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Monday Miscellany, 10/6/25

Monday Miscellany, 10/6/25

Last updated on: October 6, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 10/6/25 2025-10-03T15:11:47-04:00 Gene Veith

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The military services are now meeting their recruitment goals. Back to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the Depression. And babies from skin cells.

The Military Services Are Now Meeting Their Recruitment Goals

During the Biden administration, the U.S. military was unable to meet its recruitment quotas. I remember sitting in on a conversation between two retired veterans with multi-generational family traditions of military service. Complaining about the current military leadership and the woke policies the Pentagon was implementing, one of them, a former officer in the Marines, said, with anguish, that he could no longer recommend that his son join up. In fact, he said, he was urging him not to.

Today, though, as part of the vibe shift, all branches of the military–the Marines, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Space Force–surpassed their 2025 recruiting goals. And they did so months ahead of schedule.

Back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of the Depression

President Trump has imposed his tariff scheme by invoking the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), which gives the president the authority to set tariffs and regulate trade in the event of a national emergency.

Most observers, conservatives as well as liberals, consider that to be quite a stretch. The Constitution specifies quite clearly and explicitly that Congress, not the Executive Branch. (“The Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” [Article I, Section 8, Clause 3].)

Congress gave the President authority to do that in a national emergency, but are we really in a national emergency with every country in the world? Two courts have ruled that the IEEPA does not give the President carte blanche authority to impose “tariffs of unlimited duration on imports of nearly all goods from nearly every country with which the United States conducts trade.” We await the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter.

In the meantime, anticipating that the president’s actions will likely be overturned, the White House is looking for a Plan B. And there is indeed an option. Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 gives the president the authority to impose tariffs as high as 50% on any nation that practices discriminatory trade practices against the United States.

This provides a much better basis for what Trump wants to do that the IEEPA. That other nations are discriminating against the United States is, after all, the argument that President Trump has been making. That is precisely the “emergency” that he has been invoking.

The problem is that the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs are associated with the Great Depression. I remember being taught in my high school American history class that the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs were one of the causes of the Depression. In fairness, though, this is not correct. The Depression started one year earlier in 1929. The tariffs were part of Herbert Hoover’s hapless efforts to combat the Depression. Instead, they made it worse, sparking a trade war that shut down American factory production at the very time we needed it to grow.

Might the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act come back to bite us again?

Babies from Skin Cells

Researchers have taken another step towards manufacturing babies instead of conceiving them.

They successfully took a skin cell, removed its nucleus, and inserted it into a donor egg whose nucleus had also been removed. The egg was then fertilized, forming an embryo.

But human beings have 46 chromosomes. The mother’s egg has 23 and the father’s sperm has 23, so that together the child has a full complement, becoming a unique person while also sharing the being of both parents. A skin cell already has the full 46.

So the researchers at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland devised a way to force the skin cell egg to split off half its chromosomes into a segregated “polar body.”

“But the Oregon team found that the chromosomes in their eggs segregated and paired up randomly,” according to a Guardian article on the subject. “This led to early-stage embryos with the wrong number of chromosomes and the wrong chromosome pairings.” As a result, of the 82 embryos produced, only 10% developed to where they could be implanted.

Showing no compassion for the human lives that were generated and then destroyed–including those that could have been implanted–one of the lead researchers said that the current experiment was a “proof of concept,” with much more to do.

Eventually, they hope to generate an embryo from skin cells, then implant it either in the woman who donated the skin cell or a surrogate.

The media is describing this innovation as making it possible to have babies without biological mothers. That’s not quite true. Until an artificial womb is perfected, a mother will still be necessary to bear the child. But it would allow two men to have a child together–one contributing a flake of skin and the other contributing sperm–who would thus both be biological parents in the sense of each contributing their DNA. This same-sex couple would still, however, need a woman to nurture the baby in her womb and give birth to the child. The woman who does that is the child’s mother, but the researchers and the media are glossing over that.

discarded human embryos

Great Depression

military service

reproductive technology

Smoot-Hawley Tariffs

Trump's tariffs

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