Sunday: Hili Dialogue
Welcome to Labor Day Weekend at the tail end of August: it’s Sunday, August 31, 2025, and National South Carolina Day, whose Official State Fruit is the peach, whose Official State Snack is boiled peanuts, and whose Official State Vegetable is collard greens. Boiled peanuts are excellent, by the way; here’s a stand I patronized in February, 2013 on a lecture tour in Georgia and South Carolina. Try ’em! (The recipe is here and you can use raw peanuts instead of freshly-harvested “green peanuts”.)
It’s also National Diatomaceous Earth Day, Eat Uutside Day, National Trail Mix Day, and National Matchmaker Day. Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 31 Wikipedia page.
The news for President Trump has been filled with roadblocks in recent days. The first is that a federal appeals court ruled that many of his new, high tariffs were illegal. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that many of President Trump’s most punishing tariffs were illegal, delivering a major setback to Mr. Trump’s agenda that may severely undercut his primary source of leverage in an expanding global trade war.
The ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, affirmed a lower court’s initial finding in May that Mr. Trump did not possess unlimited authority to impose taxes on nearly all imports to the United States. But the appellate judges delayed the enforcement of their order until mid-October, allowing the tariffs to remain in place so that the administration can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
The adverse ruling still cast doubt on the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s trade strategy, which relies on a 1970s law to impose sweeping duties on dozens of the country’s trading partners. Mr. Trump has harnessed that law — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — to raise revenue and to pressure other countries into brokering favorable deals.
The loss proved especially stinging after the Trump administration told the court earlier on Friday that any weakening of its tariff powers could unleash economic chaos. Hours before the ruling, the president’s top economic advisers raised special concern about the fate of the trade agreements the United States had struck with other governments.
In a social media post after the ruling on Friday, Mr. Trump blasted the court and its conclusions, claiming that they were incorrect and that he would continue to enforce his tariffs despite the setback. The White House released a statement saying that the administration would appeal the decision and continue to pursue its trade policies.
The AP Science section reports old conclusions as if they were new ones: scientists now claim there are four species of giraffe in Africa instead of the classic one: Giraffa camelopardalis (that had nine subspecies).
Quotes
- "They say you can get used to anything. Andrzej: That’s not true."
- "Podobno do wszystkiego można się przyzwyczaić. Ja: To nie jest prawda. Masih seems to have nearly given up tweeting. Well, her substitute is always handy: I’ll never understand why a movement intent on removing protected spaces for women and children attracts so many men who appear to wish or enact harm on women and children."
The bird wants to play, too: "The bird wants to play, too:"
Auschwitz Memorial
This Dutch Jewish boy died in the camp at 19, only a month after he arrived.
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial: This ChatGPT can be wrong: Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem. Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.