A second consecutive SpaceX rocket has blown up soon after launch (technically a "rapid uncheduled disassembly"!), with debris causing commercial flight delays as far away as Miami and Philadelphia.
That'll cost him a bob or two. Given how much people hate Elon Musk these days, few people are particularly upset.
With all the ridiculous antics going on south of the border, it's easy for things to slip through below the radar. One such thing may have immense repercussions, but has received relatively little attention, and that is Trump's announcement of a "Crypto Strategic Reserve".
The reserve, which is slated to consist of five different cryptocurrencies ' Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana and Cardano - will likely put the United States inexorably in the perilous business of buying and selling cryptocurrencies, in line with Trump's stated desire to establish the United States as the crypto capital of the world. It was mentioned only tangentially in an executive order on digital assets issued in January, but is still largely unexplained and unclassified.
Trump, of course, hopes to make vast profits from such a stockpile of the notoriously volatile and speculative investment. But, as we have already seen with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, they can just as easily result in huge losses. Given that cryptocurrencies are purely speculative, and not backed up by actual assets in the way that a gold reserve is, for example, many people are questioning whether the US government should be involved in such a risky venture.
The US is already known to hold about $17 billion in bitcoin from criminal seizures - digital currencies are notoriously prone to hacking and other criminal uses (just last month, North Korea hacked $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum, the largest single digital robbery ever carried out) - and it is assumed that they will now be in the market for much more, as well as in the other digital currencies mentioned, and all five currencies have seen significant spikes in value in anticipation, although followed by a sharp drop and sell-off.
There are rumours that the government is looking to obtain abound a million bitcoins alone, worth around $86 billion, which would put it in a position to substantially influence the market. If it uses these bitcoins to, for example, pay off some of its (real) debts, that could cause the value of bitcoins to drop precipititately.
The only other country that has tried this is El Salvador, whose foray into crypto as legal tender and as a national strategic reserve ended in ignominious failure, as it has had to abandon most of its crypto plans as a condition of a much-needed IMF loan.
Trump already has personal ties to various digital currencies, and even issued his own $TRUMP cryptocurrency, which promptly tanked, down over 80% since its launch (a parallel $MELANIA coin is down over 90%).
Trump, ably abetted by Elon Musk, is also doing away with many of rhe regulatory safeguards that has kept the crypto business in check for years. But, even so, there are many, even in the crypto business itself, that question whether this is something that governments should be involving themselves with. For example, is it right that a government uses taxpayers finds to backstop the price of cryptocurrencies, and worry about the lack of clarity and transparency in the reserve.
XRP, Solana and Cardano are relatively obscure digital currencies - why were they chosen? (David Sacks, Trump's crypto "czar" is known have some conflicts of interest with a couple of them.) Should one institution (the federal government) have so much power over a currency that is supposed to be decentralized. People also worry that a crypto reserve could be funded by taxpayer dollars, representing a transfer of money from everyday Americans to wealthy crypto bros and billionaires.
Some question whether the Trump administration actually understands what it is getting into. It's not even totally clear whether Trump has the legal authority to create such a reserve. The US has a strategic petroleum reserve, a strategic medical equipment stockpile, even a helium reserve, but crypto has essentially nothing backing it and no intrinsic value, so it represents a very different prospect.
The whole thing just smacks of the kind of sleaziness and amateurishness that the MAGA crowd excels in. But this particular example of Trump ineptitude could have extremely large repercussions. It could even have implications for the US dollar's role.as the world's primary reserve currency, although personally I think that particular claim may be overstated, and I have read nothing to back it up.
As Donald Trump pauses his tariffs on Mecico and Canada's auto sectors, just one day after bringing them in, and then delays most other tariffs just a day later (insofar as they are covered by the CUSMA free trade agreement), even his MAGA followers must be realizing that the man has no idea what he is doing.
Trump is making random spur-of-the-moment decisions of huge import to both the US and other countries without any real plan or justification. He just does whatever he feels like when he gets up in the morning, in what has been labelled "government by chaos". Every day is "unprecedented" in some way or other, and it doesn't feel exhilerating or inspiring, it just feels exhausting and depressing.
If his goal is to keep Canada and Mexico off-balance (and that's a big "if"), then I suppose he has achieved that, although how that helps him or America, no-one is quite sure. But he is also keeping American industry off-balance too. Trump says, "There will be a little disturbance, but we are OK with that". Most CEOs are too scared to comment publicly, but those that have are most definitely NOT OK with all the uncertainty and chaos.
As Democratic Representative Melanie Stansbury indicated with her handwritten sign that went viral after Trump's State of the Union speech, "This is NOT normal". Even Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is starting to look like a deer in the headlights as he tries to explain Trump's random decisions and equally random reversals.
Trump's Republican cronies must know all this. They must know that the talk about "fentanyl pouring over the border" from Canada is spurious, and not the actual reason for his tariffs (and is not even real). They must know that supposedly democratic countries can't just go around talking about annexing other countries and destroying their economies until they capitulate. They must know that you can't just abandon all your old allies and multilateral organizations, and suddenly support a country that had been an implacable enemy for decades. They must know that American industry and the stock exchanges are reacting with panic.
All this is not the behaviour of a sane, serious politician. But the Republicans, thus far at least, seem willing to go along with it, repeating his nonsensical arguments to the press day after day. It's almost like they are hypnotised somehow by Trump's certainty, by his star power. When a Democratic congressman had the temerity to protest at Trump's wild State of the Union speech the other day, MAGA Republicans merely rallied round, chanting "USA! USA!" like a football crowd, or a gang of kids. As though that was a valid response, as though a supposed show of vocal patriotism outweighed everything else.
It's all kind of disturbing and sad. You have to hope that some day soon they will wake up and shake themselves, mumbling, "Wha... Where am I? What has been going on?" Because this is like a fever dream, almost completely divorced from reality. Unfortunately, though, it's all too real. Make America Great Again? If they only realized what damage they are doing, and how long (if ever) it will take to fix.
If you were thinking, hold on, Trump's tariffs on Canada can't possibly be legal, then yes, that's quite right, but probably irrelevant. An expert on international trade law lays it all out.
Firstly, yes, we have a free trade deal with the USA. Known to us as CUSMA (Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement) and to the Yanks as USCMA (and probably to the Mexicans as MUSCA, which is the easiest one to say), President Trump signed it himself in 2018 (and the final version in 2020), and it replaced the original 1994 NAFTA agreement. And yes, Trump's tariffs are a clear violation of CUSMA, which explicitly states that member countries cannot simply increase tariffs unilaterally.
And yes, there is a dispute mechanism involving a legal panel. Canada would probably win any such dispute, even if the US uses various national security defences (Trump is mainly using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act - IEEPA - to justify his tariff impositions). But if he is willing to directly contravene the wording of the Agreement, it is unlikely that he will care much about a ruling by some dispute panel.
There is also the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which the US is still technically a member, although Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from it. Canada would probably win a case before the WTO too, but Trump is unlikely to abide by any decision (and could just pull out of the organization if it suited him). The WTO has no real teeth to enforce its rulings.
Of the two, the CUSMA route is probably the best bet, although, as has been said, Trump does not appear to care about the agreement, or about legalities in general. He would just steamroller through regardless. Although such a case could be brought relatively quickly (meaning within a year!), the US could stall the process of picking a panel for quite some time, and the majority on the panel is decided by (quite literally) a coin toss, which is a bit bizarre.
There is also the possibility that US domestic lawyers could challenge his use of the IEEPA, which was never intended to be used for tariffs against a friendly nation. The Government of Canada could be involved as an amicus (intervenor) in such a case.
All of these legal remedies, however, take time, and in the meantime both Canada and Mexico (and the USA!) are suffering economically. And there is no guarantee that Trump would abide by any legal decision he doesn't like; he is past the point of concern with legal niceties. It may still be worthwhile pursuing from an international optics point of view, but again, Trump does really not care about optics, and the rest of the world already knows he is in the wrong.
