Sunday Cutdown LXVII (30 March 2025)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) The biggest tariff bang is coming in three days — or not!
INVESTING.COM: What will happen with Trump’s tariffs on April 2? Raymond James weighs in
FORBES: Trump Says He May Give A ‘Lot’ Of Tariff Breaks: Here’s What To Know About ‘Liberation Day’ As Reciprocal Tariffs Loom
The plan: reciprocal tariffs on every nation in the world.
The likely reality: plenty of carve-outs for various influential industries (one can always donate to a preferred POTUS “charity”) and for Red districts.
Meanwhile, expect all our trade partners to even things out here at home by targeting primarily Red districts.
I believe the term is “reciprocal.”
What we know for sure will happen: continued economic uncertainty tamping down consumption and investment in anticipation of heightened inflation and job losses.
Like he promised: a win-win-win for all Americans starting Day One.
Me, I grow tired of such winning, as he also predicted.
2) The reordering of global agriculture continues
FOOD AND WINE: Mangos Are Now Thriving in the Most Unexpected Place
We have mangos in the Med!
[The mango] is about 5,000 years old and originated in eastern India and southern China, spreading across Southeast Asia. Its first seeds made their way to the Middle East, East Africa, and South America around 300 AD. That’s where they have thrived ever since, as the fruit has always flourished best in tropical and subtropical climates. Until now.
Okay, I’ll bite.
Over the past several years, mango crops have been popping up in an unexpected location: Sicily. While not typically recognized as an ultra-cold climate, Sicily was once quite distant from being "subtropical." However, experts say that climate change is changing all of this — and rapidly.
In 2021, Sicily experienced temperatures nearing 120°F, marking the highest ever recorded on the European continent. As Euronews highlighted, data from MeteoBlue indicates that the Mediterranean basin, where Sicily is located, is warming 20% faster than the global average.
So, now Sicily is de facto sub-tropical, got it?
Another fantastic real-estate transformation brought to you by climate change.
You will read this article thousands of time in your life.
This success is less surprising to experts like weather.com meteorologist Jennifer Gray, who shared that climate change is "having a huge impact on agriculture. As temperatures, growing seasons, and precipitation patterns change, farmers are forced to make a decision," Gray added, "This could lead to a huge shift from where we have traditionally seen certain foods grown to a completely new landscape."
A completely new landscape — mark her words.
3) Working that DOGE magic on Social Security
WAPO: Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down
ADN: Alaskans could pay heavy price as Social Security Administration moves to increase in-person identity checks
WAPO: Social Security backs off plan to cut phone services for disabled people
The in-person application requirement, designed to prevent a tiny amount of fraud, will — in true DOGE-y fashion — end up knocking a lot of the most vulnerable and isolated elders out of system.
Yay!
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday during a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s pick to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
Brilliant! These losers don’t vote and they only vote Democrat anyway, as I am sure you all know, so … turning that MAGA minority into a majority through subtraction!
It will be especially bad for Deep Blue Alaska, due to the extreme logistics entailed. Don’t worry, though, as they’ll be fine missing a few checks or being unable to sign up in the first place. We’re talking about very resourceful people who disdain government “handouts.”
I see the Republican mandate growing faster by the angry minute. Nobody on social security REALLY needs that money. Ask anybody you know.
Time to end this Ponzi scheme, say the billionaires, making me wish I had more billionaire children.
Maybe even reduce the surplus population? The Dickens you say!
Put ‘em on all those new and roomy icebergs and let ‘em float out to sea, I say.
Or maybe just back-burner the in-person registration threat for now and reinstate it when bigger crises grab more attention — like the first missed checks in eight decades.
Wait for it … wait for it …
4) Thankfully, we are #1 in billionaires
VISUAL CAPITALIST: Ranked: Billionaire Wealth by Country
How can America possibly lose the global Billionaire Battle? We are stocked and stoked, am I right?
Anyway, we’re a democracy, so we should have the most billionaires — and the richest ones too!
