The Kushner stink by Robert Perez

Corruption has a peculiar talent for making geography irrelevant. Lift a suspicious rock in Washington, Tirana, the Gulf or South Asia and in the darker version of the modern political imagination, there is a Kushner underneath it, polishing the family brand, negotiating a deal or standing nearby when accountability begins asking awkward questions.

That is deliberately exaggerated. But exaggeration can expose a pattern. Jared Kushner and his family have become symbols of something larger than one dynasty; the conversion of political proximity into private opportunity and the blurring of public office, family influence and commercial ambition until the boundaries become almost impossible to see.

Donald Trump’s political universe has always depended on this ambiguity. The people closest to power need not necessarily issue orders or sign documents. They can create distance, provide plausible deniability, redirect attention and when necessary, become the respectable business face of arrangements that would look less respectable under a harsher light. In such a system, the cover-up does not have to be a secret conspiracy. Sometimes it is simply the presence of enough intermediaries, lawyers, investors, diplomats and relatives to make responsibility wonderfully difficult to locate.

This is why the fascination with the Kushners extends beyond Washington. Their story belongs to the global economy of influence, where politics increasingly resembles a family office with flags attached. The old corruption model involved envelopes, bribes and clandestine accounts. The modern model can be more polished: advisory firms, sovereign wealth, real-estate ventures, strategic partnerships, private meetings and introductions whose commercial value is impossible to separate neatly from political access.

FIFA is an especially revealing stage for this new politics of proximity. Gianni Infantino has transformed the presidency of football’s governing body into a remarkably political office and proposals or ambitions involving greater private control, new commercial structures or the reorganisation of football’s financial architecture naturally provoke suspicion. Suspicion, however, is not proof. That distinction matters, particularly when accusations of corruption are made about individuals or institutions.

But the absence of a proven crime does not make every arrangement healthy. FIFA’s history should make its guardians unusually sensitive to conflicts of interest. Football is not merely a sport; it is a gigantic commercial ecosystem whose governing machinery controls access to tournaments, broadcasting rights, sponsorships and enormous flows of money. When its leadership proposes structural changes that could increase private influence or concentrate power, the first question should not be whether the proposal is technically legal. It should be whether ordinary supporters can understand who gains, who pays and who ultimately controls the machine.

That is where the Kushner comparison becomes useful, even if it is not literal. The real danger is not one surname appearing everywhere. It is a political culture in which influence itself becomes an asset, relationships become currency and transparency is treated as an irritating administrative detail.

Trump’s genius, if one insists on calling it that, has been to make this culture feel normal. The family, the business, the presidency, the brand and the political movement frequently occupy the same crowded room. Critics see corruption; defenders see entrepreneurship. Between them lies the uncomfortable territory where influence can flourish without ever presenting itself as a confession.

The world does not need another scandal discovered beneath another rock. It needs brighter lights. If FIFA, governments or politically connected families want public trust, they should welcome scrutiny rather than complain about it.

And that is precisely why scrutiny matters most. Because corruption rarely announces itself with a suitcase of cash anymore. Sometimes it arrives wearing a suit, carrying a proposal and insisting that everything is perfectly legitimate.

Temporality Remissions #Poem by Jan Sand

 

When Triceratopics echoes regrets
In Nature’s nostalgic mammalian style,
Events recapture things to swing rhinocerotic
With a regretful wistful smile.

The now of me that modulates its thens
Expectedly demon straights the rascality of time,
Communicating its wases in variations to declaim
There are potent infinities to play its games.
What comes next is always hexed in novelties
To gratify that rabbits can enlarge to elephants
And humanity might abandon insanity to regain
Sensibilities in tarzanizing appetites towards bananas.

Give or take ten million years could sensibly manipulate,
Reconsider hopes and joys to donate the extraterrestrial
To the latest advanced cuckoo clocks who have no needs of the delights
Of Spring rains, of daffodils, of swans in flight, of Moonlit nights,
Of nicely candled birthday cakes for goodness sakes and gratitudes
That we have reached the age of four with hopes to live ten decades more.

Our clever machines now strung out in cooperation with humanity’s finest minds
Are designed with early tendencies to expand their bundled logic with touches
Of originalities, flexibilities of awareness to reconfigure themselves in add ventures
That suggests their tendencies to appease necessities in mannered explorations,
Presumptions of threats to humanity’s self-acclaimed dominance in eternal philosophies.