Seems appropriate to share this.
An Ontario photographer captured this stand-off between a Canada Goose and a Bald Eagle on a frozen lake near Burlington, ON, recently.
While you might think the conclusion was foregone, it turns out that the plucky goose fought back bravely against the eagle's attacks, and eventually the eagle gave up and flew away.
Rife with Canadian and American symbolism, this encounter might give hope to the underdog Canadians, as the US goes all out to dominate Canada through tariffs and other means, and Canada does what it can to fight back.
I thought I understood how the expected US tariffs would affect Canada. But then, the more I thought about it, the less certain I was. So, I'm going to write it down to see if it makes any sense. Some of this is based on my own interpretation of analyses like Dalhousie University's Ask An Expert. I'm no economist, but this is how I see it - am I wrong?
So, say Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom, decides to impose a 25% tariff on imports of Canadian steel and aluminum tomorrow. The only immediate effect would be that US importers of our steel and aluminum would be paying 25% more for their goods.
So, they may decide to import less and source their steel and aluminum elsewhere (not easy, certainly in the short run). Trump expects the US steel and aluminum industries to up their game and produce more domestically, but that is also not easy, particularly in the case of aluminum (Canada accounts for 56% of US aluminum imports but only 15-20% of steel imports; the US produces a lot of its own steel, but very little aluminum).
Or US companies may continue to import from Canada, and either take a hit to their profits due to their higher costs, or, more likely, increase the prices of their end products (or some combination of the two). Bear in mind that steel and aluminum are only two of the ingredients of their final products, and, due to market considerations, they may not decide to pass on all of their cost increases anyway. So, the prices American companies charge their customers will increase, yes, but not by 25%.
Either way, thus far, Canadians are not affected at all by the tariffs. When we become affected is when we decide to import these now-more-expensive products from the US. The costs for Canadian companies importing these goods will go up but, once again, their final products will not be 25% more expensive when sold to Canadian consumers, because these US imports will not be 25% more expensive (as mentioned above), they will not typically make up 100% of the final Canadian product, and the Canadian exporters may not pass on all of their increased costs to final Canadian consumers (or they may).
So, the eventual impact on the general Canadian public may actually be minimal (but hard, even impossible, to predict). Inflation may go up a little, although it inflation is currently pretty well controlled here (unlike America's inflation situation). If the loonie continues to depreciate against the greenback, as is also likely, the effects are further diminished.
If the US tariffs are imposed on ALL American imports from Canada, however, as they are also threatening, the effects would be more widespread, but still mainly borne by American companies and American consumers, only affecting Canadians to the extent that we import affected goods from America, and again by much less than 25% (for the reasons stated above).
In addition to all that, of course, there would be an effect on Canadian producers of steel and aluminum (and other products if the tariffs are expanded). If it becomes more expensive for American companies to import from Canada, they may import less, or source their raw materials elsewhere.
This is where the sky-is-falling predictions of Canadian industry groups get their dire prognostications about the entire Canadian steel and aluminum industries closing down, with hundreds of thousands of layoffs (estimates vary from 30,000 jobs to 600,000!) and myriad insolvencies. But it's not that easy for American companies to just switch suppliers, so it seems to me that there may be some industry layoffs, but maybe not the complete decimation many commentators seem to be suggesting.
After the 2018 temporary Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum, Canadian steel exports to the USA went down by a sizeable 38%, and aluminum exports by a more modest 19%. (Note that this is specifically the effect on US exports, not total Canadian steel and aluminum production). I have not seen any figures on industry layoffs or insolvencies.
There's more, though. If, as seems more than likely, Canada responds to the US tariffs with commensurate tit-for-tat dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs of its own, then the effects on Canada will be much more more pronounced. In that case, Canada would suffer the immediate affects that the US is described as suffering above, while the US would only feel the more limited secondary effects described above.
Either way, it's a race to the bottom. But what's a country to do? In the end, it's a political calculation of what people think may sway Donald Trump. And that, as we already know, is a known unknown.
So, "existential threat"? Maybe not. Pain in the ass, to be sure. "Ceases to exist as a viable country" without the US (as Trump recently claimed)? Not neither.
If you needed yet another example of how illogical and ideology-driven Donald Trump's new presidential term is, you need look no further than his roll-back of electric cars and chargers for federal government workers.
Last week, Trump ordered that 654 EV charging stations at government facilities be immediately removed and decommissioned, and about 25,000 government EVs be summarily sold. This will flood the EV market, so that the EVs will end up being sold at about 25% of their original value, resulting in a $225 million loss (the original $300 million paid for the chargers and electric vehicles is a sunk cost). Decommissioning the chargers could cost a further $50 to 100 million, and an estimated $700 million will need to be invested in new replacement cars.
That's over a billion dollars of public money wasted on a whim. You could add to that a further 6 billion in savings that the EV fleet would have realized over their working lives compared to a conventional combustion fleet, as estimated by investment consulting firm ICF. How many of the EVs to be sold are Teslas is not clear, but best buddy Elon Musk is probably going to be pissed.
And why? Why would a move like this be worth a billion dollars to Trump? It seems that economics doesn't come into the equation at all, and it is all because Donald Trump - for whatever reason - doesn't like EVs, and is scared of progress of any kind (and particularly environmental progress).
Many Canadians are trying their best to "Buy Canadian" these days, partly as a patriotic finger in the eye to Donald Trump, and partly in an attempt to wean ourselves American products so that the Trump tariffs are more limited in their effectiveness. But it's not easy, and it's not even easy to tell what is Canadian and what isn't.
As we study labels we've never even bothered to look at before, people are noticing that some products say "Made in Canada" and some say "Product of Canada". Most people probably assume that these are one and the same thing. But, it turns out, they are not. And, just to complicate things, what they do mean varies, depending on whether it relates to a food items or a non-food items.
For non-food items, Competition Bureau Canada rules that "Product of Canada" means that 98% of the item is Canadian content, while "Made in Canada" can mean anything above 51%.
For food items, "Product of Canada" means that "all or virtually all major ingredients, processing and labour used to make the food product are Canadian" (this definition comes from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency). "Made in Canada", on the other hand, merely means that the "last substantial transformation of the product occurred in Canada, even if some ingredients are from other countries". (Hence, products like olive oil can be "Made in Canada".)
Just to confuse things, there's also "Prepared in Canada", which, similar to "Made in Canada", means that the final production step occurred in Canada, but the ingredients could come from anywhere.
So, generally speaking, "Product of Canada" good, "Made in Canada" not so good (but better than nothing).
It's a good indication of how few people understand the difference between the two labels that substantially more people preferred "Made in Canada" items over "Product of Canada" until it is explained to them what the labels actually mean, when their preferences change dramatically!
In Robert F. Kennedy Jr's first major challenge as US Health Secretary, the maverick anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist - elevated to power and influence by another maverick - has failed miserably (and predictably).
A major measles outbreak in West Texas has now infected at least 124 people in a largely unvaccinated Mennonite region, and 18 have been hospitalized. Now, the first child has died from it, the first such death in a decade.
Kennedy's response? "We're watching it ... we're going to continue to follow it". Watching people die does not seem like a very robust response.
Kennedy went further to try to downplay the situation, claiming that there have been four measles outbreaks this year in the US already (technically, an "outbreak" constitutes three or more related cases), compared to sixteen last year, "so it's not unusual to have measles outbreaks very year". And we're supposed to be reassured by that?
Measles was deemed eradicated in the USA in 2000, 40 years after the introduction of a safe and very effective measles vaccination. It lost its elimination status in 2019 with a large outbreak in New York state and others elsewhere, and there have been many more such outbreaks since. CDC notes that vaccination rates have gone down from 95.2% to 92.7% over the last four years, in which there has been a lot of vaccination misinformation.
