Let's Fix That Headline, Shall We?

Absolutely Corrupt President Donald Joffrey Trump went before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday and delivered an unhinged, hour-long rant; and somehow, Americans from Alabama to Wyoming can still wake up to this anodyne headline in their morning paper.

A kudos or two goes to the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel for hitting closer to the mark, but my collage above doesn't quite include all the cookie cutter front pages of whatever vulture capitalist corporation owns these ten newspapers.

But I thought I'd help out any of them planning to put out a second edition today.

Q Toon: About that U.N. Speech

Since I just got back home from a two-week vacation last weekend, I've got some catching up to do.

I don't know what the coverage of Donald Trump's speech at the United Nations on September 24 was like here in the states; in the reports I saw in Spain, whatever he said was overshadowed by Greta Thunberg's glare as he walked past her in the foyer.

I got the impression from European media that the topic du jour was climate change, but Trump (or his speech writers) never got the memo. Instead, he rattled on about what a great leader he is. Then he slipped in the sentence in panel one of this week's cartoon.

This idea of convincing antigay regimes around the world to stop persecuting their LGBTQ+ citizens has been credited to Trump's Ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell. That Trump has taken up the cause while advocating against LGBTQ+ rights before our Supreme Court has baffled many observers.

Since the United Nations hadn't packed the room with knuckle-dragging maniacs from Trump campaign rallies, the audience failed to hoot and holler agreement with Mr. Stable Genius's great and unmatched wisdom. If he had had a more receptive audience, I have no doubt that Trump would have veered off his off-topic speech and let his id run wild and perhaps revealed that the true motivation behind his gay rights initiative had nothing whatsoever to do with concern for oppressed LGBTQ+ folks around the world.

Q Toon: Brunei Blind

Within two months after Trump's U.N. Ambassador Ric Grenell told a German magazine that the U.S. was calling upon all U.N. members to decriminalize homosexuality — a policy nobody else in the Corrupt Trump Administration seems to have heard of beforehand — the southeast Asian sultanate of Brunei announced that gays in their country should be sentenced to death by stoning.

The response from the U.S. State Department was tepid at best.

Global outrage has greeted news of the introduction of the new law under the Syariah Penal Code (SPC). On Friday, the British government and European Union called on Brunei to abandon the law, while George Clooney called for a boycott of hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei in a column for Deadline.
After nearly 24 hours of declining to clarify its position, the State Department finally sent The Daily Beast a statement saying the U.S. was “concerned” about the new law, minutes after we published a story noting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the department's silence.
However, when asked by The Daily Beast, Pompeo and the Department of State declined to directly condemn, or state an objection to, the stoning to death of LGBT people.
The full statement reads: “The United States is concerned with Brunei’s decision to implement Phases Two and Three of the Sharia Penal Code. Some of the punishments in the law appear inconsistent with international human rights obligations, including with respect to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
“We have encouraged Brunei to ratify and implement the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which it signed in 2015, and to sign, ratify, and implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

At this point, the LGBTQ community's expectations of the Corrupt Trump Administration are pretty low — Ambassador Grenell's ephemeral trial balloon notwithstanding. My cartoon's premise that the Secretary of State took the time to speak with Mr. Trump about the news out of Brunei is giving both of them the benefit of considerable doubt.

At least we can be assured that Trump will take part in Mr. Clooney's boycott of Brunei-owned hotels.

This president has a policy of steering any government travel business only toward Trump-owned hotels.

Q Toon: Phoning It In

In a surprise move last week, the Corrupt Trump Administration announced a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.

The announcement was particularly curious, given Trump's cozy relationship with some especially bad actors on LGBTQ rights around the world (the U.S. voted with them last year against a U.N. resolution against capital punishment for consensual same-sex activity), and with the antigay right in this country.

True, he did promise at the 2016 Republican National Convention to "do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens" — he even included the Q in the acronym. But he also included the T, yet has singled out transgender Americans for sustained hostility and discrimination.

Trump's promise then was a swipe at Islam, and, according to former Trump flack Sean Spicer, a bone thrown to persuade one convention delegate to withdraw his name from a "Never Trump" petition:

The final name that needed to be scrubbed from the petition, Spicer writes [in The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President], was that of Washington, D.C., delegate Robert Sinners. The book describes an alleged deal between Sinners, who Spicer says told the Manafort team “he wanted Donald Trump to support gay rights,” and senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes....
Sinners then reportedly signed “a form that officially removed his name from the petition,” and the deal was done.

