. In 2024, even after the controversy in China, there were 1,420 ballots cast,. This year, however, only 1,078 ballots were cast for the most popular category, less than thirty percent of a decade ago.

Once you understand how convergence works, then you know what is going to happen, even if it takes years for the inevitable to play itself out. In fairness to the SF-SJWs, though, this was only a very small part of a large societal trend in the same direction which has rendered many, if not most organizations totally incapable of performing their original functions.

Both the SFWA and the Hugo Awards are already dead from the perspective of their original purposes. It shouldn’t be much longer before they both go the way of the now-defunct Nebula Jury, the Campbell Award, and World Fantasy’s Lovecraft statuette.

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It Was Roger All Along

Of course it was. Any time the NFL is dabbling in doing something short-sighted, stupid, and harmful to the game itself, you know Roger Goodell is probably behind it.

So why did the league office ask the Lions to propose playoff seeding based on record, regardless of division championship? Because the Commissioner wants it.

Per multiple sources, it became clear during last week’s league meetings that Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to eliminate the guaranteed home game for teams that win their divisions.

Goodell’s preference became clear during the meeting regarding the proposal that was made by the Lions (at the prompting of executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent). One source in the room for the session said Goodell became visibly irritated at the resistance to the measure.

Goodell really needs to stick to the business of the league, which he’s very good at, and stop attempting to fix things about the game itself that are not broken. Taking home field advantage away from division winners is the first step toward eliminating both divisions and conferences and will eventually lead to a ridiculous NCAA-style tournament in which two teams from the same division will meet in the Super Bowl.

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Unthinkable Evacuations

Simplicius observes that the mainstream media is now openly accepting the idea that Ukraine is going to have to give up its five former separatist provinces that are now part of Russia:

For the first time we’re beginning to see major Western publications begin realistically acknowledging the possibility of Ukraine losing all five of the regions demanded by Putin, including Kherson and Zaporozhye in whole. Until now these long-standing Russian demands were virtually ignored or dismissed out of hand by MSM, which only spoke condescendingly enough about the prospects of Russia keeping Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk, let alone the others.

But now, reality is beginning to dawn on them. The Telegraph piece breaks the omerta and broaches the delicate eventuality:

How would the map of Ukraine change after such a one-sided ceasefire? Putin claims five provinces: Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The last three are still only partially occupied by the Russians.

Agreeing to withdraw Ukrainian forces from these regions would increase the Russian-occupied area from about 20pc to roughly 25pc of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. That might sound like a sacrifice worth making to stop the slaughter, though it would inevitably deprive Kyiv of yet more economic resources and its fortified front lines.

But such a deal would also mean evacuating millions of civilians. After the well-documented murder, torture and abduction of tens of thousands in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, it is unthinkable that Zelensky would abandon his people to Putin’s paramilitaries and secret police. So a war-torn, impoverished country would have to absorb a huge influx of refugees.

Confirmation they understand this would include losing the capital cities of these regions themselves:

Worse, a ceasefire on Putin’s terms would crush Ukrainian morale. Some of the cities that would be lost, including Kherson itself, have already been liberated from the Russians, often at great cost.

It’s clear that little by little the inevitable acceptance of Russia’s full demands is being digested.

But what’s particularly fascinating—and egregious—to observe about the above, is the suggestion that “evacuating millions of civilians”, particularly after many of them were allegedly ‘tortured and murdered’, is something so unthinkable, that it beggars the contemporary imagination, and should definitely be resisted by the moral forces of the world. After all, there is simply no place on earth we could even conceive of where millions of people are currently under similar threat of both mass genocide and forced displacement. The highly principled Western press would certainly apprise us of such an obvious parallel, bringing to light the stupendous hypocrisy thereof, were it to exist somewhere on this small rock, no?

And this highly righteous press would unquestionably condemn the mirroring tragedy—if such a hypothetical one existed—with the same pharisaical outrage as exhibited here, right?

….Right?

The propaganda ministers of Clown World still don’t seem to grasp that it’s no longer possible to decry the actions of the declared bad guy du jour while simultaneously defending precisely the same actions by a different international actor. If the world is supposed to respect the Israeli claim on Palestine due to its historical conquest of Canaan, and assert that the various acts of aggression and ethnic cleansing are justified by that claim, how do they imagine that the much stronger Russian claim to eastern Ukraine or the even stronger Chinese claim to Taiwan are not similarly justified?

The interesting thing which very few people appear to be noticing is the way in which the stage has been set for an Israeli-Turkish struggle for not only Syria, but Jerusalem itself. After all, the Turks owned that land for nearly 200 years, from 1517 to 1917.

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Globalization is Over

Clown World is desperately seeking a way to stay relevant in today’s nationalist world.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will deliver a speech on Monday acknowledging that the era of globalization has come to an end, The Times has reported. Starmer will make the address in response to US President Donald Trump imposing sweeping tariffs on the majority of America’s trading partners, including the UK, earlier this week, according to the article on Sunday.

The outlet said the prime minister will say that tariffs are “wrong,” but would also stress that he understands Trump’s “economic nationalism” and why the voters, who believe they have seen no benefits from free trade and mass immigration, support it.

Starmer will also stress that the fallout from the US charges on imports means that the government in London should “move further and faster” to boost economic growth at home. An unnamed Downing Street official told The Times that “the world has changed, globalization is over and we are now in a new era.”

It’s not going to work. Acknowledging the obvious doesn’t erase the past. I’m just looking forward to when Herne will sound his horn and the Wild Hunt gets started.

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