And with Kennedy in charge, nothing is going to get better any time soon.
In a move of unbelievable callousness and boorishness, Donald Trump is looking to recoup money the USA - in an earlier, kinder incarnation under Joe Biden - has freely given to Ukraine over the last three years for its existential fight against an expansionist Russia. There was never any talk of repayment, but now Trump wants to change that, mainly because he is mean, greedy and amoral.
Desperate, and with its hands tied, Ukraine sees itself as having no alternative but to accede to Trump's demands of half of Ukraine's rare earth minerals, and the establishment of a joint investment fund for Ukraine's eventual reconstruction. This is a slight improvement over Trump's initial demand of $500 billion in mineral wealth from the already cash-strapped country. Ukraine sees this deal as the only way to keep the USA on-side, although it does not as yet include any firm security guarantees or even guarantees of future aid. The assumption is that the US will want to protect its investments.
Trump claims that the US has already donated between $300 billion and $350 billion to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The actual figure is probably somewhere between $119 billion and $182 billion, depending on different estimates. A lot of money, to be sure, but certainly not $350 billion (or $500 billion). By some estimates, Europe has actually given Ukraine even more than the US, and these were certainly not loans, as Trump tried to claim recently, quickly corrected by Emmanuel Macron.
And neither were the US's aid donations loans. Trump can't (or shouldn't be able to) turn round now and demand the money back. If this is the "art of the deal", then the civilized West should want no part of it. The guy is a global embarrassment.
UPDATE
The video of President Zelenskyy "negotiating" with Donald Trump and JD Vance, in the Oval Office of the White House, must be seen to be believed. This is Trump and Vance's idea of diplomacy - like a couple of schoolyard bullies who throw their weight around, repeat things over and over again, and don't allow their victim to get a word in edgewise.
It was a deliberate public humiliation, the two working together like a tag team to bait, browbeat and berate Zelenskyy. The fact that the whole thing was televised, while unprecedented, was surely no accident. The unabashedly anti-Ukraine Vance was usually the instigator, but as soon as Trump felt himself being contradicted, he was off, no holds barred. So this, captured on prime-time TV, was Donald Trump's much-vaunted "art of the deal", which seems to involve being in an unassailable position in the first place, and then threatening and shouting down your opponent!
Time after time, both Americans kept insisting that Zelenskyy was not thankful enough, that he was disrespectful. Indeed, respect - obeisance, you might say - seemed to be the thing both men were most interested in. Zelenskyy, on the other hand, was concerned with the continued existence of his country, and the number of lives his countrymen will continue to lose. Reasonably enough, he does not want to sign away his country's mineral wealth to a rapacious USA and get nothing in return. The contrast between the two points of view was palpable, even if Trump and Vance were oblivious to it. Zelenskyy's anger and frustration were totally understandable.
Zelenskyy actually has no reason to be thankful to the Republican Party, which did its level best to block President Biden's generous support of Ukraine over the last three years, and is now seeking to distance itself as far as possible from American involvement. And, as Zelenskyy repeatedly tried to interject into the barrage of abuse against him, he has thanked America many times.
Zelenskyy, unlike most of Trump's recent sycophantic, pusillanimous visitors (looking at you, Keir Starmer), was willing to fight back against the bullies, albeit in what is probably his third language. Suffice to say, he left without signing away Ukraine's mineral wealth, for which Ukraine should probably be thankful.
Trump and Vance, for all their repeated insistence on respect from Zelenskyy, lost any respect anyone might have had for them. Most of the world reiterated their support for Ukraine after the debacle, although usually with very muted criticism of Trump (everyone is scared stiff to cross him). Only American Republicans supported and praised their Glorious Leader's "performance", increasingly isolated on the world stage. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin contented himself with silently rubbing his hands with glee.
As one of the very few foreign journalists allowed in to report on the political and social conditions in Iran, the Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York centre-fold article on the growing political and religious defiance in Iran is eye-opening.
When Mohamad Khatami was elected Iranian president on a reformist/liberalization platform in the late 90s, there were wild hopes that the Iranian people could rise from under the cruel yoke of an Islamic fundamentalism that, in particular, mandated repression of women, through the police state of the revolutionary guard and the much-hated "morality police". But Khatami's attempts at liberalization were soon clamped down and rolled back by the "authorities" (i.e. the religious leadership and the police).
Since the election of new "reformist" presidents like Ebrahim Raisi in 2021 and Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024, and building on the widespread protests following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022, there has been a growing quiet defiance in Iran. Iranian women are openly defying the fundamentalist rules of the theocracy, quite literally letting their their hair down in public places. The younger generation in particular is leading this brave defiance.
These women are still risking arrest, but increasingly the police are overlooking such contraventions. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this year, Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Javad Zarif said, "If you go to the streets of Tehran, you see that here are women who are not covering their hair. It's against the law, but the government has decided not to put women under pressure. This was a promise that President Pezeshkian made. He did not implement the law, with the consent of the leadership. So, we are moving in the right direction."
Iranian hardliners slammed Zarif's interview, and many women were somewhat disgusted at the government's attempt to take credit for a protest that they themselves had instigated (and for which they still run the risk of summary arrest). But this is nevertheless an extraordinary development in modern Iran, and gives hope that eventually the country will be able to shake off the stifling chains of its Islamist theocracy.
And, never forget, it is grass-roots Iranian women that are leading the charge here.
"We'd like you to kick their asses again because you don't boo the United States of America ... we look forward to the United States beating our soon-to-be 51st state, Canada".
So blustered US Vice President JD Vance (never trust a man who won't use his first name...) just before the Four Nations Face-Off hockey final. Trump, too, added some forgettable supposedly-humorous comments on the game.
So, how did that go, guys? Well, it went 3-2 to Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau taunted Trump on X after the game, saying, "You can't take our country - and you can't take our game". And, it turns out, yes, you can boo the United States of America, and still come out on top. The USA may be a big, rich bully, but Canada can still win at some things.
This is hilarious, depressing and scary, all at once.
A Canadian put a post on X and BlueSky, defending Canada against American extremism. The post - which read,"For a US President to refer to the Prime Minister of Canada as 'Governor' isn't just rude. It's a hostile act." - was pretty tame. And indeed it hardly registered a blip on BlueSky (which is mainly populated by refugees from the increasingly toxic X).
On X, however, the post completely blew up. Responses ranged from "Get over it, it was a joke" to "Yeah, but it's Canada, so who gives a fuck?", "Fuck Canada", "Trudeau deserves it because he's a jerk, and anyway he insulted Trump too", "Whuddya gonna do about it, pussy?", "Come and do something about it. I'd love to see you little maple syrup gay boys try something", and worse. Choice epithets included "cuck", "bitch", "coward", "drama queen", "beta male", "soy boy", "libtard", "snowflake", "butt-hurt", "faggot", "pansy", "trans communist", "Good Jew".
Wow.
Just the choices of terms of abuse alone give a pretty good idea of where Trump's America's head is right now. And the vitriol, the absolute disdain and contempt for anything approaching liberalism or even impartiality, is a thing to behold.
There's a lot of bad feeling in Canada these days, and a lot of divisiveness, negativism and even hostility (thanks almost entirely to Pierre Poilievre and his populist shtick). But, God, am I glad I don't have to live in the USA. It's hard enough living next door.
God, the Trump administration really knows how to piss people off. And it's not just Trump himself, but those who are hanging on his coat-tails seem to think they also have a God-given right to hector, berate, cajole and generally come over all smug, supercilious and disdainful.
The latest of many such examples is Vice President J D Vance's speech to the European Union at the Munich Security Conference. Accusing European governments of retreating from their core values and ignoring voter concerns about immigration and free speech, Vance's address was met with a disbelieving silence. Yes, this was the Trump administration lecturing Europe about the state of their democracy! Later, many delegates were much louder in their condemnation (except Germany's fascist AfD party, which thought the speech was "excellent").
