Commander in Thief

The party of crooks and thieves is putting forward its chief crook and thief for the presidency. We must vote against him.

— Alexei Navalny

When thievery is baked into a nation, as it is in Russia, we call it a kleptocracy. 

Kleptocracy, meaning "rule by a class of thieves," is a 19th-century word derived from the Greek words kleptes, meaning "thief," and kratia, meaning "rule."

Corruption in itself is bad enough; but far worse is the predatory and psychotic nature of kleptocrats.

Kleptocrats rule by bullying and by silencing their critics.

And when their rule is threatened, kleptocrats go on a murderous rampage.

That explains Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Pro-reform Ukraine threatens his thief's rule over Russia.

It also explains Trump's attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Joe Biden's win threatened Trumps' unhampered venality.

It will take decades for future historians and forensic accountants to quantify Trump's take during his four years in the White House, but it was well over $2 billion.

Of course, compared to Putin, Trump's a piker. 

Putin has taken 100 times that amount.

It's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a self-dealing psychotic willing to murder to protect his kleptocracy; harder still to hear your fellow citizens say they'll vote to return a self-dealing psychotic to the White House.

My one hope lies in the high likelihood that the newly formed Task Force KleptoCapture will reveal that Trump has been laundering Russian kleptocrats' money—a federal crime—for decades, and that our Commander in Thief will at last be brought to justice.

Stay tuned.

We live in wondrous times.

Peaches and Cream

Americans hate history. What we love is nostalgia.

— Regi Gibson

Teachers, librarians, and museum curators are at sixes and sevens over how to sweeten America's story.

That's because peaches and cream trump truths in this country.

Truths just get you in trouble.

American exceptionalism, the saccharine tale of the "city on a hill," is our preferred confection. 

We serve it 24/7 at every table in town.

Right now, the GOP—the party of Putin—would make it America's official dessert.

So much for apple pie.

And the GOP would deputize its members, Stasi-like, to help the state round up dissident chefs.

I don't care for a kitchen run like that.

And will do everything in my powers to thwart the GOP.

How about you?

Are you on the side of truths?

Report No. 32-04 VD

Ukraine's tragedy may be America's blessing.

The sudden spotlight on Putin may open the eyes of Trump fans to his treachery.

They might come to realize what the rest of the world knows: Trump is Putin's bitch, which doesn't quite recommend 45 for reelection.

Excerpt from Report No. 32-04 VD

With luck, that spotlight will land soon on a Kremlin document leaked last July, Report No. 32-04 VD.

While America's mainstream media slumbered all that month, reporting only on the Tokyo Olympics, Europe's media headlined the document's leak.

Report No. 32-04 VD, dated January 14, 2016, is a Kremlin brief that was discussed by Putin in a meeting of Russia's national security council a week later.

At the end of the meeting, Putin directed three spy agencies to begin "all out" disinformation campaigns to help then-candidate Trump win in 2016. 

The spy agencies were to "alter the consciousness of the masses, especially in certain groups."

Putin believed a Trump White House would disrupt and weaken America, his longtime nemesis.

"A Trump victory will definitely lead to the destabilization of the US socio-political system and will see discontent erupt," the report says.

The document also assesses the mind of then-candidate Trump.

"Trump is an impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual suffering from an inferiority complex.”

Report No. 32-04 VD confirms the Kremlin had blackmail materials from "previous unofficial visits by Trump to the territory of the Russian Federation." 

No doubt, those include the infamous "golden showers" video.

Should Trump resist the Kremlin's intervention in the presidential election, Putin would remind the candidate he could ruin him.

So as you witness Ukraine's tragedy unfold, remember what mom used to say.

"Behind every cloud there's a silver lining."

Or at least a golden shower.

True Ignorance

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge,
but the refusal to acquire it.

— Karl Popper

I rarely encounter a fatuous opinion that's based on knowledge.

They're almost always based on bullshit.

Knowledge has never been as easy to acquire than it is today.

