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How big is everything? For a long time, the earth itself must have seemed vast enough. Imagine a Phoenician in about the year 1000 BCE standing on the shores of Spain and staring out across the void of the Atlantic. It must have seemed immeasurably vast and mysterious.

Ancient Greek astronomers such as Aristarchus and Hipparchus were the first to make scientific estimates of important distances, around the third century BCE. They were pretty good at it, considering that there were no telescopes. The Earth was about 39000 km in circumference (pretty accurate); the Moon about 383000 km(again pretty good); the Sun 16,210 000 km (out by a factor of ten). These distances were immense, inconceivable, by the standards of the time. The fastest ships would take weeks to make the passage from Alexandria to Rome. Trading expeditions to the East would need a year. To people of the time, reaching the moon was technologically impossible, it would be like us imagining a jaunt to the Andromeda Galaxy.

There matters remained for over a thousand years. But with the advent of modern science, things only got vaster. It was found that the earth rotated, and worse still, went round the Sun. Which discovery, as every schoolchild knows, was profoundly disturbing to most people. Cassini made the first accurate planetary measurements of Mars in 1672. With the use of telescopes and parallax, he was not far out. Once again the Universe had jumped in size. Once upon a time things had seemed very cosy, the world all on its own with God and the stars just above. Now what lay beyond Saturn, then the last known planet-and how far?

It was Bessel who in 1838 finally managed to squeeze enough out of parallax to finally give him a good distance for 61Cygni. For the record , it’s 11.398 light years. With the discovery of cepheid variables, astronomers such as Leavitt and Hubble were able to map out our local Milky Way Galaxy, then prove the existence of fractal numbers of other galaxies dotted around a universe which is currently estimated to be 46.5 billion light years across. Our current fastest spaceships, like the Voyagers and Pioneers have taken nearly fifty years to even get into interstellar space; they will take several tens of thousands to come near other stellar systems.

Is the Universe actually infinite? One problem is that people who know talk about these things in complicated mathematics. The use of words simplifies, but it also profoundly distorts. One man who tries to bridge the gap is the very intelligent Professor Brian Cox, In a you- tube video recommended to us by Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire, Professor Cox gives his thoughts on the many exciting discoveries of modern astronomy-and their unsettling implications.

https://youtu.be/wieRZoJSVtw

#briancox #sizeof universe #bigbang #relativity

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As the world entered the Covid-19 crisis, we all knew the massive economic damage that would follow. Many no doubt well-meaning people predicted a rapid bounce back in the autumn of 2020. They even talked of a V-shaped model of economic activity. We at LSS are never certain; but over the next few weeks we shall try to find evidence to support that-and evidence against.

Larry Elliott of the Guardian has always been a reliable guru on the doings and don’tings of the UK Economy. His sharp analysis of the UK property market (real estate to US Readers) is a good jumping off place to give us some pointers to how things might turn out in general.

People in England are now talking about a bounce back in the UK housing market as demand, pent up by the lockdown, is released. There is even talk of a mini boom. Elliott is rather more circumspect. He points out that rising unemployment (currently 2.1 million) is often a harbinger of falling house sales to come. There’s more. A lot of UK employment is backed up by the Chancellor’s furlough scheme. This starts to tail off in August, and formally ends in September, at which point quite a large number of decisions will have to be made about which jobs are economically viable. And, to quote Shakespeare, here’s the rub: the government’s mortgage support scheme ends in October. People worried about their jobs will have to start thinking again about where their next mortgage payment is coming.

Elliott’s discussion is restricted to the UK property market alone. What follows next is our own take. Property-the decision to buy a house- is a classic “big ticket” item in a household budget. But there are others, in roughly this order-home improvements, cars, holidays, and eating out. All of them supporting thousands of jobs, and all intensely vulnerable to decisions on discretionary spending that all households make. As these jobs are lost, indicators of things like unemployment, consumer spending and purchasing fall faster, further depressing confidence. Demand and supply uncouple like the two sides of a DNA molecule, and the economy starts to die. Some foreign readers may smile at this point, because Britain is a service based, highly financialised economy, particularly vulnerable to shocks of this kind. That may be; but the same laws of economics apply in all economies to a greater or lesser extent. In a capitalist economy, confidence is the key, and we think it has taken a very hard knock everywhere.