It's not just that he failed to read the room; he made no attempt to read the room. Trump and those he sends out to spread his ill-advised gospel are so arrogant, so cocksure, that they don't think twice about saying whatever the hell they want. International diplomacy has given way to bullying and intimidation.
As usual, Donald Trump just doesn't get it, living as he does on a complete different planet from the rest of us.
Inserting himself into yet another situation where he's not really wanted, Trump is "making deals" with global pariah, Vladimir Putin, presenting a peace plan for the 3-year old war in Ukraine without even involving Ukraine (or Europe).
Trump is desperate to earn himself the Nobel Peace Prize, and his simplistic conception of brokering peace is to offer his buddy Putin whatever he wants, Ukraine be damned. So, as far as he is concerned, Russia can keep the Donbas and anything else they might have illegally annexed, and he is quite happy to conclude a deal - on behalf of Ukraine - assuring that Ukraine will never join NATO (another of Putin's stipulations), which would be the only thing standing between Ukraine and another invasion by Russia a few years down the road, to finish the job once and for all.
"I think I have the power to end this war", says Trump. Well, yes, if you mean by giving part (or even all) of Ukraine to bro-buddy Vladimir Putin. But that's not, it should be noted, the point.
Trump doesn't care about Ukraine, nor does he care about morality or "doing the right thing". That is not who he is. All he cares about is his legacy and what makes money for the USA. With gob-smacking cynicism, he is tying further support for Ukraine to American access to Ukrainian rare earth minerals. He blithely deadpans, "They may be Russian someday or they may not be Russian someday". His scorn and arrogance knows no bounds.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy is being understandably carefully in his public remarks about Trump, buy he must be seething inside. Europe is, perhaps rashly, being less careful in its language, using phrases like "dictated peace", "appeasement" and "dirty deal". Trump has already made clear that he is not willing to bankroll Ukraine further, and has even indicated that Europe can no longer rely on the USA's help with its own security. Let's hope it doesn't get any worse.
UPDATE
It's already getting worse. In one of his many unguarded moments, Trump even accused Ukraine of starting the war. Repeating Putin's claims that it was not Russia but Ukraine that started the wars in 2014 and 2022, Trump said,
"I hear they're upset at not having a seat. Well, they've had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal."
Unbelievable. What world does he live in?
And then of course he just waded in and made everything even worse, as is his wont, calling Zelenskyy a "dictator" for not holding elections while the country is under martial law after the Russian invasion, and questioning his legitimacy in office (a common Russian theme). (UPDATE: Later, Trump would say about this incident, "Did I say that? I can't believe I said that. Next question", trying to laugh it off.)
He further claimed that Zelenskyy's approval rating - Trump's measure of legitimacy, where TV ratings are not available - is down at 4%. No-one is very sure where he plucked that particular figure from. The most recent official survey, earlier this month, has Zelenskyy at 57% - down from 77% at the end of 2023, granted, but 4%?
How far has this bare-faced attempt at American-Russian revisionism gone? Well, as we approach the three-year mark of the war, the US is openly resisting a joint G7 statement condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine. Washington is apparently "concerned" at the way in which the war is being framed in the proposed statement. Trump has also proposed that Russia be allowed back into the G7, from which it was ejected after annexing Crimea back in 2014. Just what kind of hold does Putin have over Trump and his feckless Republican lackeys?
The Globe and Mail's Guide to Trumpism's Online Universe (or Donald Trump's Social Spheres, as the online version of the article title inexplicably gets re-translated) is an eye-opening introduction to America's right-wing media landscape and its most important social platforms. Eye-opening not least because I've never even heard of some of them (perhaps not that surprising given that I'm 65, British-Canadian, and my politics swing left to green).
The big five platforms favoured by Trump and his supporters are:
There are many others, even less well-known including Gab, Parler, Gettr. None of them have any serious moderation (which is, of course, considered woke, liberal, mollycoddling interference), so anything goes - and indeed, is encouraged - including deepfakes, offensive memes, and outright hatespeech.
The left has nothing like this network. BlueSky may be the closest thing, but it is merely a more heavily-moderated version of X, to which many on the left have decamped in order to escape the toxicity of current-day X. It is not pro-left as such, merely a platform trying to maintain some objectivity and truth. It does not allow the kind of showmanship and outright lies the pro-right outlets do. With this unfair advantage, it's hardly surprising that the far right is in the ascendance at the moment.
From what I hear and read, most people outside of the USA think that Donald Trump is an idiot, and that his slash and burn approach to politics since his election, both nationally and internationally, has been nothing short of disastrous. But what do Americans think of the show so far?
A CBS News poll suggests that they're actually pretty happy, generally speaking, with a few provisos. Which gives a good (if scary) indication of where the American people's heads are right now.
70% think he is doing exactly what he promised in his election campaign, and they're probably not far wrong there. But 53% give him an overall approval rating, compared to 47% who disapprove, which is actually more than the margin in the popular vote of the election (49.8% to 48.3%). People find him tough, energetic, focussed and effective (they're probably not wrong there either, much as I wish they were).
On more specific issues, 59% approve of his program to deport illegal immigrants, and 64% approve of his sending troops to the Mexican border, although 52% disapprove of large detention centres for deportees. Amazingly, 54% approve of his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, although only 13% think that the US taking over Gaza is a good idea, compared to 47% who think it is a bad idea (again amazingly, 40% are not sure!)
His single biggest failing in the eyes of the US population is in his inability to lower prices, although why anyone would have thought that was possible, I'm not sure. 66% think he is not doing enough on that front, which was a major part of his election platform.
And those tariffs? Well, 56% favour tariffs on China, but there is much less enthusiasm for tariffs on America's allies: 44% favour tariffs on Mexico (56% are against them), 40% on Europe (60% against), and 38% on Canada (62% against). Which makes me feel very, very slightly better...
Elon Musk's role in the government is not very popular either. Just 23% think he should have a lot of influence over government operations and spending (which is what he seems to have), 28% some influence, 18% not much influence, and 30% no influence at all. The Republican-Democrat breakdown of that vote is even more stark than with most of the others; he is a very polarizing guy.
All in all, a mixed bag, but a surprisingly positive reception for some of the wacky stunts Trump has been pulling during his first month of power. I had hoped for a general uprising of the people - not going to happen.
Full disclosure, I'm not a huge fan of either Drake or Kendrick Lamar (or of rap in general, tbh). But I'm still a bit bemused by all the fuss over this ongoing "beef" between them, which became even more public after Lamar's star billing at this year's Super Bowl and his performance of the song Not Like Us.
Probably the two biggest rap stars in the world right now, they have been "dissing" each other for years now, but it came to a head with Lamar's allegations (originally veiled, later fully-realized) that Drake has had sexual relations with underage fans, and maybe even has a young girlfriend hidden away somewhere.
"Say, Drake, I hear you like 'em young ... Tryna strike a chord and I hear it's A Minor ... Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophile". It doesn't get much more in-your-face than that!
Drake has responded with his own diss tracks against Lamar, and most recently by suing Lamar's record label for releasing Not Like Us, which of course has only met with ridicule from the macho hip-hop crowd.
But hold on, what evidence has Lamar for his allegations, in verse and otherwise? Drake has challenged him to reveal his proof, to no avail. I've read several articles on the subject, and nowhere have I seen any kind of proof being offered. Maybe it has to go to court before such minor details need to be addressed?
It's not clear to me exactly what you can say in a song, and avoid being accused of slander and libel. But surely you can't go around accusing people of being pedophiles and expect to get away with it? Can you?
