Kratom is not just a made-up word

It's funny how cultural innovations and fads can completely pass me by until they are no longer either modish or edgy. I guess it's just the circles I move in (or don't).

Either way, I had never heard of "kratom" until I read an article about how it has become wildly popular and even a significant source of addiction and other mental health problems in the USA (and, I'm guessing, also in Canada, to a lesser extent).

Kratom, it turns out, is a plant from southeast Asia that is widely used - in the form of powders, liquid shots, pills and teas - to treat a variety of illnesses. Recently, though, it has become extremely popular in the USA, even though about half of US states either ban or severely restrict and regulate it, and it is not approved for any medical use by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. An estimated 5 million Americans use or have used kratom, with the 21-34 year old demographic reporting the highest use.

It is used at low doses as a stimulant to boost physical energy, focus and alertness, and at higher doses as an opioid-like pain and anxiety treatment, and also for opioid withdrawal symptoms.

The DEA has flagged kratom as a drug or chemical of concern, especially given that synthetic derivatives of kratom, which can be easily bought at gas stations, smoke shops and online, may be five to fifty times more potent than regular kratom. According to studies, "most people" who currently use or have used kratom have a substance abuse disorder, report cannabis use, or exhibit some kind of psychological distress or major depression, although it is not yet clear from the studies whether the kratom use or the mental health symptoms came first. Another area of concern is the ease with which minors can obtain kratom or its analogues.

So, there you go: kratom. Never heard of it, but lots of other people clearly have.

Has America lost another war?

The United States is not used to losing. Whether we're talking sports, military conflicts, cultural exports, economic power, you name it, the US has been without doubt the most successful country in the world over the last couple of centuries.

That said, it has over-reached itself a few times, especially militarily. The War of 1812 with Canada, Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s, arguably even Iraq in the 2000s - these were all either American losses or at least stalemates that did not achieve their objectives.

Is Iran 2026 another such failure?

There are arguments to say so. While Donald Trump has claimed overwhelming victory almost since Day 1 and at least a dozen times since, no-one really believes that guy. Although Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran's military capabilities have been "obliterated" (his favourite word after "tariffs"), other sources suggest that Iran has retained or restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, and that it retains about 70% of its mobile launchers and it's pre-war missile stockpiles. 

Trump seems to be dialling back his earlier insistence that he needs Iran's nuclear stockpiles, or that at the very least they should be destroyed. And while the US "took out" Ayatollah Ali Khomeini early on in the action, Iran has seamlessly replaced him with his son, and the regime has continued essentially unchanged. The Strait of Hormuz is still far from "open". Iran remains a key player in the Middle East.

Of course, part of the problem here is establishing what would constitute an American victory, as Trump and his whole administration seem a bit confused about what the actual goals of the engagement are or were. Success and failure are therefore pretty hard to pin down. Also, as has been argued by better men than me, military leaders rarely actually admit defeat: their whole credibility rests on success.

Either way, whether you believe the USA has won the Iran war or not, Iran certainly believes - and with some justification - that it has not lost it. Iran has, at the very least, made America look like what the Chinese like to call a "paper tiger". People are muttering, online and in the street, that the US will not soon recover from this set-back.

A plague of frogs?

I obviously missed it at the time, but back in the innocent days of June 2005, a rather bizarre event occurred in the small town of Odžaci in northern Serbia, when storm clouds gathered and thousands of frogs rained down total the ground.

Traffic ground to a standstill and the locals ran for cover as "countless" frogs fell from the air with the rain. The frogs, described as different from the frogs usually seen in the area, seemed to survive the fall, and just hopped away, to everyone's surprise.

This is an unusual, but not unique, occurrence. A downpour of frogs has been reported in Tournai, Belgium in 1625, in Lille, France in 1794, in Kansas City, USA in 1873. Pink frogs were reported to have rained on two towns in Gloucestershire, UK as recently as 1987. 

And frogs are not the only animals to fall from the sky: the small town of Yoro, Honduras celebrates an annual Festival de la Lluvia de Peces (Festival of the Fish Rain), when a rain of small silvery fish falls once or twice a year. If it's happening, I guess you may as well celebrate it!