Elliott notes that the last nail in the UK property market is usually rising interest rates-and at the moment all policy is geared in the opposite direction. But he closes with a sombre warning from Professor Tim Congdon, no less: all this printed money will one day generate inflation. And the way you deal with that is interest rates. That’s where Friedman displaces Keynes. Those of us who remember the boom and crash of the nineteen seventies remember Friedman well indeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/24/most-ingredients-are-in-place-for-a-property-crash-later-this-year

#ukpropertymarket #larryelliott #guardian #keynes #miltonfriedman

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We at LSS have always been campaigners for a cleaner, greener future. But we are even keener on learning about alternatives to anything. Even when we think it’s a great idea, like electric cars. It’s what scientists call the Null hypothesis, and today’s null hypothesis is- hydrogen fuel cell cars.

We found a lovely chatty little piece on this in Autotrader, so as usual we’ll just summarise.*

You’ll all remember that although the idea of fuel cells has been around since 1839, they didn’t really get going until the space programmes of the nineteen-sixties. Since when, they’ve been a bit like exercise bikes-everyone should be using them a lot more often, but somehow hasn’t quite got round to it. In theory, they are a Green Dream. The only exhaust, give or take the odd molecule, is water. The filling time is only the same as your petrol car. The ranges you get are strictly comparable to diesel. As for electric cars -well maybe they’re not so goody-goody as you think. For a start, all that electricity for batteries has to come from somewhere-and as of date, relatively little is from renewables. Then there’s all those nasty metals in the batteries, dug out of the ground in countries run by nasty people, in mines owned by nasty people, by people who really should be doing their school lessons, in an ideal world. And what do you do with old batteries. To be fair, most of the hydrogen for full cells comes from natural gas, so it’s not too green either.

Hang on, you say-don’t hydrogen cells tend to go bang, with frightful consequences? Don’t I remember something called the Hindenburg? Well, there are increasing technological solutions to this- and petrol can have quite a bang too, at times. There can be problems with lithium ion batteries as well , so no one is really off the hook.

In way, that’s where we stand. Hydrogen cells have been the Next Big Thing for thirty years-and could be for the next thirty. Various companies like Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and GM continue to experiment with models. However, thanks to the percipience of Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent, we note the following story from Energy and Capital: Amazon is buying hydrogen stocks.

That’s right, Amazon and Jeff Bezos, no less, are starting to put money into this Cinderella technology. We at LSS always counsel: let the big boys get on with it, don’t risk your hard earned dollars and euros, gentle readers. But according to the authors, Elon Musk may be getting worried. So watch this trope-things might get very interesting indeed.

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/advice/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-overview

https://secure.energyandcapital.com/148938

#elonmusk #amazon #hydrogencars #electriccars #lithiumion

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One of the pleasures of blogging, especially in the difficult worlds of science and biotechnology, is coming across guides who know their stuff backwards, have the contacts, and can explain difficult topics clearly in real time. Phew, that’s a big ask. One such is Daniel Mediavilla of El Pais. We have been following Dan for years-he’s sound on things like antibiotics as well. Here we are just going to summarise his state of play article on where humanity is on this sunny Sunday in May 2020. And then get out of his way. You really should read this for yourselves.

Firstly, we have two vaccines now at stage two trials-and that’s a lot better than we were in 2002 with SARS. Among the best runners and riders are Moderna of the US where a vaccine trial with 45 volunteers is throwing up antibodies just like those in patients who are recovering from Covid-19. Well, eight of the 45, anyway. Then there is the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and Cansino Biologics, currently trialling with 108 volunteers. It looks promising-it looks safe, they are getting antibodies, and the vital T lymphocytes, with theirs. Around the world, there are at least 100 candidate vaccines. Feel better?

We hope so, because now for the bad stuff. Firstly, even Dr Wei Chan, who heads up the exciting Chinese project above , admits that there is going to be a very long march until we get to a safe vaccine. Generally speaking, it looks as if phase 11 and phase 111 trials will run this summer and into the autumn, That’s a long, long time, and a lot of people may have to “die for the Dow” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it.