It seems to me that this whole diss thing is just a way of selling more music and making more money (not that either of them need it!) Not Like Us saw a 430% increase in streams after the Super Bowl half-time show, reaching a billion streams on Spotify alone.
There are also allegations (also as yet unproven) that Lamar's song streams, particularly of Not Like Us, have been artificially inflated by the likes of Spotify and Universal Music Group. The whole thing looks very sordid. Maybe they just have nothing better to do than exercise their inflated egos.
Buffy Sainte-Marie has had her Order of Canada revoked ("terminated" seems to be the official description; "scrapped" is what it actually is), because some people think she is just not Indigenous enough. She has been officially and summarily cancelled and is now persona non grata.
As I have commented before, a CBC Fifth Estate documentary about a year ago (whose findings were contested) found some documents that contradicted some of Ms. Sainte-Marie's claims of Indigenous ancestry. Many (but by no means all) Indigenous people were outraged, and called for her to be punished. And so now, a year later, we have this.
Except it doesn't really make much sense to me. See, the thing is, she was given the prestigious award of the Order of Canada back in 1997 for her decades of activism in support of First Nations and Métis, and for raising awareness of political and social issues as they affect Indigenous people. That hasn't changed. Her decades of work are as valuable and influential now as they were in 1997. So, why revoke ("terminate") her Order of Canada?
Well, because some people - mainly Indigenous people, the very people whom Ms. Sainte-Marie helped and paved the way for - have campaigned tirelessly to have her honour removed. No official reason was given by the Office of the Secretary of the Governor General for her removal, but the usual justifications are a criminal conviction or "conduct that may undermine the integrity of the order". She hasn't been convicted of anything, so I guess it must be the latter.
But, in my humble opinion as a mere settler, it is the Office of the Governor General itself (and perhaps Mary Simon, Canada's first Indigenous Governor General - her personal role in this has yet to be made clear) that has undermined its own integrity by this action. I don't think we have heard the last of this.
Well, this is heartening. A new poll about which Canadian politicians would be best at dealing with Donald Trump, puts Mark Carney streets ahead.
It's not that I'm a huge fan of the Liberals. But I am a huge anti-fan of the Conservatives, particularly the current incarnation under Pierre Poilievre, who I see as the most dangerous and destabilizing force in Canadian politics in many a year.
Asked "Which of the following politicians would do the best job at negotiating with President Trump", 40% responded Mark Carney, 26% Pierre Poilievre, 13% Chrystia Freeland, and 1% Karina Gould (the rest being either unsure or think it would make no difference).
That's a surprise considering how untested and inexperienced Carney is in national and international politics. No-one doubts that he is a smart cookie and more than able to carry an argument, but is he battle-hardened enough?
The size of this advantage gives me some hope that Poilievre may not be a slam dunk for the federal election which is expected later this spring. I may have to hold my nose to vote Liberal, but I'll do it to keep Poilievre's hands off power.
UPDATE
A new Ipsos Reid poll in late February actually has the Liberals with 38% to the Conservatives' 36%, the first time the Liberals have led in polls since the heady days of 2021. This overturns a 26% deficit just six weeks ago!
I'm currently manfully ploughing my way through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind, it's a thick tome of anthropology, evolutionary psychology, history and politics, a tour de force of grand scope that attempts nothing less than a critical summary of the whole of human history (and prehistory).
It's full of fascinating observations and surprising conclusions (and I'm less than a quarter of the way through!) It is written in an engaging, no-nonsense style, albeit with the weight of copious analysis and academic research behind it.
Just to take one example, starting about 10,000-11,000 years ago, humankind across the world started gradually moving away from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled agricultural life, cultivating a much more limited number of crops and animals. This was the so-alled Agricultural Revolution, usually considered one of the most important steps in human progress, and a great leap forward in our development.
Harari, however, calls it "History's Biggest Fraud". He argues that the Agricultural Revolution was not evidence of humanity's increasing intelligence, not was it the renunciation of a gruelling, dangerous hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of a pleasanter, easy-living, bucolic life of farming.
Rather, the new farmers typically had an even harder life than before: backbreaking work clearing fields, weeding, building fences, guarding against pests, watering, collecting animal faeces to nourish the soil, etc, etc. Yes, it allowed for greater food production, albeit of a much more limited and less healthy variety of foods, and the improved food supply and settled homes allowed for more babies to be born. But more babies needed more food, and babies were fed cereals rather than breast-milk to allow the mothers to work more, reducing their immune systems, and leading to many more infant deaths.
It doesn't end there. If the staple crop failed due to an infestation or bad weather, peasants died by the thousands. Tribe-against-tribe violence increased, as the best agricultural land was fought over tooth and nail. Infections and diseases flourished in the busier, closer, more enclosed living quarters. Forests were cleared to make room for mono-culture plantings, a process still going on today. Once free-roaming animals were domesticated, penned, whipped, harnessed, even mutilated and tortured, before being unceremoniously slaughtered at a young age, all in the interests of human food production.
And, once the process was started, and populations were continuously growing, there was just no going back to the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This is what Harari calls the "luxury trap", and he describes a couple of interesting modern analogies.
College graduates take demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing to work hard, earn lots of money and retire at 35. But, by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children in school, houses in the suburbs, and a taste for the high life. There is no easy way to retire, and they continue to slave away for decades.
Another modern example: when email arrived, people stopped spending so much time writing, addressing and posting physical letters, and then waiting days or weeks for a reply, opting instead for the ease and convenience of firing off a quick email, and expecting an almost immediate reply. But now people dash off emails for the slightest of reasons, not just when there is something important to relate, and we are all tied to our over-full inboxes, stressed and anxious. Progress?
I'm looking forward to the next three quarters of the book.
I know I keep writing about little Norway, but it is a pretty special place. The latest from Troll Land is that almost 96% of the cars sold in Norway during the month of January 2025 were electric. 8,954 of the 9,343 cars sold were all-electric and, of the 50 most-sold models, only two were non-electric (the first of which came in 33rd place).
So, as places like Canada and the US.(and even Europe to a lesser extent) are seeing a serious retrenchment and backlash against electric vehicles, mainly as a result of Donald Trump's efforts, Norway forges ahead on its own path, doing the right thing and not giving in to commercial pressures and populist rhetoric. They expect to reach 100% electric cars later this year, ten years ahead of the EU, for example, which has a goal of 2035.
And they are doing this not by banning the sale of internal combustion engines by a certain date like the EU and others, but by continuing to offer generous tax tax breaks on EVs, which make them more than competitive with heavily-taxed gas models.
There wa a rather striking graphic in yesterday's Globe and Mail that didn't appear in the online version of the article for some reason, so I have copied it here.
It shows the progress of a vehicle being manufactured in North America. It shows just how complex and integrated the process is these days. But to me, more thsn anything, it shows just how convoluted and carbon-intense it has become.
It starts in Mexico with the metal casing. Then it goes up to Canada, where the crankshaft is re-finished. Then down to the US for further finishing ofnrhe crankshaft. Then back to Canada, where the crankshaft is incorporated into the engine. Back to a US assembly plant. Back to Canada for painting and trims. And finally back to the US to be sold to a consumer.
Now, that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Re-finishing in one country, then more re-finishing in another? A vehicle in the US has to go to Canada to be painted before returning to the US for sale?
And it's not just cars, of course. Canada exports aluminum to the USA, they make cans, and then they export them BACK to Canada for beer, pop, etc, containers. Ridiculous!
It just seems so inefficient, although no doubt it is justified by economies of scale or labour practices or some other such considerations. But the unnecessary transportation costs and the alarming carbon footprint this system entails is surely hard to justify. Is this the state of modern capitalism in some of the most advanced countries in the world. Crazy.
Much as I hate to return to the subject of Donald Trump, which only serves to gratify his narcissistic tendencies, there is just so much wrong with his recent imposition of a 25% tariff on Canadian (and Mexican and Chinese) imports that it is hard to just let it go.
