US senator endorses the use of bleach as magical cure

Good news! There's a simple and cheap chemical that can cure cancer, malaria, autism and COVID-19!

It's called chlorine dioxide, a chemical usually used for disinfecting and bleaching. It is routinely employed by food processing plants and hospitals for sanitizing surfaces and equipment, and by paper mills for whitening wood pulp. People who use it work in well-ventulated spaces and wear protective gloves. Even small concentrations in drinking water can be harmful to children and pregnant women (as even the EPA cautions). But, we are told, this same chemical has almost magical curative properties!

If you are thinking that this sounds very much like Donald Trump's pandemic-era cure for COVID - regular, everyday bleach - you'd be right. But this is the startling conclusion of a book called "The War on Chlorine Dioxide: The Medicine That Could End Medicine" by Dr. Pierre Kory. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Kory, who worked for years in Wisconsin hospitals, is no longer a doctor, having been struck off the medical register for promoting these very claims. However, that didn't stop MAGA Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin from publicly endorsing Dr. Kory's work. Johnson has propounded various conspiracy theories and misinformation on vaccines and COVID over the years. In his recent endorsement of Kory's book, he is clearly convinced that there is a globally-coordinated cover-up against the medical uses of chlorine dioxide, by health agencies, drug companies and the media. Kory describes this dastardly cover-up in his book, including assassination attempts on doctors who have tried to release the truth about the miracle drug/bleaching agent.

I imagine that the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would approve of Senator Johnson's stance.

The USA is a prime example of competitive authoritarianism

We routinely talk about America sliding into authoritarianism these days. It seems to be a done deal, with little anyone can do to check it. After all, Trump was legally and democratically elected, even if most of his supporters really should have seen where this was headed long before election day. But, bafflingly, most of them still seem pretty happy with the way things are going. Many Americans WANT an authoritarian government, it seems.

But, however much we may kvetch about it, this is not the same deal as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia (not yet anyway). A thoughtful and deep article on the Foreign Affairs website introduced me to the concept of "competitive authoritarianism", which sounds like an oxymoron, but which actually describes pretty well what is going on here.

Competitive authoritarianism is "a system in which parties compete in elections, but where incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition". It's what we see happening in Chávez snd Maduro's Venezuela, Bukele's El Salvador, Erdogen's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, and Modi's India. (Russia and China are a little further along the continuum to full-scale dictatorships.)

The USA under Trump is just such a competitive authoritarian country. Arguably it's democratic decline has proceeded faster (and less subtly) than any of the other examples given. However, that does not mean that the slide is irreversible. Democratic channels still exist whereby Trump's slide can be checked and even reversed. Recent Democrat Party gains in by-elections indicate that all is not lost, although the 2026 mid-terms will be the litmus test. 

It requires the American public to recognize the twin dangers of complacency and fatalism, but the authors of this article, at any rate, believe that this will happen.

Bloc's opposition to religious exemption for hate speech makes sense

It's not that often that I agree with much that the Bloc Québécois says, but the Bloc's amendment to the Liberals' Bill C-9 (the Combatting Hate Act") does make good sense.

Bill C-9 promises to clamp down on hate speech and make hate-motivated crimes a specific offence. But the Liberals' original formulation allowed the current criminal code's religious exemption to continue. This specifies that something that would otherwise qualify as hate speech can be allowed, "if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text". 

So, religion can be used as a cover for homophobia, antisemitism, anti-Islamism, you name it, so long as it appears to come from religious convictions or an interpretation, however tenuous, of a religious text.

As the Bloc Québécois points out, such an exemption makes a self-defeating mockery of the law, alllowing for all sorts of hateful utterances provided the perpetrator claims it is part of their religious beliefs, and the Bloc refused to support the government unless the religious exemption was removed. The Liberals need the Bloc's votes to pass the legislation, so it has agreed to remove the offending clause. The Conservatives, predictably enough, continue to insist that the religious exemption is just fine.

