Some COVID news. I don't write half as much about COVID as other opinionators because, as I've been telling you for more than a year, I don't find it the least bit interesting. It's an infection. If you're old, get vaccinated. Old or young, get on with your life!

I know most people are more interested than I am, though; so when a COVID story tickles my fancy, I'll post it.

This one definitely tickled my fancy. It's from India. Headline, from the Daily Mail, July 7th: Two men are arrested in India for saying cow urine and dung do not cure Covid-19.

Two men arrested in India for saying cow urine and dung do NOT cure Covid-19 | Daily Mail Online https://t.co/8OkVdN4gmo

— Khawaja Khalid Farooq (@Kkf50) July 7, 2021

What happened was, a Member of Parliament from India's ruling party, the BJP, has claimed that smearing cow excrement all over your body and drinking cow urine can cure the COVID infection. The Daily Mail story comes with pictures of people who have done the smearing.

These two men who've been arrested had put up Facebook posts criticizing this advice. Some loyal members of the BJP took exception to that, saying that the two had  "deliberately and wilfully insulted and outraged religious feelings and sentiments" of BJP workers.

So the two guys who posted (Erendro Leichombam and Kishorechandra Wangkhem, which I did not try to pronounce on my podcast) were arrested. At the time of the Daily Mail report they had been held in jail for 45 days. Under Indian law you can be arrested and held for a year without any formal charge or trial.

That BJP sounds like a pretty powerful ruling party. Seems they can do what they like to dissidents from state dogma, even when that dogma concerns covering yourself with cow poop. Thank goodness our ruling party here in the U.S.A. doesn't have arbitrary power like that!