Last week President Trump increased tariffs on Chinese goods entering the US. Today China retaliated. Now the ball is back in our court:

The U.S. is looking to up the stakes further with the office of the U.S. Trade Representative also planning on Monday to announce details of an even larger tranche of tariffs on China’s goods than the one imposed last week.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a statement Friday that the president has ordered all remaining imports from China that aren’t yet subject to duties to face the tariffs….The office of the USTR will publish details of the next tariff increase on its website Monday “as we begin the process prior to a final decision on these tariffs,” the statement said.

I’ve long figured that the real test here is whether Trump is willing to raise tariffs on iPhones to 25 percent. What would happen then? Would Apple just eat the extra taxes and keep its price the same? Or would the price of iPhones be raised by some amount?

This whole trade war seems sort of distant to most people who aren’t farmers, but 25 percent tariffs on consumer goods from China would suddenly get everyone’s attention. I guess we’ll know in a couple of months.

That’s right: the limited-access superhighway, brought to its peak in the freeways of Southern California. As you descend into John Wayne Airport, first you’ll see the mighty interchange between highways 57 and 91. If you follow the 57 south out the bottom left of the picture you’ll end up at Angel Stadium:

Next up is Interstate 5, aka the Santa Ana Freeway in this neck of the woods. Go north for a while and you’ll get to Disneyland. Go north for a little while longer and you’ll end up in Seattle:

Finally, just before you touch down, you’ll fly over the 405, right where it meets up with the 55. In the background is South Coast Plaza and the buildings that surround it:

So that’s that: five freeways in five minutes. What would Julius Caesar have thought about all this?

I’m back! And I’ll bet you’ve all missed your charts this week. So here’s one for you:

I was curious to check out the overall effect of the Trump tariffs on China. As you can see, it took a few months for them to bite, but in the first three months of 2019 imports took a steep dive from about $45 billion per month to $30 billion per month. We’re definitely buying less from China thanks to Trump’s tariff on Chinese goods.

Exports to China have also declined, though it’s a little hard to see. The odd thing is that the decline began in early 2018 and doesn’t seem to have changed a lot after Trump enacted his tariffs. In any case, the drop in exports is almost 100 percent in agricultural goods, which fell by more than half between 2017 and 2018. No other sector has been strongly affected.

Hopper is stopping to smell the roses while Hilbert watches her sternly from behind. This is how things go around here.

At the B&B I stayed at on Tuesday night, the owner told me to be sure I kept a lookout for wild yellow and orange azalea. Ordinary garden azalea, she assured me, was mostly pinkish and white, so the orange variety was an unusual sight and it had just started to bloom.

Now, I wouldn’t know an azalea if I ran over one. I only hear about them once a year, when CBS sportscasters inform me in hushed tones that Augusta National is truly a special place in April when the azaleas and the dogwood are blooming.

Whatever. Around here it’s all over the place. And as I was hiking down the trail to the Cascades, a National Park Service sign told me that I was standing right beside a flame azalea bush. So naturally I took a picture.

It’s time to start blogging the Blue Ridge Parkway itself. But which picture to use?

The wildlife has mostly spent its time mocking me and my camera. However, late Tuesday, just before I fell into a creek, I found a beautiful Red-Spotted Purple butterfly. I think it’s more like blue with orange spots, but I guess no one asked me. Anyway, it landed near me and just sat there no matter how close I got. Very unusual. I figured it must be sick or dying or something. But no: after I emerged from the creek I saw it flying around with no problems.

But after a few minutes it returned to its rock and wouldn’t budge. It repeated this cycle a couple of times while I was there. I’m not sure what accounts for it. I’ve never seen a butterfly act that way before.

UPDATE: I guess that’s not a rock after all. Perhaps something a little more, um, pungent and organic.

President Trump today refused to turn over the full, unredacted version of the Mueller report to Congress. In return, House Democrats have threatened to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt. Sarah Sanders lashed back, saying Democrats were horrible people etc. etc. Then she added this:

Faced with Chairman Nadler’s blatant abuse of power, and at the Attorney General’s request, the President has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege.

IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how executive privilege works. It applies to (some) conversations between the president and his senior advisors, and it’s intended to allow the president to consult freely and receive candid advice.

It is not intended to be used as retribution against a political opponent you don’t like.

In any case, all this does is make Democrats really curious about what’s behind those redactions. It must be smokin’ hot.

Speaking of which, I’m writing this at lunch in Galax, Virginia. I had the Texas brisket sandwich with smokin’ hot BBQ sauce. In just a few minutes I’ll leave Virginia and enter North Carolina.

Yesterday’s photo question was a trick, of course: It wasn’t taken on my vacation, it was taken out of an airplane window on my way to my vacation. In fact, I shot it pretty close to home: the mountains in the picture are part of the Coast Range in San Diego, peeking out from an early-morning marine layer.

Several people figured this out, more or less. Several other people guessed that it was a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which was wrong in fact but right in spirit. On Monday I drove down Virginia’s Skyline Drive as a warmup, and for the rest of the week I’ll be driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is part of my usual photographic strategy: choose subjects so beautiful that all you have to is randomly point your camera around and you’re all but guaranteed to get some great shots.

I flew into Washington DC on Sunday and stayed the night with my sister-in-law and her wife. They gave me a whirlwind tour of our nation’s monuments after dinner, and I’ll probably share them eventually even though you can buy postcards that are just as good. Today’s photo was taken at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and shows MLK staring down the Washington Memorial. I assume this placement is a coincidence, but it seems oddly appropriate.

Today Alex Tabarrok highlights a new study that, as he says, should shock even those of us who consider ourselves stone cynics. The subject is prescription opioid abuse.

In 2010, Purdue Pharmaceutical introduced a new version of OxyContin that was more difficult to be abused. Doctors who worry about balancing genuine pain management against the possibility of abuse would be happy about this. Their prescriptions of OxyContin would likely go up. Conversely, doctors who are basically pill mills would be unhappy. They’d most likely switch to other opioids.

Long story short, Molly Schnell analyzed the prescribing behavior of 100,000 physicians and found that:

• 40 percent acted like good doctors.
• 30 percent acted like pill pushers.

(The other 30 percent were somewhere in-between.)

Are you shocked? If not, you really need to work on your cynicism.

Oh, and one more thing: the percentage of pill pushers varies by area. And areas with higher percentages also record higher rates of death from drug abuse.

Unbelievable. I’m speechless because I can’t think of a reaction fit for a family-ish publication. Tabarrok has more if you can stomach it.

UPDATE: I revised the headline to more accurately summarize the study.

Greetings from vacation! I’m off all week on a photographic excursion while Marian stays home to feed the cats and manage the kitchen remodel. Here’s a picture from my first day. Can you figure out where I am?