Some of the Bloc Québécois' strident views on secularism are a bit too strong for me, a confirmed atheist. (For example, the recent ban on religious garb and symbols for public sector workers.) But this one seems sensible to me.

Art and cobblers

I've been quite enjoying the page 2 item in the print version of the Globe and Mail newspaper in recent months, where they feature painting and other artwork form various Canadian art galleries.

Today's showcases a painting by Uktainian-Canadian William Kurelek called Lumberjack's Breakfast. 

What do you see as the dominant colours in this picture? Brown? Green, maybe?

The blurb that goes with the picture in the Globe says, "His use of blue and yellow, echoing the Ukrainian flag, subtly affirms the artist's cultural identity". 

Yes, there's a little bit of blue, but almost no yellow. Which subtly affirms my own observation that there's an awful lot of cobblers talked about art.

Why did Trump pardon a Honduran narco-trafficker and dictator?

A great many people are having a hard time understanding the logic of Donald Trump's official pardon for ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.

Hernandez is serving a 45-year sentence in the high security USP Hazelton prison in West Virginia for his role in trafficking some 400 tons of cocaine into the USA. No-one is quite sure why Trump has pardoned him, given his administration's supposed strong anti-drugs stance (think bombing Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, punitive tariffs against Canada for its supposed role in the US fentanyl trade, etc).

Even members of his own party are questioning the action: "Why would we pardon this guy and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?" (Republican Senator Bill Cassidy).

Perfectly good question, with no good answer. The best we can do is to assume that the pardon was Trump's attempt to meddle in the ongoing election in Honduras, in which Trump would prefer to see the right-wing National Party candidate triumph (Hernández's old party). That, and he would, of course, like to be seen as doing the exact opposite of whatever the Biden administration did (Hernández was tried and convicted by Biden's Justice Department).

It's not a very convincing explanation, although why we are still looking for logic and sense in Trump's decisions is beyond me. Maybe he just wants to sow doubt in people's minds about the whole US legal system, which is still attacking Trump on several fronts. Who knows what the guy is thinking?

How do we claw a way back to common sense and respectability after Trump?

Donald Trump, and his administration of amoral lackeys and yes-men, will probably be remembered by history for the big things he got wrong, from upending global free trade, to rolling back environmental protections in favour of the oil and gas industry, to repudiating and reversing the immigration that helped make the country great in the first place, to the flagrant disdain for human rights and international norms, to the concentration of executive power to accommodate the whims and obsessions of one man at the expense of the congressional system that has served the country for two and a half centuries. 

Of course, this list can be extended and expanded. What counts as egregious has undergone a stark re-definition during Trump's second term, so extensive and all-encompassing are the man's sins. Perhaps the single most important change he has wrought is the normalization of personal insults, crudity, lying and nepotism in the political sphere.

What might get lost in that larger history, though, are the smaller things that Trump brings to bear almost every single day. It seems like nothing is too small for his overbearing attention. In some ways, you have to admire the attention to detail and the sheer single-mindedness of the man, although we must still remember to stand back and look at the actual import of his attentions, lest we too become caught up in his personalty cult.

Most days, there is a social media posting (or 10!), a press release, or an executive order that just gets lost amid all the vileness and atrocity emanating from the White House in what now passes for the "normal" course of business in the USA. 

Whether it is redistricting congressional boundaries for party political gain, or weaponizing the Justice Department to get back at perceived enemies, or the gratuitous extra-juducial killing of purported drug carriers, actions that would have been considered outrageous and politically unconscionable just a few short years ago are now coming thick and fast. Browbeating countries into disadvantageous trade and investment agreements, changing the names and briefs of entire government departments, co-opting public institutions for personal gains and aggrandisement, issuing pardons to convicted criminals on purely political grounds, freezing all asylum applications and making it more difficult for anyone to enter the country (even legally), embracing dictators shunned by the rest of the civilized world, blatant interference in the running of private-sector companies, the abandonment of any and all diversity initiatives, the "purging and packing" of state institutions from the Supreme Court down, deliberately lying about vaccine and other healthcare claims ... there seems to be no end to the depths Trump is willing to plumb.