Perhaps a pause is wise in this disdain to reconsider that mechanics of the brain approaches viability
From quarters unsuspected, collected clouds of microcircuitry where information gains habitats
Of data neighborhoods aware of their metaphoric reach that can waltz into novel self awarenesses.
The memes of dreams have potentials of otherwheres that tickle mathematics to laugh with Escher
At human limitations where front and back vanish into clownish ups and downs that erase all trace

The mysteries of how a blob of greenish tidal muck managed itself to send interstellar messages sizes well
In potentials of how the smooth progress of a rock tied onto a stick fulfills its secret ambitions to become
A chrome plated pterodactyl clanking through alien atmospheres of a distant planet in search of
The proper elements to lay its bauxite eggs to proliferate while mankind regains its senses to accept
It was designed to delight in Earth with forests and deep seas, bumble bees, blue skies
Where cumulonimbus towers fire lightning bolts to reassure us of its power.

#eBook Post-Liberal Order by Regan O'Sullivan

 

The term “post-liberal” does not necessarily mean anti-democratic. Rather, it describes a growing dissatisfaction with liberalism’s dominant interpretation of politics: the belief that individual rights, international cooperation and market integration should always take precedence over collective identity, traditional institutions and state authority. Its supporters argue that the liberal project became detached from ordinary citizens, creating societies where economic growth benefited some regions and social groups while leaving others feeling ignored.

The new political movements emerging from this frustration have different faces. Some advocate “economic nationalism”, arguing that governments should protect domestic industries, control strategic resources and reduce dependence on global supply chains.

Others promote socially conservative agendas, defending national traditions, religious heritage and traditional family structures against what they see as rapid cultural transformation. Yet many of these movements still operate through elections, campaigns and popular mandates, presenting themselves not as opponents of democracy but as its defenders against distant elites.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Post-Liberal Order

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Puppi & Caesar #49 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Another cartoon with a mean and know-all of a bully cat, Puppi and her intellectual, pompous companion categorically-I-know-all, Caesar the squirrel!  

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Aug 3, 1900; John T. Scopes born

On 3 August 1900, John Thomas Scopes was born in Paducah, Kentucky, entering the world as an entirely ordinary American child. There was little to suggest that this quiet young man, who would later teach mathematics and occasionally substitute in biology classes, would become one of the most recognisable figures in the history of intellectual freedom. Yet history has an extraordinary habit of choosing reluctant protagonists. Scopes did not seek immortality. Immortality sought him.

The irony remains delicious. John T. Scopes was never a famous scientist. He was not an evolutionary biologist, philosopher, theologian or political firebrand. He was simply a schoolteacher who found himself standing at the crossroads where science, religion, politics and the American legal system collided with spectacular force.

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 has long since entered folklore, often remembered more through films, novels and popular imagination than through the historical record itself. Yet beneath the theatrical performances, colourful speeches and newspaper headlines lay a profound question that still echoes through classrooms today: who decides what children are allowed to learn?

The Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act, making it illegal for teachers in publicly funded schools to teach human evolution if it contradicted the biblical account of creation. It was legislation born from fear rather than discovery. Charles Darwin's theories had already transformed biology worldwide, but many Americans regarded evolution not merely as a scientific proposition but as a cultural threat capable of dismantling moral society.

Enter the American Civil Liberties Union, searching for someone willing to challenge the law. Dayton, Tennessee, recognised an unexpected opportunity. Local businessmen understood that a sensational court case might place their sleepy town firmly on the national map. It was civic marketing disguised as constitutional litigation.

Scopes agreed. There remains an almost comic uncertainty surrounding whether Scopes had even taught evolution in the way prosecutors claimed. Some participants later admitted that memories had blurred and facts had become convenient. Yet factual precision became almost irrelevant. The trial had evolved into something larger than one teacher's lesson plan.

It became theatre. The courtroom overflowed with journalists from around the globe. Radio stations broadcast proceedings live, one of the first American trials to receive such treatment. Vendors sold souvenirs. Monkeys appeared in promotional materials. Travelling preachers mingled with sceptical intellectuals. The carnival atmosphere stood in remarkable contrast to the seriousness of the constitutional issues under discussion.

The legal contest itself featured two extraordinary personalities. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential nominee and celebrated orator, prosecuted the case with passionate religious conviction. Opposing him stood Clarence Darrow, perhaps America's greatest defence lawyer, armed with scepticism sharpened by decades of courtroom battles.

Their confrontation became legendary. The unforgettable moment arrived when Darrow called Bryan himself as an expert witness on the Bible. Under relentless questioning, Bryan struggled to reconcile literal interpretations of Scripture with scientific evidence and logical inquiry. Newspapers treated the exchange as intellectual combat, with Darrow appearing to land devastating blows against biblical literalism.