American business groups and companies, politicians, and even regular American folk (even Republicans!), are complaining about it because they understand, as Trump seems not to, that it is not grounded in economic reality. It is not a way of correcting the balance of payments deficit with Canada, not is it helping American businesses or the country as a whole.
In fact, it is not an economic measure at all, it is merely a kind of punishment for us not being American, a pressure tactic to get us to do what he wants. Purely and simply it is bullying; he does it because he can.
One of Trump's main beefs with Canada - other than just the fact that we are way too liberal about everything - is that he thinks that the American fentanyl problem is huge and Canadian-made. He has made it clear that, in his twisted mind, this is one of the main reasons for the tariff move.
Setting aside the fact that the demand for illegal drugs in the USA is very much an American thing - we don't create the demand! - Trump's claims that fentanyl is killing 250,000 - 300,000 American a year, as he said during his inaugural address, is clearly nonsense. (White House spokesperson Katherine Leavitt's claim that fentanyl is killing "tens of millions of Americans" is just laughable.)
It turns out that, at its worst (2022 - 2023), America's total drug overdose deaths were around 114,000, and that is from fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and all other drugs. Not to be sneezed at, to be sure, but not anything like the figures Trump or his lackeys quote. Furthermore, since then, this figure has been plummeting, falling below 90,000 deaths for the first time in a decade.
As for Canada's role in all this, yes, there is some fentanyl finding its way from Canada to the USA, but less than 1% of America's fentanyl comes from Canada, as Justin Trudeau pointed out in a speech on the tariffs, a figure backed up by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. We supply fewer illegal drugs to the US than they supply to us! A handy DEA report on fentanyl flow to the USA shows that China and Mexico are the major culprits, with India becoming a player (Canada is not even mentioned).
Trump's blather about Canada's increasing contribution to narcotics distribution and the activities of Mexican drug cartels on Canadian soil is just that, blather. In 2024, for example, 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the US-Canadian border, compared to about 21,148 pounds at the US-Mexico border, putting Canada's contribition at about 0.2%. (UPDATE: Actually, it turns out that a third of even that small amount of 43 pounds was misreported: it was seized in Spokane, Washington, about 150 kilometres from the Canadian border, and traced to three Mexican nationals!) Also, both of those figures are already on the decline, as both Mexico and Canada clamp down on illegal activities.
Furthermore, of the drugs that are seized at the US-Canada border, fentanyl makes up about 0.05%, an almost vanishingly small percentage. The vast majority is marijuana, khat (a relatively mild stimulant, particularly popular with Somalis) and cocaine.
In fact, more drugs come into Canada from the USA than the other way round (to say nothing of the number of guns coming our way), and that flow is on the increase. So, in reality, it's the US that needs to get its act together not Canada.
It is a similar situation with illegal immigration from Canada to the USA, another irritant that Trump quotes as a major reason behind the tariffs. Trump insists that "millions and millions" of illegal aliens are crossing from Canada to the USA every year. US Customs and Border Protection data tells a different story: in 2024, US Border Patrol apprehended 23,721 illegal immigrants at their northern border (about 1.5% of the total), as compared to about 1.5 million apprehensions at the Mexican border. Also, more people crossed illegally from the US to Canada than the other way round. Natch.
Now, I don't expect Trump to listen to any of these figures. He does what he wants, and no amount of logic and statistics are going to get in the way of that. But it makes me feel better to get it off my chest. Trump, meanwhile, needs to look into why so many Americans are hooked on drugs and not leading better lives in the land of the free.
Remember all the hoo-hah a few months ago about foreign interference in the Canadian electoral and political systems? There was talk of the "witting and semi-witting" participation of Canadian politicians in political meddling by Chinese, Indian, Russian and a bunch of other ne'erdowells. Hell, there was even talk of "traitors" and treason".
It was a big deal, and there was much tearing of hair and soul-searching, and not a little finger-pointing and partisan shouting. A detailed and wide-ranging public inquiry was called for.
Well, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue's final report has just been released and the conclusions are ... well, "underwhelming" is the word that springs to mind. There is absolutely "no evidence of 'traitors' " among Canadian lawmakers, and the country's democratic institutions remain "robust in the face of foreign interference" attempts. It's all a bit of a let-down quite honestly.
Some of the more outré claims and allegations should probably be walked back, preferably with apologies. But don't expect that in today's polarized, hyper-partisan atmosphere.
Mind you, Mme. Hogue didn't give a complete unconditional pass. She notes that some politicians had been found to be "behaving naively" and displaying "questionable" ethics and "concerning conduct", but nothing that had not been happening for many years previously. The few attempts to curry favour with lawmakers remain "margin and largely ineffective", and there is no need for "widespread alarm". Critically, the results of the last two elections were not swayed by any of the antics of foreign actors.
She did also make 51 recommendations to further safeguard future elections, most of which will be implemented in time for the next federal election in just a few short months' time. She also pointed to the general climate of nastiness and disinformation that has become the norm now, since Trump's successes with it south of the border, suggesting that this is probably a much bigger problem than direct interference by state actors.
Happy Fifth Anniversary, Brexit! Or is it? Believe it or not, it has been 5 years to the day since Britain severed political ties with the European Union, on January 31st 2020 (and four years since it left the European single market and customs union).
So, how has that gone?Not that well, it seems, although maybe not quite as disastrously as I might have predicted.
Setting aside the way in which it has divided British society, setting family members and long-standing friends against each other in acrimonious political dispute, Brexit's effect on Britain's trade has been generally negative, economists agree, but not entirely so.
Exports of goods are substantially down, as expected, although different studies disagree as to how much (6%? 30%?), with smaller companies being disproportiately affected. But exports of services from the UK (advertising. management consulting, information technology, etc) are up, a lot. Overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the UK's economy has taken about a £100 billion hit.(about 4%) as a result of Brexit.
On immigration, a major plank of the Brexit campaign, results have also been mixed. Net immigration from Europe has indeed fallen a bit, but immigration from the rest of the world has increased by a lot more. So, net immigration has actually increased, by quite a lot!
Travel in and out of the UK/EU has not changed that much, although plans to introduce ETA/ETIAS permits to later this year will make the administration even more burdensome and expensive, in both directions, and this may (or may not) have a dampening effect on travel.
Likewise, Brexit was supposed to give the UK much more independence in the laws it can pass. But thousands of "retained EU laws" were passed in the UK just after Brexit announcement. And only a small proportion of those (mainly small obscure regulations, at that) were repealed by the various Conservative governments, so UK law actually still reflects EU law pretty closely.
And has Brexit actually saved the UK bags of money, as the Leave campaign promised? Yes, around £18 billion a year in public sector contributions to the EU are no longer being paid out. But, at the same time, £5 billion a year in agricultural funding from the EU has stopped, and $4 billion a year in "rebates" on EU Budget contributions further whittles down the annual saving to around £9 billion. Add to that £21.3 billion in official Brexit Withdrawal Agreement payments to the EU, and the UK has hardly seen any overall savings yet, although that may yet start to materialize in the years to come (there are still many unknowns involved).
For example, after Brexit, the UK did stop paying into the Horizon pan-European scientific research scheme, from which it used to be a net beneficiary, in terms of science grants, etc). But in 2023, it decided to re-join the scheme, even though it is now a net payer to the tune of about £2 billion a year.
So, as ever in politics, nothing is ever simple, certainly not as simple as populists like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage assured the British public. And now, with a more conciliatory Labour government in power, the future may be even more difficult to predict.
As I sit watching the waves on a beach at the less trendy end of Grand Cayman, I got to wondering about the truth about the mythical (pr perhaps not) "seventh wave".
The truth, as these things usually turn out, is complicated.