Is anyone actually keeping track of everything that needs to be reversed in order to bring America back to normality and international standards? Whoever follows Trump - and we have to believe that this too shall pass one day, and that a majority of Americans will eventually wake up from their delusions - whoever follows Trump will have the unenviable task of methodically undoing all the harms that have been perpetrated by the Trump administration. As things stand, it's hard to see that ever happening.

And we also have to hope that the demons of back-door fascism and extreme populism that Trump's actions have allowed to take hold, and become normalized, across the world also die with him. Otherwise, we are are in for one ugly 21st century.

Trump's targeting of Venezuelan boats not likely to save any Americans from anything

America's crusade against drug-trafficking Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean is completely off-target.

US claims, that the Venezuelan boats targeted by the USA were involved in transporting fentanyl from South America to the US, flies in the face of all available evidence, which shows that the drug trade through the Caribbean is almost all in cocaine, not fentanyl, and that the cocaine is destined for Europe, not America. US-bound fentanyl almost all comes in from Mexico, not Canada, as Trump also claims, and certainly not through the Caribbean, and most of America's cocaine comes in through the Pacific.

President Trump and various members of his administration, as well as key spokespeople from the Pentagon (which is now largely staffed by loyal Trump supporters, and not necessarily experts in their field), have been loud in their claims that US strikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, of which there have been at least 20 in the last few months, are essential to break up drug flows into the US and to protect the drug-addled American population. Trump has claimed (without evidence, as per usual) that each boat bombed saves 25,000 American lives, which is just ludicrous.

It is more and more apparent that this is just a pretext for Trump's regime-change aspirations, and his desperate need to be seen to be doing something - anything - about America's drug problem.

The Trump regime has come under more and more criticism by allies for its activities int he Caribbean, which increasingly look to be against both US and international law. Some allies are even witholding intelligence on Latin American drug smuggling operational from the USA, as they are worried about the illegality of America's policy.

FIFA boss pleases Trump with his very own peace prize

The FIFA World Cup draw in Washington was the rather bizarre occasion for the presentation of the brand-new FIFA Peace Prize. 

The what, you say? FIFA is in the business of awarding prizes for world peace? I thought they were all about football? Good questions all.

It turns out that Gianni Infantino, the Swiss-Italian current boss of FIFA, is best buddies with Donald Trump, although nobody really knows why. From Trump's inauguration to the recent Club World Cup final to the signing of the supposed "peace deal" between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Infantino keeps popping up, Waldo-like, in Trump's environs, sometimes in the most unlikely circumstances.

Infantino's "style" was all over the the glitzy World Cup draw event. Trump's favourite entertainers, The Village People and Andrea Bocelli, were there too, as were a bunch of other actors, models and assorted hangers-on. There was much mutual back-slapping between Trump and Infantino, and some embarrassing one-sided abasement. Infantino even promised Trump "the support of the entire football community", which seemed a bit rich.

Even given all this, it was nevertheless a very strange moment when Infantino hijacked the lottery draw event, full of soccer personalities and sports talk, to present Trump with a cheap imitation peace prize, à propos of nothing at all. Given that it is very unlikely that Trump will ever earn the Nobel Prize, given his predilection for war, Infantino presumably felt sorry for him and thought he should have his very own peace prize. And it was just that: a prize created expressly for Trump and no-one else. No-one else on the 37-member FIFA Council seemed to know anything about it.

The President, though, was clearly deeply touched by all this nonsense. And, in one fell swoop, Infantino firmly positioned himself as Trump's bestie, even rivalling fallen Canadian Great One, Wayne Gretzky. It is hard to make this stuff up, isn't it?