Back in the 1970s, America made a strategic blunder. It was the #1 manufacturing nation in the world, and it figured it could coast. It didn't worry about defending its position. Instead, it turned to the finance and the service industry and bet big here.

Now the chickens have come home to roost.

I went to Costco to buy a big-screen TV expecting to spend three or four, maybe even five thousand bucks. And sure enough, there were SONYs and Samsungs for around that price. But then a salesperson pointed me to a new Chinese TV that had just come in at $1950. He said China is about to dominate the industry. And the same thing will soon happen with automobiles too, he said. Chinese EVs costing less than $10,000 will wipe out the European and American auto brands.

In May, Biden imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars. He said it's to counter unfair Chinese subsidies and practices. The New York Times and most of the Western media also spun it that way, running a bunch of stories justifying the tariffs. China was deliberately positioned as the villain.

The sad truth is that in many critical industries, America simply can't compete anymore. Without tariffs, the American auto industry would die.

It all goes back to that stupid industrial policy mistake America made half a century ago, putting it on the downslope. — KL

‍Lately I get lost in my garden.

It's become my refuge, the source of my calmness and base of my spiritual quest.

There I feel the joy of putting a seed in the ground at just the right moment and watch life sprout . . . there in late Spring I taste the thrill of broad beans quickly boiled with a teaspoon of butter & dash of soy sauce . . . and there in mid Summer I thrust my hand into the Earth and pull out a sweet potato.

And lately, something even more profound.

I used to be the vegetable guy. Masako, the love of my life for over half a century, was the one who planted the flowers. But now that she is bedridden and needing lots of care, the roles have changed. Now I’m the flower guy . . . Cosmos, Sunflowers, Marygolds, Forget Me Nots . . . this spring, as my desire to grow vegetables and eat them sharpened, all of a sudden —POW! — I have a wild, primitive need to plant flowers, too. I went crazy!

So peppered throughout my rows and plots and pots this year, there are not only veggies to eat, but flowers — wild and gorgeous — to behold.

Feels like in a very personal way I’m experiencing what I’ve been talking about in Adbusters lately: The birth of a new aesthetic — a vibe shift from straight-line to wobbly thinking.

— KL

As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that the pursuit of novelty is “the only one way to live a truly progressive life,” it’s a mighty tempting strategy to air out. “From a species perspective, the job of each individual is to be unlike anyone who’s living or who ever lived,” McKenna wrote. “To do things, and react to things, in a way no one has quite done before.”

This is of course pretty much an act of cultural treason. There’s a reason Atomic Habits was a #1 world bestseller and nobody has written Atomic Novelty. Habits are safe. Flout them and people in charge start furrowing their brows, because now you’re likely to start breaking rules, too. Even the rules of the universe? Many smart people claim we don’t actually have free will, even though it feels like we do. I decided to engineer a day that tests that discouraging premise — a day where you chase free will around, trying to outfox it. The experiment wouldn’t really prove anything one way or the other. But it might yield some ... unexpected returns.

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