Here’s a daunting list of the mountains we have to climb.

The earth has about 7600 million residents at the time of writing. How many doses will we need? And how much in each dose? Will it be a one off dose-or will you need one every year, like the flu?Are some vaccines easier to produce than others? Are companies going to do it on their own? Or will countries do it, pooling resources where necessary? All of these questions are considered in a second article by Dr Elisa Sicuri, whose CV and titles are so long and impressive we will simply extract: Institute of World Health, Barcelona, and Imperial College, London.

Anyway you can find all three pieces below. My English language followers will need a translation app.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-05-22/los-resultados-iniciales-de-la-vacuna-china-indican-que-es-segura-y-genera-anticuerpos.html

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-05-22/cuanto-se-tardara-en-fabricar-la-vacuna-de-la-covid-para-todos-los-habitantes-del-planeta.html

#danielmediavilla #coronavirus #sarscov2 #covid19 #imperialcollege #paulkrugman

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Once again, a big thank you to all our readers who saw all these stories this week, told us about them-and we didn’t have time to cover them. There are quite a few! With out further ado, here goes:

We have always suspected that the small mammal populations of the world are home to countless variants of coronaviruses-and others. Just the tip of the iceberg is demonstrated by this excellent New Scientist piece, brought to us by Mr Gary Herbert. Seven new coronaviruses have been found lurking in bats in Africa. The moral of the story? No more bushmeat. Repeat: no more bushmeat!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2243749-seven-new-coronaviruses-have-been-found-lurking-in-bats-in-africa/

In theory journalists are just researchers, following stories like contact tracers go after the coronavirus. Not so, according to Barton Gellman of the Atlantic. After a fairly routine meeting with Edward Snowden, he found himself in a immersed in a murky world of cyber attacks and service denials, presumably from national intelligence agencies-but which ones?. This piece, recommended to us by Mr Lindsay Charlton, is a fascinating insight into how the latter day targets of intelligence agencies are your computers, phones, recorders and anything else they can find. Fans of traditional spy literature will find honeytraps filled with beautiful women as well. The Atlantic was a joy when we discovered it, and well worth a delve on any topic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/edward-snowden-operation-firstfruits/610573/

We at LSS value intelligence above all. When somebody uses their professional skill to so something really well, in all fields from jewellery making to astronomy. Proof of the latter comes in this article from Forbes, in which Jack Madden and Lisa Kaltenegger of Cornell University unveil new spectroscopic techniques to analyse the atmospheres of exoplanets, and see quickly if they are potential abodes for life. We thank Mr Peter Seymour for this story-and ask our selves- wasn’t Cornell where the late, great Carl Sagan used to hang out?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2020/05/23/new-planetary-color-models-will-decode-signs-of-extrasolar-life/#1b105b3c7d10

Disinformation just grows and grows. Here’s a little quote piece from Nature, followed by a short read which suggests that no less than a whopping 45% of tweets on coronavirus are from fake accounts.

45%-The proportion of 200 million tweets about the coronavirus that were probably from fake accounts designed to sow disinformation, according to an as-yet-unpublished analysis. (NPR | 4 min read)

And so we wish all of you a happy Saturday night. We thank all new readers from around the world who have joined us this week, and apologise that there is no longer time to thank you all individually. Be Lucky!

#disinformation #exoplanets #theatlantic #forbes #newscientist #coronavirus #covid19

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And tonight we celebrate the Gibson, in homage to Hitchcock’s stylish thriller North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant, Eva-Marie Saint and old stalwart James Mason. Remember those fifties Hitchcocks? When men shaved properly, wore tailored suits, and a lady knew what gloves to wear to dinner? When it was still possible to cross the United States in a luxurious train and sip a cocktail as the majestic scenery slipped by? Of course, James Bond does scenes with cocktails, and trains, and ladies. And does them well. But for us, there’s nothing like Grant’s silky smooth delivery, and the whole ambience of a time before trains hadn’t quite been killed off by aeroplanes.