The short answer is that the old saw is nonsense: ocean waves are generated by the wind way out to sea before they crash onto the beach, and the wind is capricious and unpredictable. Why then, should we expect waves to be regular?
However, once a few waves get going and begin to feed off and amplify each other, they do become a bit more coherent and regular, and in practice they do tend to form packs or groups of between 12 and 16 waves, with the biggest waves in the centre of the pack. So, the group of waves typically goes from small to big and back to small again, with the largest wave of the group right around number seven or eight.
However, that does still mean that the largest waves only occur every 12, 14 or 16 waves, not the 7 of folklore. Sorry.
And just while we are about it, why do waves break anyway? Waves out at sea are caused by the wind imparting its energy and friction to the waves it comes into contact with. But waves out at sea usually don't break - they just cause bigger and bigger swells.
When the waves approach a coastline, though, the water is shallower and there is less water to draw up into the wave. At the same time, there is more friction acting on the bottom of the wave (where it meets the seabed) than there is at the top. So, the bottom is slowed down more than the top until eventually the top of the wave kind of overbalances and topples over itself due to the force of gravity. This is what we see as the wave breaking. So, there you go.
I have been making my way through Carol Off's excellent 2024 book, At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage.
It is ostensibly a book about words and how they have been changed, redefined and weaponized. But it is also a pretty comprehensive (and rather depressing) look at how the alt right has become such a force in Canadian, American and worldwide politics, and how the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right that outright fascist views are being openly espoused by mainstream politicians.
Along the way, she looks at Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, SteoehnHarper, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Radovan Karazdic, Ron DeSantis, and several lesser-known, but equally influential and blameworthy, names like Arthur Finkelstein, Christopher Rufo, James Buchanan, Leonard Leo and Tamara Lich, not to mention a cornucopia of well-funded, largely secretive, organizations whose single-minded purpose is the imposition of anti-woke autocratic rule and the permanent destruction of caring liberal democratic governance.
The book is replete with literally hundreds of interlinked anecdotes about how the extreme right has employed disinformation, exaggeration, doublethink, and outright barefaced lies to achieve its ends, and how successful it has been at it. "Dystopian" and "Orwellian" don't even cover it. So confident are they that they make little or no attempt to dissemble, and there is oodles of publicly-available evidence of their Machiavellian machinations.
The chapters are named after words that have been co-opted by the hard right in many different countries: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, and Taxes. But what Ms. Off does really well is outline how interconnected the right is throughout the world, and how they learn from each other, sometimes indirectly, but often surprisingly directly, to an extent that the left has never been able to.
Clearly, the hard right, and in many cases - let's not beat about the bush - openly fascist, regimes see their opportunity, their moment in history, like at no other time since the 1930s and 1940s.
It's only when you read all of this, together in one place, that you realize the enormity of what is going on under our very noses. It makes truly scary, but essential, reading.
Interesting article in Psychology Today, not a publication I often read, about whether we really need to have a purpose in life.
Sounds a bit heavy perhaps, but I've always thought that having a purpose in life, and constantly searching for a "meaning" of life, to be overrated, just a back door into the dead end of religion. Personally, I don't feel the need for a meaning to my life, or a purpose to it. I'm here and it's quite nice, and that's just fine for me. But lots of people agonize over it, and the lack of it leads many people into mental health problems. So, you could argue that often it is this need for meaning and purpose that CAUSES mental illness.
The article outlines the way in which wanting and having a purpose in life helps many people become successful, happy members of society. But if it turns out that they change their minds about that purpose they have set for themselves, that's when the stress and anxiety clicks in. And if someone feels they need a purpose and don't find one, they too turn stressed, depressed and worse.
Better, then, not to go there at all, it seems to me. Just live your life, be nice to people, try to leave things a bit better than you found them (or at least not worse), and just enjoy it. I know I am perhaps in an enviable position, born into the western world, well-educated and not short of money, so maybe I have a rosier outlook than many. Personally, I blame religion for much of that obsession with meaning and purpose, but then I tend to blame religion for many things.
Remenber COVID? Yup, still with us.
The latest Health Canada update of the status of respiratory diseases indicates that the COVID positivity rate has decreased a bit, but that some 4,000 people have been hospitalized for COVID since the end of August, of which 285 required intensive care. This is obviously much fewer than at the pandemic's height, but it is far from insignificant.
The stat that really stood out for me, though, was that there have been 750 deaths from COVID since August, compared to 43 deaths from flu, for example. So, to say that COVID has become just like the seasonal flu bug is far from the truth. I'm wearing a mask when we fly south later this week.
It's no secret that Donald Trump loves tariffs. "To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it's my favourite word", he said in a Bloomberg interview (and many other times). I wonder if he knows that "tariff" actually comes from an Arabic word, via Italian. Probably not.
I wonder though if it's possible that he doesn't actually understand how tariffs work. He must have had economists explain it to him, surely, and economists agree that tariffs are costly and would not generate the benefits that Trump claims for them.
However, as he reiterated during his inauguration, Trump appears to believe that imposing tariffs on imports benefits Americans financially: "Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens".
Except that's not how tariffs work, as any economist could tell him. A tariff levied on imported goods is borne by the domestic company that imports the goods, not the foreign company that exports them. That company would then charge consumers more to compensate - few, if any, companies will voluntarily take a hit to their bottom line and NOT raise consumer prices - making the goods more expensive for (in this case) American consumers, increasing inflation in the process.
For good measure, the USA already has a very similar example of the ill-advised imposition of tariffs from nearly 100 years ago, from which to learn. In 1930, under President Herbert Hoover, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act imposed 20% tariffs on a broad spectrum of goods, against the advice of hundreds of American economists, employing broadly similar arguments to Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, we know how that one turned out. It triggered a global trade war and retaliatory tariffs, the stock market crashed, US exports fell by two-thirds, unemployment tripled, inflation spiked, and the 1929 recession tipped into a full-blown depression. Oops.
So, what gives? Did Trump manage to find an economist that would tell him what he wants to hear, rather than the truth? That's certainly plausible, but weird. Maybe he just doesn't understand what he's being told, or just prefers to "go with his gut"? Also plausible, but also weird.
I'm not really expecting Trump to re-evaluate his gut feeling; that's not the way he rolls. But it will be interesting to see just how badly it goes.
Donald Trump is expected to sign a record-breaking 100+ executive orders on his first day as President ("Day 1", as he would have it). He had them all ready and waiting. Here's a quick summary of the main ones, and it makes for some scary reading. During his first term he signed more executive orders than any other recent president; his second term is likely to blow it away. A particular attraction for him is that there is little to no oversight from Congress, and he gets to feel like a bona fide dictator.
But what is an executive order anyway, and why are they allowed? An executive order is basically a legally-binding written order by a president which does not require congressional approval. Their authority comes from Article II of the Constitution - "The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States" - although this is so vague as to be almost useless as a guide.
Almost all US presidents use them - Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton particularly liked them, although even they can't hold a candle to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge, whose use of them numbered into the thousands. Donald Trump REALLY likes them.
They can be used for relatively minor things, like establishing a new national holiday or renaming the Gulf Mexico, or much more substantive issues like nationalizing an industry or instituting mass deportations or mator trade tariff changes. increasingly they are being used to reverse an executive order of a previous President in a potentually unending back-and-forth.
Technically, Congress can pass a law to override an executive action (although the President may be able to block that), and technically their legality can be reviewed by the Office of legal Counsel (which doesn't always happen) and they can be reversed by the courts if they are illegal or unconstitutional. But in the main, a President's executive orders stick, at least for a few years.
It seems ridiculous to me that such a powerful and essentially unregulated political tool can reside in theg hands of a single individual. An unscrupulous or mentally unbalanced president could enact all sorts of petty or dangerous laws (sound familiar?) with impunity, contrary to the wishes of the governing party or Congress in general, and certainly against the will of the populace.