The new campaign appears to be the pet project of Richard Grenell, Trump's Ambassador to Germany (who is also in the running to be named Ambassador to the United Nations). Grenell is a disciple of National Security Adviser John Bolton; his name showed up in my blog in 2012 when Mitt Romney dropped him as a foreign policy adviser as a sop to religious right-wingers alarmed that Grenell is openly gay.

Grenell cites the recent execution in Iran of a man accused of being gay as the impetus for the campaign:

Grenell called the hanging “a wake-up call for anyone who supports basic human rights,” in Bild, a leading German newspaper, this month.

“This is not the first time the Iranian regime has put a gay man to death with the usual outrageous claims of prostitution, kidnapping, or even pedophilia. And it sadly won’t be the last time,” Grenell wrote. “Barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalized and punishable by flogging and death.”

As much as it is heartening to see our government standing up for LGBTQ rights in Iran, it is hard to imagine the Corrupt Trump Administration doing the same for LGBTQ rights in Saudi Arabia, where LGBTQ relationships are also "criminalized and punishable by flogging and death." After all, Trump could barely scrape up any trace of disappoval of the Saudis' murder of openly heterosexual journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Nor have we heard much from him about antigay repression in Russia, especially the disappearance, torture and murder of hundreds of LGBTQ Chechens.

As with virtually everything else about life in North Korea, we know precious little about the plight of its LGBTQ citizens; a gay defector last year painted a picture of oppression and forced denial. Homosexuality isn't technically illegal there; but as in any totalitarian country, the government can label anything "contrary to a socialist lifestyle," "obscene," or "decadent" as an excuse to prosecute whomever it wants.

It's a safe bet that safeguarding the rights of LGBTQ Koreans did not come up in conversations between Kim and Trump in Vietnam this week. Rather, the Corrupt Trump Administration's sole concern in LGBTQ rights anywhere is their usefulness as a wedge between western European liberalism and the Iranian theocracy.

Trump has not been able to persuade other signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to join him in abrogating the agreement, in which Iran promised to limit its nuclear activities and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their compliance, in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Without European cooperation, Trump has no leverage to force some presumably more punitive deal on Iran.

So is he just being clever, calculating that liberal western politicians would rather go back to Square One on Iran's nuclear ambitions (even as nuclear powers India and Pakistan have begun shooting at each other) than to appear antigay? Maybe.

Or maybe not.

News reports this week suggest that, contrary to my cartoon, Vice President Mike Pence is more aware of the administration's brand new policy than President Trump himself is.

A reporter asked Trump about the global initiative, which is being spearheaded by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest ranking openly gay person in the Trump administration.
At first, Trump seemed not to understand the question, asking the reporter to repeat it.
“Say it?” Trump said.
When the reporter referenced the push to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe, Trump professed unawareness and said something about reports in his administration.
“I don’t know which report you’re talking about,” Trump said. “We have many reports.”

EnviroStewardship: Measuring Costs and Benefits

Once a month, I turn the blog over to my dad, a chemistry Ph.D. who writes an "Environmental Stewardship" column for local church newsletters. The following is by John Berge:

Recently there have been published a number of interesting and informative scientific review papers published on the environment and therefore on Environmental Stewardship. One published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters used 2016 data from the Global Burden of Disease project to calculate loss in life expectancy as a function of small particle (2.5 micrometers or less) pollution in various countries.

Obviously, small particles are just one type of pollution, but one that is very significant around coal-fired power plants and the rail lines leading to them. On  average in the USA, the drop in life expectancy is only about four months; but these data fall in the portion of the response curve that is steepest, so a small change in pollution, in either direction, has a corresponding large effect.

In Bangladesh, Egypt and Niger, the curve has leveled off, and it will take great reductions in pollution to change their almost two-year reduction in life expectancy. The report also noted that in Southeast Asia, PM2.5 pollution had a bigger effect on life expectancy than all cancers combined.

Thou shalt not pollute thy neighbors’ land, nor thy neighbors’ water nor thy neighbors’ air, so that thy days and thy neighbors’ days shall be longer and healthier.

Another report was from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They were asked by the United Nations to examine how much better off we would be if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced sufficient to limit temperature increase to 1.5ºC rather than the goal of 2.0ºC set by the Paris Agreement on Global Warming.

They reported that global average sea level rise would be reduced from 56 cm to 48 cm (1.84 feet to 1.58 feet). The ocean’s acidity increase would be reduced from 24% to 9% and the probability of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in any given year would go down from 16% to 3%. The proportion of global population facing at least one severe heat wave every five years would drop from 37% to 14%. The number of vertebrate species that would lose at least half of their viable range would be cut in half, from 8% to 4%.