Well, even if you haven’t seen the film, here’s what it tasted like. (Editor’s note: we are indebted for this recipe to a site called Allrecipes.com They use fluid ounces, which we presume must be something like a measure we recommend on normal Fridays.)

2.5 fluid ounces white gin- Gordons is always our first go-to at LSS. 0.5 fluid ounces dry vermouth.

Mix over ice, then pour into a standard cocktail glass. Your garnish is a single pearl olive.

Well happy drinking. Cheers, and may reason prevail over stupidity.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/222413/gibson-cocktail/

https://www.bing.com/search?q=film+north+by+northwest&form=EDNTHT&mkt=en-gb&httpsmsn=1&msnews=1&plvar=0&refig=19bf7e54095e4e02f0519f04c12

#alfredhitchcock #carygrant #gibson #cocktails

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It’s not that we want to boast or strut about with an oh-so-clever-told-you-so lower sixth form grin on our faces. But we at LSS have been extolling the virtues of Artificial Intelligence in countless fields. (LSS 28 April 2020) And so we feel ever so slightly vindicated at today’s repro from Nature updates. The researchers in this article are using the power of AI to look for new materials to help reduce CO2 emissions. We pointed out how AI had helped to discover a new antimicrobial called halicin.* Either way, the implications for research into the Covid-19 pandemic are blatant, if our leaders could get their acts together. It’s amazing what people can achieve when they think, as opposed to screaming with their emotions.

here’s the Nature summary, which gives you the main paper:

Researchers on the hunt for new materials are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Algorithms can predict the physical characteristics of selected crystal structures from first principles, and neural networks can use that information to make guesses about much larger gamuts of possible materials. In future, automated labs might help to make the materials more quickly. But even a robotic lab will need human overseers: synthesis still involves “a fair amount of artisanship,” says electrical engineer Ted Sargent. Wired | 6 min read
Source: Nature paper

Before you go off to read the paper, the team that did this looks sort of international and cooperative to us. Is that telling you something? Or maybe you’re the sort who thinks your football team should only use players from your own country. Well, it’s one way of doing things.

*J Stokes R Barzailly J Collins et al A deep learning approach to antibiotic discovery CELL vol 180 pp 688-702 Feb 20 2020

#artificialintelligence #nature #materialsscience #catalyst

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When nations decline, does it happen from the bottom or the top? Scholars of national declines, such as Paul Kennedy* usually point to long term demographic and economic factors. For example, the decline of the Spanish Empire was due to the hollowing out of the Castilian economy, due to the demands of wars-their manpower was decimated and their currency debased by inflation. Students of British decline point to the failure to develop a healthy, educated workforce, and the financial structures necessary to advance manufacturing to the levels developing in the emerging powers of the USA and Germany. Factors which were due to deep cultural biases (Spain: Catholicism; Britain: Free Market fundamentalism) and which took decades to play out.

Students of the other school point out that the people at the top of any country make decisions, which have consequences. Phillip II and his advisers decided to initiate the daft series of religious wars which lasted eighty years and bled the Empire dry. Britain in the 1930s still had the remains of a powerful empire. But its foreign policy blunders lost it so much prestige that its enemies (Germany, Italy, Japan) were emboldened to start the war which led to the final collapse of the British Empire in the payments crisis of 1941, and the disasters in the Far East in 1942.

In this light, the Presidency of Donald Trump has been catastrophic. We won’t reprise his appalling series of economic and domestic blunders. Our readers have newspapers and TV. But we will observe that in any crisis, people tend to follow the adults in the room. We cannot stop thinking about the following observation from Martin Kettle in the Guardian.*

… look no further than what happened at the World Health Organization assembly in Geneva this week. On the one hand, Trump spent the week slagging off the WHO, threatening to withdraw all US funding, promoting quack medical remedies and attacking China. On the other, Xi addressed the assembly, donated $2bn to the WHO for the coronavirus battle, called for a vaccine to be made available to all, and successfully watered down the planned post-pandemic international investigation into Covid-19. Having done that, Xi slapped a punitive 80% tariff on Australian barley to punish Canberra for pressing for a fuller, more independent Covid-19 probe. Stand by, if it takes place, for a similar Xi approach at the postponed Cop26 climate conference.

