While politicians are gassing on, here's the sort of thing that really matters: the Washington Post reports on a superbug resistant to last-resort antibiotics, and liable to share its genes with other more sinister bacteria, that has reached the United States. People tell me, oh, I wouldn't want to live in the Middle Ages because they didn't have antibiotics. Well, we did and we squandered them.

Three cheers for modernity.

In today's Mercatornet Newsletter, Editor Michael Cook cites a noteworthy observation by his colleague Carolyn Moynihan:

A great deal of ink has been spilt over the rather dreary topic of the state of public bathrooms in the United States. Transgenders, it is argued, clearly have a civil right to access the bathroom of their choice. This is an issue which affects, at most 0.3% of the population. For my money, Carolyn Moynihan, our deputy editor, has penned the most sensible contribution to this debate. She asks why Americans are working themselves into a frenzy over bathrooms when nearly 1 in 6 young men between 18 and 34 is either out of work or in jail.

In principle it's possible, even logical, to be compassionate to everyone. But her observation underlines how selective, and ostentatious, some people's concern seems to be.

Suppose you are a delegate at a political convention. And suppose a resolution is put forward that “No delegate shall vote for any candidate who threatens violence, or condones violence by his or her supporters, to influence the political process in this party or our nation.” Could you vote against it? In fact the convention is a major one, being watched carefully by many of your compatriots and many people abroad. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s a question of who you are. Are you someone who could possibly fail to support a resolution that forbids thuggery and intimidation as tools for gaining a nomination or winning election?

Now you may see where this is going. But beware of what Soren Kierkegaard called “a covetous eye on the outcome”. Close your eyes and answer the question clearly and frankly in the privacy of your own conscience.

OK. Now do look at the outcome. Because I am indeed thinking about Donald Trump. And I’m thinking about him because of a post by Ilya Somin on The Washington Post’s excellent “The Volokh Conspiracy” blog, in which he suggests that the Republican Party can, and should, stop Trump by adopting precisely such a rule.

As Somin notes, “The Republican National Convention Rules Committee has almost unlimited power to change the rules by which the delegates vote.” And the committee will be selected from delegates to the convention. He says he is not optimistic about their finding a way to stop Trump. But they “certainly will have the power to do so, even if not the will.”

As Somin further notes, among many other observations and arguments worth reading, “Trump has threatened “riots” if he does not get his way at the convention and repeatedly condoned violence by his supporters against even nonviolent protestors. If there has not been a rule against such behavior in the past, it may be because, until this year, no one imagined that a candidate who condones violence in the political process could get so close to the nomination.”

At this point some people will be saying hold on, this is just a trick to keep Trump from getting the nomination. And it certainly would have that effect. But that doesn’t make it a trick. Rather, it would be a principled decision. If it excludes Trump, it’s because Trump is unfit to be given the nomination.

Some Trump backers, including Canadians, might be inclined to dispute that claim. But before doing so, I ask them please to close their eyes, forget that Trump is involved, imagine if it helps that it’s some radical leftist firebrand who’s actually said the kinds of things he has, and then picture themselves confronted with the resolution above as a voting delegate. And never mind “democracy”.

I’m not asking what you think of other people’s decision to back Trump. I’m asking whether you personally could vote against a resolution blocking the nomination of people who openly advocate and threaten violence not against the nation’s enemies, but to gain political advantage in a political system based on liberty under law.

Could you really?

There he goes again, you may be tempted to say. Our PM posed with the Canadian Invictus Games team and did their pushup-then-lock-one-arm-and-extend-other-hand gesture while issuing a thinly veiled challenge to Prince Harry and President Obama to do the same or something similar for the British and American teams for the upcoming games in Orlando. NBC headlined it "Watch Justin Trudeau's Macho Challenge to Obama, Prince Harry" and indeed my first thought was "Showing off again, huh?" But on reflection I'm going to praise him instead. First, the Invictus Games created by Prince Harry "for wounded, injured and sick Service personnel" are an excellent cause. Second, fitness is an excellent cause. Third, and crucially, the two leaders he implicitly challenges are both themselves healthy and physically active. It would be unfair and in bad taste to call out a political leader who through age or misfortune couldn't do such a thing. But in this case I appreciate his doing the... well, it sure is a clumsy thing to describe.

So I was thinking of dubbing it "the Trudeau" so we can do it at the dojo without spending five minutes naming it. But I decided "the Invictus" was a better name. Because this time I don't think he was calling attention to himself but to two worthy causes: rehabilitating wounded members of our Armed Forces and those of our allies, and staying fit.

Yes, it's a challenge, to other leaders and to the rest of us. But it's a worthy challenge because most of us should be able to do at least one "Invictus". If Trudeau happens to look good doing it, it's because he keeps himself in shape. And that's a good thing.

It seems that Donald Trump will indeed win the Republican nomination for president. For months I have been predicting, at first blithely and more recently grimly, that it would not happen. And now I am eating crow. I got it badly wrong and I apologize. I have no excuse. I don't even have an explanation. I have great faith in Americans and a great deal more faith in Republicans than most commentators around the world and even, I often feel, in the United States. And perhaps I allowed wishful thinking to distort my sense of what was likely to happen.