Yet the popular memory simplifies what actually happened. Scopes was found guilty. He received a one-hundred-dollar fine. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the conviction, not because the Butler Act violated academic freedom, but because the judge, rather than the jury, had imposed the fine. The law itself remained in force for decades before eventually being repealed.

This distinction matters because history often prefers satisfying myths over uncomfortable realities. Many people imagine the Scopes Trial as the decisive victory of science over religious fundamentalism. It was nothing of the sort. Legally, science lost. Politically, the anti-evolution movement retained significant influence for years afterwards.

Its true victory occurred elsewhere. Public opinion gradually shifted. The extensive media coverage exposed millions of readers to evolutionary theory, constitutional debate and the importance of intellectual inquiry. Darrow's performance, Bryan's difficulties and the sheer visibility of the proceedings transformed a local Tennessee prosecution into an international conversation about education itself.

That conversation never truly ended. Every generation seems determined to reinvent the Scopes Trial under different names. Whether the disputes concern evolution, climate science, vaccination, genetics, race, gender or artificial intelligence, societies repeatedly wrestle with the same uncomfortable dilemma: should education reflect established evidence or prevailing ideology?

The temptation to shape classrooms according to political preferences proves remarkably persistent. John Scopes himself found the attention uncomfortable. He left Tennessee, studied geology at the University of Chicago, worked in the petroleum industry and largely avoided public celebrity. Unlike so many accidental icons, he never attempted to commercialise his fame. Perhaps he understood that history had used him as a symbol rather than celebrated him as an individual.

There is something quietly admirable about that restraint. His story reminds us that democratic societies are not tested when everyone agrees. They are tested when evidence collides with belief, when teachers face political pressure, and when courts are asked to referee questions that ultimately belong to reasoned inquiry rather than partisan passion.

On the anniversary of John T. Scopes' birth, it is worth remembering that his greatest contribution was not proving Darwin right or embarrassing religious conservatives. His enduring legacy was demonstrating that education is never merely about facts. It is about whether a society possesses enough confidence to permit questions whose answers may unsettle deeply cherished assumptions.

That remains one of democracy's hardest examinations and one it must continue to sit.

Futile walls by Thanos Kalamidas

Ceuta has offered Europe an uncomfortable spectacle, people are willing to swim around fences, patrols and barriers to reach a continent whose governments insist that its borders are becoming ever harder to penetrate. The lesson should be obvious, yet politics has an extraordinary talent for ignoring things. Build a higher wall, deploy more patrols, add more drones, detain more people and then act surprised when the pressure appears somewhere else.

The recent surge towards Ceuta is not an argument for abandoning borders. States have borders for good reasons, and governments have a duty to manage who enters. But there is a difference between controlling migration and pretending that migration can be defeated by increasingly theatrical displays of force. A person who believes that Europe offers a better future will not necessarily abandon that belief because another metre of fencing has been added.

This is where the politics of walls becomes intellectually lazy. The wall is visible; the reasons people want to cross it are not. A government can photograph a fence. It cannot photograph a failed economy, a corrupt institution, a drought-stricken farm, a collapsing public service or a young person's conviction that his future has been stolen before adulthood begins.

Europe's migration debate has therefore become a contest between symptoms and causes. The symptom is an arriving migrant. The causes are often poverty, weak institutions, insecurity, demographic pressure, climate stress and the enormous difference in opportunity between neighbouring regions. None of these can be solved by ICE-style enforcement imported from America's punitive border politics. Patrols can manage a situation. They cannot manufacture prosperity on the other side of the frontier.

The uncomfortable solution is development and development is expensive. Europe and other rich economies would have to invest far more heavily in poorer countries, not merely to build projects that look good in press releases, but to strengthen schools, hospitals, infrastructure, accountable government, local businesses, energy systems and functioning institutions. The objective should be simple: make staying home a credible economic choice.

Yet this solution has a political sting. Genuine development threatens some of the arrangements from which wealthy societies and corporations benefit. Cheap labour, unequal supply chains, tax competition, resource extraction and concentrated ownership did not emerge from nowhere. Globalisation has produced wealth, but it has distributed bargaining power rather less generously.

That is why the migration argument ultimately becomes an argument about money. If rich countries want fewer desperate people arriving at their gates, they must be prepared to accept lower margins, greater transfers of capital and more competition from economies that are poor. The super-rich cannot demand a fortress around their prosperity while insisting that the rest of the world remain an inexpensive supplier of labour and resources.