5) What my divorce attorney calls “poisoning the well”
WAPO: New Trump memo seen as threat to lawyers, attempt to scare off lawsuits
WAPO: Law firms refuse to represent Trump opponents in the wake of his attacks
Okay, so I don’t have a divorce attorney. But, say I needed one, and I didn’t want my soon-to-be-ex-spouse to find good representation, then I’d go around to all the top divorce attorneys in the area and tell them my problems so they’d have to excuse themselves from possibly serving her.
It’s actually called “conflicting out" and it’s unethical and — in certain instances — quite illegal.
That’s what the recent Trump memo is designed to accomplish: here, to threaten-out law firms from representing those claiming harm or unconstitutional treatment at the hands of the Trump Administration.
The White House is directing federal law enforcement officials to seek sanctions against attorneys or law firms that challenge President Donald Trump’s actions in court, a move seen as an escalation of the president’s attacks on those who oppose his aggressive policy changes or who have litigated against him in the past.
A White House memo issued late Friday night orders Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to pursue ethics challenges against lawyers who they accuse of bringing meritless cases or making arguments that are not backed up by fact, including in immigration courts.
How does the government know you’re a rogue lawyer? If you dare take this administration to court for any reason.
We have all been warned. The weak are already capitulating.
6) The autocrat-copycat bandwagon grows
WAPO: Autocrats roll back rights and rule of law — and cite Trump’s example
We can still lead the world, so … we’ve got that at least.
As Trump upends democratic norms at home, his statements, policies and actions are providing cover for a fresh chill on freedom of expression, democracy, the rule of law and LGBTQ+ rights for autocrats around the world — some of whom are giving him credit.
Don’t worry. Once they round up all the LGBTQ, it’ll stop there — just like in Nazi Germany, where the government also cited the “threat to traditional values.”
Christian sharia — the good kind of religious persecution. And very Jesus, who was known for sticking it to the dregs of society.
Blessed are the stone throwers!
7) The lower courts are rising in stature
AXIOS: Lower courts' growing power
Naturally, this administration and the GOP-led Congress are contemplating hearings and laws and impeachments to stop this gotta-be illegal resistance.
It’s like these people think they’re some independent and equal branch of the government!
Is it me, or does that historical graph look like a big old middle finger being given to Trump 2.0, which has already received 15 such national injunctions to-date?
Congress doesn’t legislate anymore, so POTUSes keep overstepping their legal boundaries so as to compensate and, by doing so, legislate from the Oval Office. That, in turn, forces the courts to respond, which leads to jurisdiction shopping.
When you’re in the White House, it is a gross miscarriage by activist judges.
And when you’re not? Then this is great stuff proving an independent judiciary is still the only thing standing between us and autocracy.
Don’t you just hate it when people do their jobs?
8) Somebody got the memo
TIMES OF ISRAEL: Fatah calls on Hamas to relinquish power to avoid ‘end of Palestinians’ existence’
Too late. The deal’s been struck.
Gone Gaza, in theaters today.
9) One singularity sensation!
WAPO: Inside the scientific quest to reverse human aging
Gulp!
For those hoping to cure death, and they are legion, a 2016 experiment at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego has become liminal — the moment that changed everything. The experiment involved mice born to live fast and die young, bred with a rodent version of progeria, a condition that causes premature aging. Left alone, the animals grow gray and frail and then die about seven months later, compared with a lifespan of about two years for typical lab mice.
But the Salk scientists had a plan to change the aging animals’ fate. They injected them with a virus carrying four genes that can reshape DNA and, in effect, make every cell in the rodents’ bodies young again. The scientists could even control the genes from outside the mice, turning them on and off to manage the safety and potency of the genetic changes.
The experiment worked: The animals lived 30 percent longer afterward, a marked improvement, if not quite a normal mouse lifespan.
And, with that, the longevity gold rush entered a new era.
Cellular reprogramming is seen as the single most likely path ahead on radical life extension for humans.
Get some!
It’ll probably be even cheaper than the weight-loss shots.