The GOP has nominated candidates I did not approve of in the past. So have the Democrats. But normally I could find some sort of explanation, even for Hillary Clinton, who I think would make a pretty bad president. For Trump I just can't. It makes no sense to want this man as your leader or your representative. You can't admire his grasp of the issues, his consistent adherence to a philosophy, his suavity, his gravitas.

Sure, he annoys the right people. But so did Ted Cruz and any number of other potential nominees. Ronald Reagan drove them berserk, as did George W. Bush. You didn't need Trump for that, and I have no idea what anyone does think they need him for. And annoying people may bring a certain sour private satisfaction. But it cannot drive political conduct anywhere you want to go.

I'm not abandoning my faith in the United States or in American conservatives. But I am saying this outcome, and with Ted Cruz suspending his campaign after his crushing defeat in Indiana it seems inevitable that Trump will be their nominee, reflects badly on both the nation and the movement.

It's too early to risk a prediction about what will happen in the general election especially given how wrong I was about this nomination race. But I am certain that those who backed Trump will eventually be very sorry they did.

As for me, I'm already sorry. In both senses.

In my latest National Post column I argue from the American example that excessive growth of government has made people reckless about their personal finances among many other things.

A nice piece in today's Daily Telegraph advocating Brexit and criticizing Barack Obama's intervention in the debate (on which I commented recently), by London mayor and long-time columnist Boris Johnson. He says that "to stay in the EU" is to consent "to the slow and insidious erosion of democracy in this country". He's exactly right. And if the pro-EU campaigners aren't exactly aware of it, they certainly hold a worldview that categorizes genuine self-government as an irritating obstacle to progress rather than vital to preserving a decent society. There is no European Magna Carta and it matters. And if we want to maintain the foundations of individual dignity and enterprise that have made Canada what it is, we need to recapture our own sense of the enduring importance of self government and an awareness that, to the extent that "progress" and liberty are antithetical, we should choose liberty.

A curious intervention by Barack Obama in Britain’s debate over leaving the EU. It’s not odd that he supports them staying in. He would. But it’s odd that for once he got the premise so right though as usual he got the conclusion so wrong. After a ritual nod to Britons’ right to decide their destiny for themselves, the American president launched into a rightly derided and probably counterproductive attempt to cajole and bully them into submerging their sovereignty in the European Union, including threatening their access to American markets with a claim that a genuinely independent Britain would go to “the back of the queue” for a trade deal, well behind the EU. So much for the special relationship, I guess.

I find Obama's performance more than usually curious because his effort to flatter the British drew on the shared values that underlie that special relationship: “As citizens of the United Kingdom take stock of their relationship with the EU, you should be proud that the EU has helped spread British values and practices – democracy, the rule of law, open markets – across the continent and to its periphery.”

He’s quite right about the first part. Those are British and subsequently American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand values. Government in the Anglosphere, as we argued in our Magna Carta documentary and will in the “True North and Free” project currently under way, is dramatically different even from government in the more politically pleasant parts of Europe, let alone the rest of the world. And Obama isn’t normally sensitive to such matters, to put it mildly. But he went on to say “The European Union doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it.” And that’s completely wrong.

The EU isn’t democratic. It’s not tyrannical. But it is bureaucratic, centralized and unaccountable. It stands more for rule by law than of law, in the vital sense of fair, stable rules that arise from the people and protect their right to make their own choices. And it stands for government meddling not open markets. I do think the British example has made Europe better over time; even France, let alone Germany, has to some extent been embarrassed into creating more responsive and less repressive governments. But both also made impressive efforts to crush British liberty by force. And neither have embraced the common law system under which governments emanate from the people organically rather than standing majestically, or stodgily, above them.

Obama then claimed that “A strong Europe is not a threat to Britain’s global leadership; it enhances Britain’s global leadership. The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe ensures that Europe takes a strong stance in the world, and keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies on the other side of the Atlantic. So the US and the world need your outsized influence to continue – including within Europe.” Which is utter bosh.

Britain’s influence in the world has dwindled dramatically since it joined the European Economic Community, forerunner to the EU, back in 1973. Not only because it joined. But it was part and parcel of turning away from the glorious heritage of liberty that had made this damp, chilly foggy group of islands a hyperpower economically, culturally and militarily and also the “Mother of the Free” described in Land of Hope and Glory. Worse, Britain’s influence in Britain has dwindled, as law, regulation, and even jurisprudence come increasingly from the alien continental system.

For over a thousand years Britons decided their destiny for themselves, via a Parliament that controlled the executive in a way not even Europeans managed and nobody else really even tried. That is the system that spread to the United States as well as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. And precisely because democracy in the desirable sense, rule of law in the desirable sense and open markets in the genuine sense are British values, they should leave the EU.

Europe is so close to Britain. And yet it is so far away. And so is Barack Obama.