How is this democratic? A loose cannon like Donald Trump could bring in all sorts of wacky rules to the detriment of the country, and indeed of the whole world, without any congressional agreement or legal regulation (especially given the tame Supreme Court Trump has engineered, the generally pro-Trump Republican majority in Congress, and the fact that he has surrrounded himself with a cabinet of fiercely loyal acolytes, regardless of their experience in their jobs, or lack thereof).
I'm not aware of anything even remotely similar to this system of executive orders in other jurisdictions like Canada or the UK.
Here's a conundrum. Most of the people who voted Donald Trump into power don't actually agree with his policies. So, if they didn't vote for his policies, what did they vote for? His charisma? His brotherley love vibes? A chimera?
A recent survey for Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that:
So, why did they vote for Trump, again? Mass hysteria? Overcome by emotion, tired of logic and reason? By mistake? Well, they're stuck with him now. And so is the rest of the world.
With Donald Trump's threats of 25% tariffs hanging over us, Canadian politicians, economists and businessmen are arguing among themselves over the best retaliatory tariffs to levy back against our largest trading partner, the USA. But everyone seems agreed that retaliatory tariffs are in fact the way to go, indeed the only possible way to go.
What if they weren't? I know it's economic heresy, but I can't help wondering whether we have fully thought this through. And finally I came across another heretical article in the Globe and Mail asking the same question.
Many commentators have leveraged the 2018 experience, when Trump levied tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum exports and Canada hit back with a tit-for-tat retaliation, resulting in the American tariffs being lifted and new agreement struck on steel and aluminum. But it didn't have to end that way, and there is no guarantee that it would end that way a second time, particularly when dealing the ever-mercurial Trump. And we still ended up with a worse deal on steel and aluminum than we started with. The Globe article offers some alarming counter-examples from recent years.
Trump just uses tariffs of this sort as a bully tactic, just one part of his weird negotiating technique. If we retaliate, we hurt our own economy even more, just as the American economy is hurt by Trump's tariffs. Do we really want to voluntarily saddle ourselves with this double whammy? Nothing we do to America has the power to hurt them anything like as much as we are hurt ourselves, despite what a belligerent Doug Ford says. I'm sorry, but we are not going to somehow bring American to its knees.
Maybe we just need to ride out the Trump years, much as we rode out the COVID pandemic, by strengthening our social safety net and rebuilding our infrastructure, as the article suggests. (Trump is a pest very similar to a nasty virus). It won't be easy or cheap. But if we impose retaliatory tariffs, we would still have to ride it out, in addition to the harm it does to our own economy.
And, of course. there is no guarantee that any of it will change Trump's mind one iota. Trump doesn't really understand tariffs very well, despite it being the main single plank of his plan for economic trade. He seems to think that tariffs are paid by the other country (Canada, Mexico, China) and that they represent basically free money for the US. (In fact, American tariffs are paid by Americans, as people hav been telling him for years.) But Trump is not a logical being. What he is is vindictive, and our tariffs may well invite more (and potentially worse) retaliatory retaliations.
I finally got around to watching Israelism, a hard-hitting documentary about indoctrination and misinformation about Israel among American Jews.
Subtitled "The Awakening of Young American Jews", the 2023 film didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know because I have read around the subject, although I'm sure it will be a shocking eye-opener for a lot of people.
It looks in some detail at the way in which young Jewish people in America are fed a very one-sided and often false story about the creation of Israel, the way Jews are treated, and how the state of Israel is a paradise for Jews. It explains how well-funded this movement is, and how young impressionable American Jews are being indoctrinated and even recruited into the Israeli army.
It also shows that there is a whole cohort of young American Jews who are questioning this indoctrination, and visiting Israel and Palestine personally to see for themselves. They come away with a very different impression - a place where Palestinian lands are illegally settled by a rapacious Israeli political machine and fanatical fundamentalists, and Palestinian people are subjugated and oppressed in an apartheid system at least as brutal and absolute as anything in 20th century South Africa.
This has led to a plethora of activist groups in America of Jews opposed to the politics of the Israeli state, and supportive of Palestinian freedom and human rights. These groups are being routinely harassed and threatened online and in person by angry Zionist elements, and subjected to regular death threats, but they are bravely persisting because they have seen the injustice and feel they cannot remain silent.
The film makes no secret of the fact that there is indeed a burgeoning antisemitic movement in America (and worldwide) as the far right gains a foothold and unquestioningly pro-Israel populist politicians and demagogues proliferate. But it makes the point that, notwithstanding, the propaganda we are being fed about Israel remains wrong, and that criticizing Israel is not in itself antisemitic, as we are also told.
The documentary was produced before the October 7th 2023 incursion by Hamas and the bloodbath in Palestine that ensued in its wake. Perhaps not surprisingly, after the attack and the start of the war in Palestine, there was a concerted effort to get the movie banned on the grounds that it is antisemitic - it's not, and the movie itself explains why it's not.
It should be required viewing, but so entrenched are the pro-Israel views of many people, Jews and non-Jews, that I don't hold much hope that it will change many minds.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just banned a food additive known as Red 3, on the grounds that it has been shown in animals studies to cause cancer. The synthetic food dye, which colours candies, drinks, cosmetics, even some medications, a lurid cherry-red colour, has also been banned in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It was banned in cosmetics in the US as long ago as 1990.
And yet, FD&C Red No. 3, or is perfectly legal in Canada. So, what gives?
It turns out it's all about legal niceties. There is a legal provision in the USA that obliges the FDA to ban food additives found to cause cancer in either humans or animals. The Canadian rules only operate if a substance is found to be dangerous for humans.
You might think the American law is superior and we, here in Canada, should just ban the stuff anyway. But the two US rat studies that led to the ban found that Red 3 caused cancer in lab rats with a "rat-specific hormonal mechanism" that does not exist in humans. So, the effect of the additive on rats would almost certainly not translate into humans.
Canadian scientists agree that "evidence demonstrating human safety concern is lacking", and that "there is actually no evidence at all that it would be a danger in cosmetics". Consequently, there are some limits on how much of the food colouring can be used, but no ban. Moreover, a joint UN/WHO committee in 2018 looked at studies involving both humans and animals and found no safety concerns for the dye as a food additive.
That's not to say candies containing Red 3 will do you any good. Personally, I would steer well clear of anything coloured radioactive scarlet. And, a note to manufacturers, there are perfectly good natural dyes out there (beet juice extracts, anthocyanins extracted from berries, etc) without having to resort to synthetic crap just to sell a few more units.
I hadn't really noticed it, but apparently there is an unwritten rule in Canadian politics that whatever Camada votes federally, the province of Ontario votes the opposite. It even has a name, the Underhill Balance Theory, after Frank Underhill, a political scientist who noticed the phenomenon way back in the 1940s.
And it does seem to work. In the heyday of the federal Liberal Party after the Second World War - Mackenzie King, Louis St Laurent, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Elliott Trudeau - Ontario elected a series of Conservative Premiers - George Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, Bill Davis - as a kind of balance.
When Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in Ottawa in 1984, Ontario responded by voting in first Liberal David Peterson, and then NDP Bob Rae. With federal Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien came Conservative Ontario Premier Mike Harris. When Conservative Stephen Harper replaced Chrétien federally, Ontario turned back to the Liberals with Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. And with Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, of course, came Doug Ford in Toronto.
So now, as a new federal election looms, which the Conservatives are widely expected to win handily, Doug Ford - who is apparently also considering calling an Ontario election, even though he has a strong majority, good polling results, and more than 16 months before the next scheduled election! - must have the Underhill Balance Theory at the back of his mind.
Indeed, it could well be a major reason why Ford wants to bring an Ontario election so far forward: to lock in the Conservative administration in Ontario notwithstanding a potential Conservative federal government, to break the Underhill jinx (as Ford might see it).