Carbon dioxide, the most abundant of the greenhouse gases that we humans have been increasingly producing since the start of the industrial revolution, is a natural component of the atmosphere. Without it, our planet would revert to a “Snowball Earth,” which it is believed by many geologists to have been 600 million years ago. It is the rise from 270 ppm before our increasing use of fossil fuels to the current approximately 412 ppm that is the problem. We, and the rest of nature, have evolved with the lower levels of greenhouse gases and we are now seeing the consequences of this rapid, human-caused rise.

While much of the corrective actions to avert the damages of global warming may depend upon governments, there is much that we as individuals and families can do:

• Buy gas-sipping automobiles rather than gas-guzzlers.
• Switch from coal-fired electricity to wind or solar power. 
• Travel less, whether it is local driving, business which could be done electronically, or vacations. 
• Eat less meat, especially high energy-requiring corn-fed beef. 
• Buy and use only the most energy efficient appliances. 
• Turn down the thermostat a few degrees in winter and up in the summer. 

Carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons are pollutants; good environmental stewards should treat them as in my imaginary umpteenth commandment above.

Q Toon: Marry Making

Sitting at my drawing board Sunday night, I had considered putting Nikki Haley behind Trump in this cartoon. I'm so glad that I didn't.

While most of the country was embroiled in the fight over whether alleged devil's triangulator Brett Kavanaugh deserved a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, the State Department announced that it is going to require foreign diplomats and U.N. employees who are living in the U.S. with their same-sex life partners to get married or ship their honey home.

Diplomats and United Nations officials in same-sex couples who wish to keep U.S. visas, or are in the process of acquiring them, must show proof of marriage by December 31. If they fail to do so, partners of diplomats and officials will “be expected to leave the United States within 30 days unless they submit the required proof of marriage or have obtained separate authorization to remain in the country through a change of non-immigrant status.”

Ostensibly, this is supposed to have something to do with Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage three years ago, although it's very difficult to see how marriage equality in this country should force people to get married who don't have to obey our parking regulations.

This is not something that any LGBTQ group of any kind has been pushing for, or had even dreamed up, so it's difficult to imagine what the Corrupt Trump Administration is trying to accomplish. As our former Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Powers pointed out, only 12% of U.N. member states allow same-sex couples to get married. Many countries in Africa, the former Soviet bloc, and Asia actively criminalize their LGBTQ citizens. This new rule is not going to pressure antigay regimes to turn around and embrace marriage equality; it's more likely to result in the persecution of those same-sex partners, and probably the recall and disappearance of the diplomats they were living with.

Which leads me to suspect that maybe there is some particular diplomat Trump wants to get rid of, and this is some sneaky way of going about it.

Whatever the reason, you can be sure it's over something petty.

Q Toon: The Reason

The theme of this year's World AIDS Day is "Access Equity Rights Now."

Access Equity Rights Now  is a call to action to work together and reach the people who still lack access to comprehensive treatment, prevention, care and support services.
Access Equity Rights Now  is a call to action to strengthen the commitment to HIV research evidence-based interventions.
Access Equity Rights Now  is a call to action to all HIV stakeholders to unite and overcome injustices caused by violence and the exclusion of people on the basis of gender, class, race, nationality, age, geographic location, sexual orientation and HIV status.
Access Equity Rights Now  is a call to action to repeal laws that infringe on people’s human rights and deny communities the ability to participate in the world as equals.
Access Equity Rights Now  reminds us that all our gains will be lost if we do not continue to push forward and build a strong global movement to change the course of the epidemic.

On the positive side, 18 million people now have access to life-saving treatment for HIV/AIDS, and new infections were down 58%. But reading between the lines of  Executive Director for UNAIDS Michel Sidibé's message this year, that reduction is largely because there are fewer transmissions of the disease from mother to child.

We are winning against the AIDS epidemic, but we are not seeing progress everywhere. The number of new HIV infections is not declining among adults, with young women particularly at risk of becoming infected with HIV.

We know that for girls in sub-Saharan Africa, the transition to adulthood is a particularly dangerous time. Young women are facing a triple threat: a high risk of HIV infection, low rates of HIV testing and poor adherence to HIV treatment.

Because HIV+ patients are living longer, we are also encountering the new challenges of treating HIV/AIDS  in older patients, who are at increased risk of age-related illnesses compared to the general population. The United Nations is calling for a "life-cycle approach" to meet these challenges in the years ahead.

Francis at the U.N.

--from Pope Francis's address to the United Nations this morning.