Friends of democracy will tremble that their system can throw up such a troubled leader. Its enemies will rejoice to see China acting rather like the US was doing in the 1940s: the sensible honest broker offering reason all round. And then ruthlessly pursuing its own interests as all powers on the rise do. And Trump’s behaviour is not a one-off. From the BBC*we learn that he has got into a ridiculous twitter war with a hostile TV Host (from his own party) alleging foul play in a sad death which happened nearly twenty years ago. The President of the United States in a Twitter war? The Defender of the Constitution, the boss of the CIA using social media to follow personal grudges, like someone from a trailer park on the outskirts of Flint, Michigan? With a TV host, yet?

Historians of the future will point to many steps on the road in America’s decline from its pinnacle of power and riches. The Invasion of Iraq in 2003; the financial collapse of 2007-8;the super-pac Supreme Court Ruling 0f 2010. But anyone writing a historical novel on what it felt like to live through the decisive moments will set their characters in the months from January to June 2020,when Trump dropped the baton. And Xi picked it up.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/20/post-coronavirus-uk-alliances-stand-up-china-us

ps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52748844

Paul Kennedy The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers Random House 1987

Corelli Barnett The Audit of War 1986

#donald trump #americandecline #presidentxi #coronavirus #martinkettle

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Imagine you opened a disused garage, and found a very strange Rolls Royce car parked in it. And that you can climb all over, with your flashlight and keys, can open it up to look under the hood, at the serial numbers, and inside the boot. Imagine that the wheels were from a 1968 Silver Shadow. The engine is from the 1937 Phantom 111. The seats and fittings are perfect for a 1979 Carmargue. The bodywork is a classic 1965 Phantom V, the big ones you see in the old Beatles and James Bond films. Then you open the glove compartment and find the tax and insurance documents: this thing was running around in 2010. Do you think that you might be puzzled?

Such was the sort of problem given to the world by Professor Lee Berger when he discovered one of the largest, best preserved and frankly, strangest, collection of human fossils ever made, in the Rising Star Caves in South Africa. They are like no other human fossils found, because they are a bit like every other human fossil ever found-in various ways. He called his new species Homo naledi, as naledi means star in one of the local languages.

Their brains are so small that you would expect to find them in pre human ancestors, or the most absolute early humans- a design that fits to about three million years ago. The body shape is a bit apish in places, and they may have spent some time in trees. However, the general shape of the head and the structure of the brain, are more like those of modern humans, and this includes the teeth. The hands look very modern too, as though they were good at skilled movements. They could walk upright very well , but may not have been very good at long distance endurance running, unlike some earlier humans, who could use this skill to run large animals to death. You can find many more comparisons in the links below.

It gets even odder. No tools were found; yet humans and pre-humans had been making tools for millions of years before H Naledi. In fact no artefacts of any kind have been found. There is no evidence of fire use. At this time several other types of humans had been cheerfully using fire for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet all the bodies were found in deep caves, with almost no possibility of them having been dragged their by wild animals. It looks as if they were burying their dead. However, the real shocker is the date, which comes in at 335-236 000 years before the present. You would have expected something with a brain this small, and no tools, to have lived more like 3.35-2.36 million years ago, not thousand. yet the burial practices are way ahead of their time: the first evidence of modern humans and Neanderthals doing this is hundreds of thousands of years later. For more data on this, go to the links below.

So what is going on? Were they a survival of a very primitive type of human, that somehow clung on? On an island, perhaps: but it’s hard to see that in South Africa, which is wide open to migration by other humans. Why are their no tools of any kind? Some say that tools we have found elsewhere may have been made by them. Which is not evidence; no jury would convict on the basis of a knife found somewhere else, with no link to a defendant. Were they really burying their dead, or is there some other explanation? Had they found an odd drug in a plant and become decadent, spending their days in intoxicated orgies? Not likely in the African bush, with so many lions, leopards, hostile humans, and hyaenas about. There is even a suggestion that they were a sort of cross between humans and a pre human ancestor called Australopithecus. Which would have been like sex with a chimpanzee, albeit one that walked on two legs.