This is not quite the Biblical plague of frogs described in Exodus 8 verses 1-15. That was actually a much less impressive event, where an unspecified number of frogs ("abundant", millions?) came out of the river (the Nile?) and "covered the land of Egypt", getting "into the houses of your servants, onto your people, into your ovens, and into your kneading bowls". No, not the kneading bowls! Deprived of water, the frogs eventually began to die off, causing a "great stench".

This must have been concerning, but the divine threat "I will smite all your territory with frogs" was perhaps not one of the Lord's most chilling. Certainly, it didn't change Pharaoh's mind on the captivity of the Israelites, because God tried eight other plagues after the frogs.

There is of course a perfectly good explanation for all these miracles, and it doesn't involve God or smiting. Regarding the rain of frogs, there is a freak meteorological event called a waterspout, where a small tornado forms over water, sucking up any lightweight objects into its extremely low-pressure centre. When the tornado loses energy and dissipates, it rains its contents to the ground wherever it happens to be. Some waterspouts can travel hundreds of kilometers, but usually they only travel a few kilometers from their source. 

The Biblical plague of frogs can have many natural explanations (as do the other plagues and miraculous events mentioned in the Bible), from a regular migration to a one-off stress reaction caused by water pollution or algae blooms or bacterial or viral agents or increased water temperatures or drying up of parts of the river due to short-term climate events or Super El Niño years.

Weird things happen in nature. You can understand that ancient religious leaders (the politicians of their day) might have been tempted to use them for their own advantage, much like even more ancient leaders used knowledge of astronomical events, extreme weather, etc, to bamboozle and control their naïve citizens.

US position on Taiwan remains unchanged, but Trump can turn on a dime

For the most part, Donald Trump's visit to China was a bit of a nothingburger, despite his usual bombastic and delusional reporting. No big deals, and very few small deals.

Of course, the subject of Taiwan had to come up at some point in the visit, and, of course, President Xi urged Trump not to support Taiwan, which China claims as part of its own territory. Trump, for his part, blathered something about "not looking for somebody to go independent", which might or might not be a veiled and confusing warning to Taiwan not to declare its independence, which is has already done for decades. He did say that "if you kept it the way it is, I think China's going to be OK with that", which is also absolutely not true.

Trump added that "nothing's changed" with respect to the USA's policy on Taiwan, which amounts to not formally supporting Taiwanese independence, while stopping short of explicitly opposing independence, a kind of sensible on-the-fence position, given the circumstances.

Of course, the first thing Taiwan did after Trump's visit was to publicly re-declare their independence: Taiwan "is a sovereign and independent democratic nation and is not subordinate to the People's Republic of China", read an unequivocal foreign ministry statement. Taiwan's Presidential Office reminded the world of "the multiple reaffirmations from the US side, including from President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the consistent US policy toward Taiwan remain unchanged".

This, of course, puts the US in an awkward position, especially as President Xi was at pains to remind Trump that any misstep on the issue could cause "conflict". 

But Taiwan too needs to tread carefully. The United States is legally required to provide weapons to Taiwan for its defence (stipulated in the Taiwan Relations Act), and an $11.1 billion arms package was announced by Washington just this last December. But a second phase of arms sales, worth around $15 billion, has not yet been approved by the US, and Taiwan must know that Trump would be more than willing to use that as a bargaining chip in his relations with China (in fact, he admitted as much, in so many words). Taiwan might think that that deal is done, dusted and non-negotiable, but Trump almost certainly does not.

Mr. Carney's disastrous pipeline deal with Alberta

Mark Carney, much like Justin Trudeau before him, is the master of the grand gesture, the grand announcement, often with little substance behind it. The difference is that, thus far at least, he seems to be managing to carry his public popularity along with him.

Yesterday was the occasion of another such grand announcement. Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith jointly announced, to great fanfare, a climate and energy agreement to follow up on their memorandum of understanding (MOU) last November. For all their talk of urgency, it has still taken six months to get to this next step.

