And there was significant, if diminishing lethargy for a further 3 days.

36 hours later, I finally humanised enough to get out of the house, even with 6 hourly doses of Tylenol, but am spending 50% of my time horizontal, in a fug. Be warned!

guildjosephdominic.org.uk/father-broca...

I've remembered the name of that "disreputable friar". It was Fr Brocard Sewell (link below). Turns out his bad reputation with the order stemmed, not from his lifelong devotion to Fascism but to his opposition to the reforms of Vatican 2, like services other than in Latin!

I was called over to speak with him by the Prior (yup, I know!). He asked this very question. I uttered some pious platitude. He shocked me by responding that he had come to the view that Free Will was an illusion out consciousness generates post hoc to give us a positive feeling! Was he right?

50 years on, we can still see elm suckers at a high frequency in English hedgerows, but they are all genetically identical, and succumb to the disease as soon as their bark matures enough to harbour the beetles that host it.

In contrast, elm predominantly reproduces non-sexually, by suckering. this makes it great for establishing hedgerows quickly and cheaply, but also very vulnerable to extinction events.

Importantly, this suggests that the approach to managing the outbreak should be more conservative. Allow seedlings regrowth. Don't clear fell. Etc

(range 2-5), not the value of epsilon alone. Thus, even using their equation and their sources of data, the calculated default tariffs should have been a quarter of those they came up with. Was this a rookie error by a bunch of idiots, or a carefully contrived provocation?

The problem is that their selection of values of 4 and 0.25 for epsilon and phi is NOT justified by the content of the published sources they cite. There is a fair amount of variability in the estimates, but the median estimate for the *product* of epsilon and phi is around 4

The key paragraph in the above is below (screen grab).

The US Treasury goes into more detail at their site: ustr.gov/issue-areas/...

This is the official US Treasury explanation on Xitter

Retaliation: Major trading partners (Canada, UK, Germany, etc.) imposed their own tariffs on U.S. goods.
- Trade collapse: U.S. exports fell by ~60% (1929–1933), worsening the Depression.

Key Aspects of Smoot-Hawley:
- Signed into law: June 1930 (after the 1929 stock market crash but before the worst of the Depression).
-Average tariff increase: Duties rose to nearly 60% on over 20,000 imported goods.
-Goal: Protect American farmers and manufacturers from foreign competition.

In simple terms, a Trump tarrifs is no less than the greater of 10% and half the trade imbalance, expressed as a % of trade.

The gold price surge is a response to the uncertainty now attaching to the medium term valuation if the $ . Such movements do not bode well, historically speaking.

Much of the trade imbalance is caused by over valuing the US$, making imports artificially cheap. This in turn is largely caused by the hoarding of US Treasury bonds by countries with cash surpluses and volatile currencies.

Enough to keep me busy!