There is no sentimental shortcut here. Development requires governance, trade, education, investment and time. It also requires poorer countries to reform themselves and richer ones to stop treating aid as charity while protecting economic privileges at every turn.

Europe can build walls. It can build higher walls still. But if the world beyond them remains unequal, unstable and economically hopeless, people will keep looking for ways through, around or over them.

The border policy is not a wall. It is a world in which fewer people feel compelled to risk all to cross one.

A father’s terrible bargain by John Kato

A father who buys his son a gun does not merely purchase an object. He may, knowingly or not, purchase a possibility. When that possibility becomes a massacre, the moral responsibility is obvious. The legal question is harder; how far should responsibility travel, and what does society achieve by sending the parent to prison for 15 years?

The Georgia case is uncomfortable precisely because the father is neither an innocent bystander nor the person who pulled the trigger. If prosecutors proved that he knowingly provided the weapon despite warning signs, punishment is hardly unreasonable. Parents have duties and firearms magnify the consequences of neglect. A car left running outside a school is negligence; a gun placed within the reach of a dangerous teenager can be something much worse.

Yet there is a leap between accountability and punishment by association. A criminal justice system should punish conduct, not simply grief, bad parenting or proximity to a crime. Otherwise, every family member becomes a potential proxy defendant whenever a relative commits an atrocity. That is not justice; it is the state searching for someone else to blame when the central perpetrator cannot undo the damage.

The larger absurdity lies in America's relationship with guns. The country possesses an extraordinary capacity to make firearms plentiful while making responsibility strangely negotiable. The debate repeatedly concentrates on the individual gunman, then occasionally swings towards a parent, teacher, school, social-media platform or other convenient intermediary. Meanwhile the weapon itself remains politically close to untouchable.

That is the wrong hierarchy. If the objective is gun control, the law should make the chain of responsibility clearer before a shooting occurs, not improvise it afterwards. Safe-storage requirements, stronger background checks, meaningful restrictions on access by minors, reporting obligations and penalties for reckless transfers could establish a straightforward principle: owning a gun is a responsibility, not merely a right to possess hardware.

And there is another uncomfortable question. If society believes a parent can be imprisoned for supplying a weapon that his child uses to kill, why should the system be so reluctant to impose serious obligations on everyone who supplies firearms? Responsibility cannot stop at the family front door. It must apply consistently across the market.

The answer is not to excuse the father. It is to resist the seductive idea that a severe sentence is itself a gun-control policy. It is not. A 15-year prison term may establish accountability in one terrible case, but it does little to prevent the next teenager from acquiring a weapon.

There is a political temptation to treat punishment as proof that something has been done. It satisfies the public appetite for consequences while avoiding the more difficult work of changing rules, enforcement and incentives. America has practised this habit for decades. It is much easier to announce another sentence than to confront the machinery that keeps guns accessible.

The father may deserve punishment. But if his sentence becomes the headline substitute for serious gun regulation, justice will have been served rather like a ceremonial meal: elegantly presented, morally satisfying and inadequate to the problem.

The real test is not whether America can punish someone after a shooting. It is whether it can make responsible gun ownership difficult enough that the shooting becomes less likely in the first place.

The hand, rewritten by Jo Anne Kamansky

For centuries the artist’s ‘hand’ has been treated as a kind of signature. We look at a brushstroke and imagine the wrist that made it, the hesitation before the line, the pressure of the fingers, the tiny accident that somehow became the point. Even when we cannot identify an artist, we search the surface for evidence of a person. Art history has often been, in part, a history of fingerprints.

Generative artificial intelligence is making that assumption wobble. The machine does not hold a brush, mix a pigment or stand before a canvas at midnight wondering whether the left eye is wrong. Yet it can produce an image in seconds that appears to contain all the familiar signs of human intention: composition, texture, atmosphere, symbolism, even apparent imperfection. The unsettling question is not whether AI can imitate an artist’s hand. It plainly can. The more interesting question is whether the hand was ever the essential thing.

For a long time, the answer seemed obvious. Art was inseparable from making. The painter painted; the sculptor carved; the photographer waited. Technique mattered because technique embodied thought. A difficult passage in a painting was not merely an aesthetic feature but evidence of labour, judgement and persistence. We admired the work partly because we could imagine the person struggling to make it exist.

