As a blogger with an admittedly limited readership, I am always delighted when my offerings are read by people from faraway lands. I have counted more than 50 countries so far, including some of the smaller ones such as New Zealand, Malta, and Norfolk Island, as well as the much larger Canada, China, and Russia.

But recently I have begun searching my viewer reports for signs of life from two places I had never heard of before this week, when Donald Trump declared them sufficiently vital to the U.S. economy and the balance of trade to slap tariffs on them: a few hundred square miles of glaciers and volcanic peaks known as Heard Island and McDonald Islands.

Legally a territory of Australia, the islands are so remote and so barren that they are uninhabited by humans, aside from the occasional visit by a research expedition.

Vegetation on the inhospitable surfaces consists primarily of mosses and lichens, providing no sustenance for land animals. There is, however, an abundance of seabirds, penguins and seals.

And those are the readers I am now waiting to hear from. If they are subject to tariffs, then I have to assume they are also intelligent enough to be creative, to conduct business, to read, and to use the internet. So come on, all you happy denizens of Heard and McDonald Islands . . . check me out, and let me know how the tariffs are affecting life down there in the Antarctic, so I can write about it and make your home the next big tourist attraction.

Who knows? You might even become an Amazon distribution center, or the site of SpaceX’s next failed launch . . . the possibilities are limitless.

But it also occurs to me that you might have been added to the tariff list by mistake, like that reporter on the Signal call about the Houthis. Stuff like that just sort of happens in Washington, you know. No big deal.

So, on second thought, perhaps we should all just leave you in peace, happy in your ignorance of the ways of man.

You have no idea how well off you are!

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/5/25