The main item is the construction of a new one-million-barrel-a-day oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast. A firm  proposal is to be submitted by Alberta to the major projects office by July 1st, it is to be designated as a project of national interest by October 1st, and construction could start by "as early as" September 1st 2027, and in theory it could be up and running by 2033 or 2034. I suppose, in Canadian terms, that is expeditious, if not downright breakneck.

Of course, there is as yet no private sector proponent willing to stick its neck out and commit to building the thing. Neither is there a confirmed route that is not going to get bogged down in endless controversy and acrimony. Both parties say that they will respect Canada's duty to consult with Indigenous peoples, and the province of British Colombia remains implacably opposed to such a pipeline though its land and coastal waters. BC accuses Carney of pushing through "nationally significant" energy deals without involving the entire country, and of "rewarding" Alberta's bad behaviour and separatist rumblings. 

So, all things considered, we are probably no further forward than we were, despite the grand announcement.

The other part of the announcement was an agreement with Alberta on industrial carbon pricing and emissions reductions. Alberta is to impose on its oil producers a carbon price of $130 a tonne (that is what they would pay for carbon offsets), up from the current level of $95 a tonne, according to a gradually increasing schedule between now and 2040. Yes, 2040! 

However, it turns out that the "floor price" - the price actually enforced by government - will be only $110 a tonne, and even that price will only start to be regulated by 2030, while the floor price will actually start at the ultra-low level of $60 a tonne. Talk about devil in the details! Compare that to the Trudeau-era federal climate plan, which set the price of carbon at $170 a tonne by 2030, and you can see just how much Carney has been swayed and equivocated. Incidentally, the lower carbon price is to apply across the country, pending consultations with other provinces. 

Environmentalists, of course, are not happy, slamming the deal as betraying the country, undercutting national ambitions on industrial carbon pricing, and sabotaging plans to combat climate change. It puts "Canada's target of net zero by 2050 well out of reach", they say, and its 2030 targets will be put back by at least a decade as a result. Carney is still promising that Canada will meet its 2050 net zero goal, but his promises appear increasingly divorced from reality, and hardly anyone else seems to share his optimism.

But the muck gets yet thicker. Carney also made clear that the pipeline deal is still dependent on the construction of a massive carbon capture project in the Alberta oil sands, the so-called Pathways project, which is to be built built the Oil Sands Alliance. Carney was unequivocal: "No Pathways, no pipeline".

The Pathways initiative is a 400km long pipeline, funded largely by the region's oil industry, that will transport carbon trapped at oil sands facilities to a storage area located under Cold Lake, Alberta. At the moment, though, this whole project is largely theoretical, and the oil company execs involved are increasingly getting cold feet as the costs and technical challenges become apparent. The coalition of potential builders also object the $130 price on carbon that has just been set, however low it might be. This, then, is not going to happen by September 2027 (or even 2033). And, "no Pathways, no pipeline", right?

So, where does all this leave us? Well, nowhere really. For all the grand announcements, we are no closer to getting a new pipeline built than we ever were. Now, that's not necessarily a bad in thing, in my personal opinion. And I do wonder whether this might not be some elaborate house of cards built by Mark Carney - once an environmentalist himself, remember - in full knowledge that it will almost certainly all come tumbling down eventually.

Honda cancels EV plant just as demand atarts to pick up

It's ironic that Honda is officially putting its $15 billion electric vehicle (EV) and battery plant in Alliston, Ontario on indefinite hold now, just as demand for EVs in Canada (and around the world) is starting to pick up again.

Honda "paused" development last May, at a time when EV demand was indeed reeling. Since then, though, the US war in Iran and the ensuing oil price shock, along with Canada's reinstatement of a $5,000 rebate, has made EVs much more palatable and demand for zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) is recovering, big-time. March 2026's sales of ZEVs in Canada has increased by 75% over the previous year. Whereas EVs made up just 6.6% of new vehicles a year ago, in March 2026 they made up 12.2%, almost double. And gas prices have continued going up and up since March as the US war in Iran continues, so the expectation is that EV demand will continue to rise.

And this is the time that Honda drops its bombshell about cancelling its new investment in the Alliston plant?