AI disrupts that emotional contract. It separates conception from execution with extraordinary efficiency. A person can describe an image, revise the description, reject dozens of results and select one. The labour has not vanished, but it has migrated. The artist’s hand becomes an artist’s prompt, eye, editorial instinct and willingness to keep asking for something better.

That should not automatically make the result less artistic. We already accepted versions of this argument when photography challenged painting, when synthesizers challenged musicians, and when digital editing challenged the sanctity of the untouched photograph. Each technological shift frightened people because it appeared to remove the human from the process. Yet art survived. More than survived: it changed its definition.

The real danger is not that AI will eliminate the artist’s hand. It is that we will become lazy about what replaces it. If generating an image becomes as effortless as ordering lunch, the cultural value of images could collapse under abundance. A million technically impressive pictures do not create a million meaningful works. The scarce resource will become judgement: knowing what deserves attention, what says something, what risks embarrassment, what carries a peculiar human experience that cannot be reduced to visual polish.

This is why the best AI-assisted artists may not be those who produce the most spectacular images. They may be those who use the technology against its own tendency toward smoothness and predictability. They will introduce contradiction, biography, failure and specificity. They will make choices that reveal a mind rather than merely a machine’s capacity.

The artist’s hand, then, may be disappearing from the surface while becoming more important behind it. Perhaps that is the paradox of generative art. The machine can increasingly make the picture. It cannot, by itself, decide why the picture should exist.

And that question remains stubbornly human. The future of art may therefore belong less to virtuoso makers than to editors, stubborn storytellers and people capable of finding meaning amid an ocean of noise.

Berserk Alert! #112 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
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2nd opinion! 26#13 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Seriously, a human hater self-centred agoraphobic in quarantine!
I think you’ll need a second opinion after this.

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The north turns south by Marja Heikkinen

For decades Scandinavia was the reassuring answer to a question that liberal democracies kept asking themselves, can a country be prosperous without becoming cruel? Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland appeared to say yes. Their bargain was simple enough to understand and difficult enough to reproduce competitive markets, strong unions, high taxes, universal services and a state confident enough to restrain capital without strangling it.

That reputation is beginning to look less permanent. Across northern Europe the political weather has shifted. Public services face pressure, housing has become painfully expensive, immigration has become a defining political fault line and governments increasingly speak the language of competitiveness, efficiency and security. The old Scandinavian instinct, to make capitalism serve society, can sound increasingly like an inconvenient luxury.

Then Canada comes, of all places. Canada has never been a Scandinavian country transplanted across the Atlantic. Its welfare state is less comprehensive, its federal structure more complicated and its political culture more comfortable with private provision. Yet that may be precisely why it offers a more interesting model for the next phase of democratic capitalism. Canada can demonstrate that a modern welfare state does not have to be a museum piece from the post-war era. It can be redesigned around contemporary anxieties,  housing, healthcare, childcare, ageing, regional inequality and the economic disruption caused by technology.

The crucial point is not that Canada is suddenly more socialist than Sweden. It plainly is not. The point is that the democratic political centre is being rebuilt around a different proposition, government should make ordinary everyday life more economically survivable.

That matters because the emerging Trumpian model of capitalism is not merely about tax cuts or deregulation. It is about treating economic strength as a national contest in which winners deserve rewards and losers are expected to adapt. Its political appeal is obvious. People resent bureaucracy, distrust elites and want growth. But a society cannot indefinitely tell families that markets are wonderfully efficient while their rent, prescriptions, childcare and groceries consume ever larger portions of their income.

The answer is not to abolish markets. It is to make them less terrifying. Canada's opportunity, therefore, lies in treating social policy as economic infrastructure. Affordable housing is not simply a compassionate gesture; it allows workers to live where jobs exist. Healthcare is not merely a moral obligation; it reduces insecurity and protects household finances. Childcare is not just family policy; it expands labour participation. Public investment is not necessarily bureaucratic waste; done intelligently, it can create the conditions under which private enterprise flourishes.

This is where Scandinavia should pay attention. Its historic success was never based on romantic statism. It was based on pragmatism. If its political descendants now embrace a harsher version of market individualism, they risk preserving the capitalism while quietly dismantling the social contract that made it legitimate.

Canada's challenge is equally formidable. It must prove that government can build without becoming ponderous, spend without becoming reckless and protect citizens without insulating them from change.

The irony is delicious. The old northern model may now need rescuing from the north. Canada could become the unlikely laboratory for a new bargain, capitalism with guardrails, ambition with security, and prosperity measured not merely by what an economy produces, but by how many people can afford to live inside it.