One Nobel so far, along with — one assumes — unlimited opportunities for triggering the zombie apocalypse.
Something that bears close watching — most logically across Hollywood, the earliest of adopters.
10) Putting out the unwelcome mat
NYT: ‘Trump Slump’ Looms as Foreign Visitors Rethink Travel to U.S.
All indications are that the world is rethinking the US as a tourist destination for the foreseeable future (as in, Trump 2.0) future.
The reasons are piling up:
International tourists detained at U.S. borders. Steep tariffs imposed on trade partners. Threats against longtime allies.
And the world is paying attention.
The onslaught of contested policies and language by the Trump administration in recent weeks is causing tourists around the globe to either cancel or reconsider travel to the United States. A growing number of visitors say they feel unwelcome or unsafe and are reluctant to support the economy of a country that some foreign officials say is waging trade wars and destabilizing its allies. A draft of a new travel ban circulating through the administration could restrict citizens from up to 43 countries, including Belarus, Cambodia and St. Lucia, from entering the United States.
As always, track the local money, which is the smartest money. If Americans are looking to “escape,” then that’s all you need to know.
“So many Americans are looking to escape the tense and toxic atmosphere at home. Why would anyone want to visit, especially right now with all the arbitrary detentions at immigration?” said Mallory Henderson, 53, a marketing consultant in London who usually visits the United States twice a year, but canceled a trip to visit her brother and niece in Boston this Easter.
Making everybody else look better by comparison.
“It’s a really hostile and scary time, and quite frankly, there’s plenty of other inviting and pleasant places I can go to meet up with my family,” she said.
It is an amazing accomplishment of Trump 2.0 within its first 100 days. Truly unprecedented.
Bring on the Trump Recession! It was apparently embedded in our “mandate.”
11) The real Signal scandal
NYT: Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: ‘Pathetic’
Simply put, the Trump 2.0 team truly despises our closest allies.
To me, that’s the ONLY message to take from the Signal war plans kerfuffle that otherwise only proves the enduring — and stunningly casual — stupidity of senior USG officials of both parties when it comes to IT and social media in general.
Small-fry bureaucrats down below do this and they go to jail; political types high above do it ALL THE TIME and are never really punished.
But, again, the real point to take away here is this administration’s inability to hide its antipathy for our historic allies, which I guess they display proudly to induce some sort of ally-version of self-deportation.
It just carries such a sophomoric “mean girls” vibe with it: Everybody just ignore Susie til she finally catches on that we hate her and don’t want her around — aargh!
This sort of frat-boy diplomacy is … embarrassing, signaling zero adults in the room, which, of course, is what we voted for, right? Let you-know-who-be-you-know-what?
MAGA-types are correct, nobody in the world is laughing at us anymore.
They’re cringing at OUR pathetic behavior.
The hero of the movie just turned out to be a total asshole.
Why are we still watching this flick?
12) Short answer? Nothing good.
NYT: What Happens to Your Brain When You Retire?
On some levels, my producing a daily Substack newsletter is my way of preparing for retirement by making sure I engage in vigorous cognitive efforts every day, maintaining that schedule and mandating daily exercise, which for me is going back and forth between yoga and 20-mile bike rides at roughly 20mph.
Studies indicate the importance of both:
Doing something creative and novel can give you a sense of purpose and keep your brain agile. Research suggests you can practice creativity just like any other skill, said Jonathan Schooler, a distinguished professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That could mean writing for a few minutes every day or attempting an adventurous new recipe for dinner. Regular exercise is critical for brain health as you age, so you could also consider trying a new type of fitness class.
Creativity can also boost a person’s sense of “meaning,” Dr. Schooler added. “There is great evidence that finding meaning in life gives one a great personal satisfaction.”
Beyond being with loved ones, I feel happy primarily when I feel creative. Nothing comes close to that fix — not money, not recognition, not power … nothing.
It took me decades and a midlife crisis to figure that out, I am embarrassed to say, but I guess that is par for the course, as my Dad would say.
