Back to the days of half-baked medical advice

We all recall the days during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when Trump would hold press conferences where he would promote whatever the latest crackpot idea that he heard about to treat Covid, such as injecting disinfectant or hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine or ultraviolet light or the animal dewormer Ivormectin. And since as president he commanded much media attention, a lot of people listened to him.

It looks like we are back to those days, only much worse since Trump is now backed by another crank in RFK Jr. whom he has appointed to the post of secretary of the department of health and human services and who has long espoused anti-vaccine views as well as promoting false theories as to the causes of major ailments.

They seem to think that they have found the cause of autism and that it is the over-the-counter analgesic Tylenol, long a staple of home remedies for fevers and minor pain. He and RFK Jr have launched a major attack on it, claiming that it can cause autism.
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Jimmy Kimmel returns and slams Trump

After a major uproar over the cancellation of his show, ABC’s parent company Disney decided to reverse course and bring Jimmy Kimmel back. The return was eagerly anticipated but if Trump and his critics expected Kimmel to tone down his mockery of him, they would be disappointed, as you can see from this segment that aired last night as Kimmel did not pull his punches. I thought that he hit pretty much the right note.


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What makes a disease incurable?

In my previous post on Canada’s system known as MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), there was an issue that I did not properly address and thought worth exploring in more depth, and that is the question of when a patient’s request for assistance in dying should be honored. The criteria have been getting steadily looser over time, which is not surprising. Once the threshold has been crossed that it is acceptable for medical professionals to end the life of a patient, the line as how much it should be limited becomes difficult to draw.

In 2014, when the question of medically assisted death had come before Canada’s supreme court, Etienne Montero, a civil-law professor and at the time the president of the European Institute of Bioethics, warned in testimony that the practice of euthanasia, once legal, was impossible to control. Montero had been retained by the attorney general of Canada to discuss the experience of assisted death in Belgium—how a regime that had begun with “extremely strict” criteria had steadily evolved, through loose interpretations and lax enforcement, to accommodate many of the very patients it had once pledged to protect. When a patient’s autonomy is paramount, Montero argued, expansion is inevitable: “Sooner or later, a patient’s repeated wish will take precedence over strict statutory conditions.”

As the size of the aging population gets larger and we see many cases of painful and protracted end of life, and as more and more people become comfortable with the idea of assisted dying and know of people who have taken the route and died peacefully, they are likely to want greater access, and that has happened in Canada with the expansion occurring at a faster rate than in Belgium
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Canada grapples with medically assisted dying

That people should be able to request medical assistance in dying peacefully if they face a long and painful death due to illness or chronic pain is something that many people can sympathize with it. But implementing such a program in practice can create problems for the family and the medical professionals involved. Canada legalized the practice following a supreme court decision in 2015 and has seen a rapid rise in what are called MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) deaths. The August 11, 2025 issue of The Atlantic magazine has an article by Elaina Plott Calabro titled Canada is Killing Itself that takes a very deep dive into this ethically challenging area.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
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The new law approved medical assistance in dying for adults who had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing them “intolerable suffering,” and who faced a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. To qualify, patients needed two clinicians to sign off on their application, and the law required a 10-day “reflection period” before the procedure could take place.

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Oh, the humanity!

Europe’s richest man is whining about a proposed wealth tax for France. But of course, he is not complaining that it would hurt him personally, which would be very selfish, but that it would hurt the entire economy, which makes him a noble crusader and protector of the economic health of the country.

Europe’s richest man, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, has said that a wealth tax that could cost him more than €1bn (£817m) would be deadly for France’s economy.

The French founder of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said in a statement to the Sunday Times that calls for a 2% wealth tax on all assets “aims to destroy the liberal economy, the only one that works for the good of all”.

The idea of a wealth tax has steadily gained ground in France because of a political crisis, with the government trying to push through unpopular budget cuts. The idea of a 2% wealth tax on fortunes worth more than €100m has been proposed by Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor who has become a household name in France.
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Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École normale supérieure, and last year wrote a prominent study on the wealth tax for the G20. In June, Zucman wrote in the Guardian: “Unprecedented wealth concentration – and the unbridled power that comes with such wealth – has distorted our democracy and is driving societal and economic tensions.”

But Arnault insists that his motives are pure and that those who are pursuing this tax are doing so because, for some reason, they want to destroy the economy.

“This is clearly not a technical or economic debate, but rather a clearly stated desire to destroy the French economy,” Arnault’s statement said. “I cannot believe that the French political forces that govern or have governed the country in the past could lend any credibility to this offensive, which is deadly for our economy.”

Really? They ‘clearly stated’ that their desire is to destroy the economy? Where and when did they say this?

People like Arnault should continue to speak out like this so that people will increasingly see that what greedy, selfish jerks they are.

Here we go again – another cutely-named voting group

In every election, political consultants love to come up with a new demographic group with some cute identifier that they signal will be THE swing group whose votes will determine the outcome, and the media promptly latches on it it. Sometimes these groups consist of women. Remember the ‘soccer moms’ phase?

Well, we have a new entry for this election cycle: the ‘weighted vest moms’, which consists of (I kid you not) women wearing weighted vests as they walk around or jog or otherwise exercise. This is apparently the latest fitness fad promoted by TikTok influencers and others such as Gwyneth Paltrow. (That last piece of information alone should give you pause.)
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Creepy Epstein tributes

The entire book of tributes to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been released (putting paid to claims by Trump and his defenders that the story was a hoax and the book never existed) and it is really creepy. You can see the full book with tributes here

First of all, what kind of adult gets such a birthday present? Ghislaine Maxwell went to a great deal of trouble to put it together and it was obviously an effort to please a vain, immature man. A lot of prominent people took the trouble to send in contributions and some are now rightly embarrassed at this display of their obsequiousness. One of them was the UK’s ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson who has now been fired for it.

It is not clear how Epstein initially got his wealth but what is clear is that once he acquired some, he had a formula for how to draw people into his web and make even more money. [Read more…]

Preparing for the unexpected

As regular readers know, I play the card game bridge and recently I happened to look at some aspects of the history of the game. It is not pretty because the main body that governs the game in the US, the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), was infused with the racism that the country was steeped in, not allowing Black people to join and play, forcing them to start their own organization the American Bridge Association (ABA).

On October 4, 1949, members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.
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Everything can become a competition

There seems to be an insatiable appetite among the public for competitions. This results in some enterprising people turning even the most unlikely practices into contests with prizes and the works. The annual hot dog eating contest is one such thing. But at least that contest has a quantifiable measure with which to judge the outcome.

Harder to understand is a massage competition. But it appears that there is a world championship for this.

[O]ne Saturday morning in June, in Copenhagen, I found myself in a classroom filled with twelve massage tables, around which massage therapists from across the world prepared to ply their trade on their receivers, or “body models,” in front of an audience.
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The eighth annual World Championship in Massage was under way in a modernist, glass-and-concrete building owned by University College Copenhagen. For a weekend, more than two hundred and sixty competitors from fifty-eight countries would face off in nine categories, including Swedish, Thai, chair, and Eastern- and Western-freestyle massage.
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