This wouldn’t surprise me

I don’t know how true this actually is, but it doesn’t come as a shock. The current regime is so full of incompetents and unqualified morons that I can entirely believe they worked out the whole thing with ChatGPT, which is famously wrong about almost everything. Apparently this explains the Norfolk Island mystery, too:

Trade tariffs imposed on tiny Australian territories that are either uninhabited or claim to have no trading relationship with the US appear to have been calculated based on erroneous trade data.
The data relates, at least in part, to shipments mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island, or Heard Island and McDonald Islands, instead of their correct countries of origin, the Guardian can reveal.
Among the erroneously labelled shipments over the past five years from the island territories are shipments of aquarium systems, Timberland boots, wine and parts for a recycling plant.
According to an analysis of US import data and shipping records, multiple shipments of goods were classified as having originated from Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islands when neither the company address, nor the port of departure for the shipment, nor the destination port were located in those territories.
In some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
Norfolk Island was this week hit with a 29% tariff on its goods – 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia – despite claiming to have no export relationship with the US.
The decision has perplexed the Australian government, with Australia’s prime minister saying it was evidence “nowhere was safe” from Trump’s tariffs. The country’s trade minister, Don Farrell, said it was “clearly a mistake”.

I’m kind of loath to let Mushroom Cock know that, though. He doesn’t like being told he’s wrong and the tariff on Australia might get blown up to 29% instead.

Alas, this does kind of screw up my theory about what really happened with Heard & MacDonald… cos quite apart from how hard it is to actually travel there, you need special permits to do so that are rarely given out, to the point where apparently no one has gone there for nearly a decade. So when I thought more about this, I could only wonder what the penguins were up to in humanity’s absence. Maybe, just maybe, that $1.5m worth of machinery the US supposedly imported from H&M just in 2022 was real? Maybe I shouldn’t rule that out just yet. Who knows what those penguins might be doing…