Wise fools: New Yorker Cartoons

    Bob Mankoff, ed. The New Yorker Cartoons of the Year 2016. (2017) Grouped in categories such as Animal Instincts, What the Doctor Ordered etc. New Yorker cartoons are known for being insightful, wittily, sometimes bitter, but always worth a look. I leafed through this book at one sitting, then looked through it again. It’s that kind of book.

     If you need some solace, or a reminder that the world won’t go away, there’s a New Yorker cartoon that will fit your mood. One I liked: a theatre full of cats watching a movie. The screen shows a boot with a loose shoelace. Our cat can’t stay away from anything that looks like a string. ****

Love and Loss: the Rhythm of Life.

     Lauren Carter. Following Sea (2019) Lauren is a friend. Don’t think that makes this review any easier.
     I read this sequence of poems almost at one sitting. It’s a page turner, unusual for a poetry collection. Several things kept me reading: the story of some of Lauren’s ancestors pieced together from the fragments revealed in the poems; Lauren’s grief for her childlessness, which surfaces partway through; Lauren’s skill with the sound of language, there’s much alliteration and internal rhyming, and a loose, wave-like rhythm.
     The setting for most of these poems is Manitoulin Island. Lauren’s evocation of that place and its history impressed me.
     I recommend this book. ***

Trump on tariffs: Does he really not get it? Or is he pretending?

Mr Trump has once again  "imposed tariffs on" Mexico. He talks as if the Mexicans will pay these tariffs. Well, whoever pays, the prices for Mexican goods will rise, and American consumers of those goods will pay more. Mexico not only makes consumer goods but also components for products made or assembled in the USA.

A tariff is an import tax, levied to bring the prices of imports up near (or even above) the prices of domestic products. Their net effect is to raise domestic prices.  They are sometimes coupled with export subsidies, so that prices of domestic products in foreign markets will be lower. The justification has always been to protect domestic industries so that they can thrive on the domestic market. The effect has always been that domestic prices are higher.

I wonder: does Mr Trump not understand this? I've seen Facebook posts that show the poster believes that tariffs will be paid by the foreign manufacturers, and that the money will flow to the USA. So is Mr Trump playing to this misconception? Or does he make the same mistake?

Update 20190907: Trump has now imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. Steve Paikin (host of TVO's The Agenda) chatted with a Michigan boater this summer while on vacation. This man knew the tariffs would hurt his business, but believed that "We have to stick it to the China." I think this attitude shows a general misunderstanding of both tariffs and international trade. Econ 101 again: International trade is about goods, not money. Money is merely a method of tracking the relative values of the trade goods, which encourages both fair trade and efficient resource allocation.

Cheaper foreign goods prompt domestic producers to use domestic resources more efficiently, and/or to reallocate resources to unmet needs and wants. In the short term, there will drops in production, hence drops in profits and employment. However, as long as people believe that the business exists to make money and provide jobs, attempts to alleviate the pain will be misplaced. Instead of supporting shifts in domestic production, there will be attempts to prop up failing industries. When the other country imposes countervailing tariffs, healthy industries will be hurt as their foreign markets shrink. Either way, domestic resources will be wasted.

We see both these effects in Trump's trade war. The steel and coal industries have not recovered as Trump's base expected. Steel has used the tariff protections to shift into even more specialised product, and employment has not (and will not) reach pre-Rustbelt levels. Coal continues to be replaced directly by gas and indirectly by solar and wind  power. The soy and pork farmers receive billions of dollars to replace their lost sales. And domestic vendors have not repatriated production as expected, but are shifting it to countries that Trump has (so far) ignored. 

Drugs and other decadent indulgences: Ian Rankin's Hide & Seek

     Ian Rankin. Hide and Seek (1990) The second Rebus tale, and a dark and troubling tale it is. Rankin knows how to create ambience and character, and to tease out a plot that convinces. This one starts with Rebus called to the apparent overdose of a junkie, but niggly little weirdnesses hinting at witchcraft bother him. They widen into a network that ensnares the high and the mighty of Edinburgh.
    
     I first encountered Rebus in the first TV series starring John Hanna, and liked the edginess of the stories. I started reading  his novels,  this is the third one I've finished. I couldn't get far into several others. I don’t think I’ll read another one. I’ve lost my taste for dark and troubling tales. But if you like well written crime novels, read Rankin. He has few equals. ***

Comment to NYT on story about Nigel Farage

Comment to NYT on story about Nigel Farage
With some additions.

The soil that grew this poisonous plant is nostalgia for Empire. The English wallow in rosy-tinted fantasies of the past. One symptom: They have more Railway Preservation Societies than the rest of the world put together. I occasionally receive Steam Railway, a news magazine about these societies, whose mission is to promote steam locomotives. A recent story about defunct steam locos referred to the railroad "turning its back on steam". The implicit accusation of betrayal is obvious.

Or consider Downton Abbey, another example of treacly nostalgia, with every episode signalling that these were the days of glory when England ruled the world, and somehow the Others have since stolen England's place. Note how everyone knows their place, and accepts it. Oh, the days of tugged forelocks and curtsying maids! Gone, gone forever!

Farage's message is the same: The cosmopolitan elites have betrayed all that was best in England, and he will restore it. See also  Rees-Mogg's affectation of wearing Edwardian costume. But of course what they and their like really want is an England in which they rule unfettered by bothersome regulations about environmental protections, social safety nets, and financial probity.

Beware: As we age, we become curmudgeons who wish the times were as simple as we misremember them. That wish distorts our perceptions, and influences our votes. That's what the Farages and Trumps count on.

ETs as they could be

     Terence Dickinson (text) & Adolf Schaller (original illustrations).  Extraterrestrials (1994). An essay in controlled imagination.  Dickinson and Schaller begin with fictional ETs, then survey the Universe as we know it. Then they discuss evolutionary pressures which (probably) constrain the forms and functions of organisms. Finally, they speculate how ETs may appear if these evolutionary constraints work as expected. The book is handsome, pithy, and inspiring. Recently, SF movies have gone a step or two beyond the bug-eyed variants of human forms of Star Wars and Star Trek. I think this book and similar exercises in speculative imagining have had an good effect.
     The cover shows a half-kilometre long aerial whale swimming through the dense atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter. Symbiotic “crabs” living on and in the creature provide the manual dexterity needed to build cities and space-craft. ***

The Fascination of Everyday Things: Margert Visser's The Way We Are

     Margaret Visser. The Way We Are (1994). A wonderful potato chip book, but more nourishing. Margaret Visser wrote a column for Saturday Night, Canada’s defunct general interest and arts magazine. Her editor, John Fraser, persuaded her to collect them into a book. Here it is, and if you can find a copy, buy or borrow it. You won’t be disappointed.
     Visser has a knack for giving you both the essence of some topic and some off-the-wall riff on it. These essays often prompt further reflection. My favourite: she ends In Flagrante Delicto (an essay about blushing) thus:
     We blush above all when we think that other people think that we are different from what we want them to think we are.
     Which reminds me of my tentative definition of “honour” as our mutual acceptance of the public images we’ve created of ourselves as being better than we know ourselves to be. “Dishonour” is the revelation that we are not what we pretend to be. Hence the widespread misconception that some bad behaviour reveals “what a person really is”. What a person really is all the behaviours they are capable of. Most of us never discover all that we are capable of, but few, I think, understand how lucky they are. ****