A big part of the problem is that the market for EVs in the USA is still soft, and most of the cars that would be made in Ontario would be destined for the US, not Canada. But, even in America, EV demand is picking up, as the Iran war and the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz, drags on with no end in sight.

So, is Honda being short-sighted here? Well, longer-term trends are almost impossible to predict in this rapidly changing world, and Honda is notoriously conservative. It's hard to commit $15 billion without a pretty firm guarantee of future sales demand, I get that. But taking risks and getting ahead of the competition is what corporate capitalism is all about, no?

Trump is openly flirting with fascism, but Americans only care about gas prices

I'm kind of tired of writing about Trump. But I still keep doing it because, like it or not, he is the driving force of our times, the single individual generating most of the worldwide news (almost all of it bad) in these weird times we live in.

Trump's popularity in the USA, the metric by which he measures himself, is at an all-time low. (His popularity in the rest of the world has always been at an all-time low, but doesn't really care about that.) So, does this mean that America is finally waking up from an embarrassing - and extremely consequential - trance?

Er, probably not.

See, here's the thing. Despite the fact that Trump has spent the last year and change converting the US into a fully-functional fascist state, the thing that is finally causing Americans to snap out from under his spell is actually something as mundane as ... gas prices.

Think about that. It gives a good indication of just where American priorities lie. 

Trump has presided over the establishment of a vicious paramilitary force tasked with oppressing the American people and forcefully abducting specific segments of the population based on racist ideology. He has co-opted the highest legal court in the land by installing compliant judges willing to put ideological bias before sound legal judgement. He has wilfully demonized political opponents, and weakened institutional trust. He has pursued an aggressive policy of imperialistic expansionism, in words and sometimes in actions. He has deliberately taken actions to undermine democratic norms and protections, and has openly flirted with extreme authoritarianism, with all the trappings (think White House ballroom, mugshot pictures hanging from public buildings, etc). He has attempted to suppress free speech anywhere it implies criticism of his actions and policies. He, his family, and members of his administration have all enriched themselves on the back of his policies, at the expense of the working stiff. He no longer feels constrained by international norms or domestic institutions, but is happy to let power speak, whatever the ethical implications. Truth is now optional in official circles.

This, it has been widely argued, is fascism. But many Americans have stood idly by and watched all this happen, like a frog in a pot of heating water (I'm talking here about the republican/conservative half of this dismally divided country - Democrats have always opposed Trump, even if not as loudly as they might have.) Land of the free? Cradle of democracy? Pshaw. Over-rated.

What has actually - finally - started to galvanize opposition to Trump and his policies is the threat to Americans' profitability and financial ease. America has always been a country obsessed with money and wealth, to a degree unmatched by any other state. When Trump's disastrous trade policies and, particularly, his ill-advised invasion of Iran (and the oil price chaos that, predictably, followed) finally started to hit their proverbial pocketbooks, even Republicans have started to wake from their deplorable sleepwalk.

Brightly-painted wind turbines would save many bird deaths

I've posted before on ways to make wind turbines less destructive of birds, bats, etc. (I've also posted on the fact that wind turbines are much less destructive of birds, bats, etc, than most people think.)

Now, another study, recently published in the journal Behavioural Ecology, shows that birds are much more likely to avoid turbine blades that are painted to mimic venomous snakes or frogs. It makes a lot of intuitive sense: neither birds nor bats are particularly sophisticated intellectually, and operate much more on short-range instincts.

Almost all wind turbines and their blades are painted bright white, for reasons I have never understood. And, for reasons no-one else really seems to understand, that is the very colour that attracts birds towards them. It has been known for some years that even just painting one of the blades black significantly reduces bird collisions, and yet I have still never seen a wind turbine painted anything other than white.

The latest study demonstrates definitively that birds are least likely to avoid white blades, followed by blades where one is painted black. However, they are even more likely to avoid blades painted red and white, or red, black and yellow (to mimic a venomous coral snake). The differences are apparently quite dramatic. 

Personally, I think that brightly-coloured striped wind turbines would be an improvement aesthetically - plain vanilla white is so blah - although I'm not sure everyone would agree.