We at LSS believe that the worst sort of people you can meet are the ones who know all the answers. There are no easy answers to this one . Sometimes, science throws up ambiguities, and the frankly inexplicable. We invite you to look at the sites below (there are many more if you want more data) and take it in the spirit of a puzzle for corona lockdown. Maybe it’ll make a change from all those computer games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi

Homo naledi

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-naledi

#leeberger #homonaledi #humanevolution #anomalies #risingstarcave

It is the year 1930, and Republican Herbert Hoover is in his second year as President of the United States. Outside the White House, popular tunes on the radio include Embraceable you, by George and Ira Gershwin, and Ten cents a dance by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers. In cinemas Laurel and Hardy have made their transition to talking pictures with shorts like Hog Wild and Another Fine Mess. These would have supported new feature films such as Hells Angels and The Dawn Patrol, both evoking strong memories of the recent World War.

In May 1930 Hoover was a very worried man. In the previous autumn, the Wall Street Crash had sent shares into meltdown, triggering an avalanche of company closures and layoffs. By March 1930, US unemployment was already at 1.5 million. Now there was even worse news. On his desk lay a Bill called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff-and he, as President, was expected to sign it.

The Bill had been introduced into both Houses by Senator Reed Smoot (Rep, Utah) and Representative Willis C Hawley (Rep, Oregon). It was a response to cry from Republican heartlands to protect American jobs for American workers-and especially American Farmers. To this end, it introduced high tariffs on a vast range of imported manufactured and agricultural goods. Now it had passed both Houses of Congress, and so only needed the President’s signature to become law.

The trouble was that the whole rest of the world depended on trade with a thriving American economy. America was the only healthy economy left of any size after the Great War. A rise in US Tariffs would mean a collapse in trade for everyone else; and even the possibility that they might retaliate. 1,028 leading economists signed a petition asking the President to use his veto. The head of JP Morgan begged the President to reject this “asinine” legislation. Henry Ford spent an evening with the President in a last- ditch attempt to persuade him to use his veto. It didn’t work: Hoover knew that he needed the support of his Republican Party to govern at all. Not to have signed would have sparked a civil war inside the party. And so on 7 June 1930, the Smoot Hawley Tariff became Law.

The economic consequences unfolded at once. Over the next three years US imports decreased by 66%, and exports by 61%. An economy estimated at $103.1 billion in 1929 had fallen to $55.6 billion by 1933. The collapse in farm and other commodity prices brought starvation to the farming communities who had so strongly pressed for the Bill. In December 1931 US unemployment reached 9 million. By December 1932 it was 13 million.

The international consequences were disturbing. Led by Canada, all the major trading countries began putting up their own protectionist tariffs. Any hope of the world trading its way out of depression vanished. Unemployment rose to vertiginous heights, especially in Germany. There were consequences. In 1928 the Nazi Party had 12 seats and 2.6% of the vote. By 1932 they commanded 230 seats and 37.3%. Most worrying of all was Japan, which in despair abandoned the world community. Instead they looked for resources and markets by seizing Manchuria from China, initiating the eastern half of a war that would last until 1945.

What can we learn from all this, ninety years on? Never underestimate the power of ignorance and stupidity in human affairs. That nations have a right to defend their interests, but need to be very, very thoughtful about how they do it. And that the Talkies were here to stay.

By 1934 the new President, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, was already starting to lower tariffs again. But the damage had already been done. Japan was by now so committed to China that only military defeat would get them out. In Germany, Hitler was consolidating his power by becoming Fuhrer. Some years of peace lay ahead, but the lines that led to war were already laid down.

Perhaps we should leave the last words to WH Auden, who wrote these memorable lines on 1st September 1939, as Germany marched into Poland, and the most terrible conflict in history got under way

Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole Offence/from Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad……………………….I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/That those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return

we apologise for being unable to find a royalty-free image of Messrs Smoot and Hawley

Hugh Brogan The Pelican History of the United States of America penguin 1985

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939

#smoothawley #tariff #protectionism #populism #RepublicanParty