And yet ignorance remains rampant.

Our polity is a disaster today because, while we test citizens relentlessly—for Covid-19, alcohol, cholesterol, illegal drugs, math skills and driving skills—we don't test our citizens for ignorance. 

We let it go unchecked.

People who are ignorant counter knowledge by labeling it opinion, as if there were no difference. 

"Well, that's your opinion."

But there's a vast difference, which has been understood for 2,500 years.

The Ancient Greek philosophers called opinion doxa; knowledge, episteme.

The former is hearsay; the latter, science.

Episteme, the philosophers taught, had privilege over doxa because it was rational (or what we'd call "evidence-based").

To label episteme as doxa—to say, "Well, that's your opinion"—is to conflate the two forms of knowledge. 

In short, to pile ignorance on top of ignorance.

But some ignorant people want to double down even on that. 

When cornered by unwanted evidence, they label it fake news, as Trump labeled Covid-19 in October 2020—despite the detection of 69,000 new cases every day.

Insisting there's fake news is worse than ignorant; it's psychotic.

It's the cranial condition Karl Popper described as "true ignorance."

Ignorance that won't seek self-help.

Millions of our citizens share this psychosis—incurably, I'm afraid.

But that's nothing new.

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been," science writer Isaac Asimov said in 1980.

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence," Mark Twain said in 1887, "and then success is sure."

Quousque Tandem?

For how much longer, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

— Cicero

Fox News cut off Trump last night when he attributed Putin's invasion of Ukraine to the "big steal."

"Putin was going to be satisfied with a peace, and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration, and as an American, I'm angry about it, and I'm saddened by it, and it all happened because of a rigged election."

Interviewer Laura Ingraham cut off Trump at this point and jumped to another story. She returned to Trump minutes later, only to get into an argument with him.

We can only hope media companies—even propagandist ones like Fox News—have lost patience with Trump's bullshit.

It would not be the first time a popular figure was silenced by broadcasters.

In November 1938, radio stations nationwide banned Father Charles Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with 30 million avid American listeners, after he denied during his weekly broadcast that Kristallnacht had hurt Germany's Jews. (He claimed it only targeted Communists.)

The stations insisted the airwaves could not tolerate Coughlin's intolerance—an abuse of the freedom of speech. Without a platform, the Nazi-loving Coughlin soon vanished from the public forum.

In November 63 BC, Rome's consul Cicero convened the senate in order to lay before it a plot to overthrow the Roman Republic.

The plot's leader, the corrupt Senator Catiline, sat in the gallery as Cicero delivered his First Speech against Catilina, one of history's greatest political orations. It opens:

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? 

For how much longer, Catiline, will you abuse our patience? How much longer will your madness make playthings of us? When will your unbridled effrontery stop swaggering?

Quo usque tandem abutere, Trump, patientia nostra?

Absurdities

Love the offender, yet detest the offense.

— Alexander Pope

Self-justification is a powerful force.

A recent Goodly post offended a friend of mine, who's rejoicing over the end of mask mandates. 

He was particularly upset by my calling anti-maskers "discourteous" and "miserable" and wanted to know if I was labeling him as such.

"I and millions of other well-informed people are convinced we are well past the point of mandating mask-wearing," he said.

This fallacious argument is known among logicians as the argumentum ad populum. 

It insists that, because a belief is held in common by a large group of people, it is therefore correct.

The fallacy is clear: just because a crowd thinks something is so doesn't make it so. (More on this in a moment.)

In fairness to my friend, I believe he views my criticisms as instances of "name-calling."

Name-calling is mightily offensive to everyone (especially to name-callers).

He also views mask-wearing as an instance of "hygiene theater."

Medical experts now know Covid-19 is transmitted through the air and that many of the now-outdated public-safety protocols we cherish, like surface-scrubbing, hand-sanitizing, plexiglass shields and disposable menus, are worthless "theatrics" designed to soothe anxious citizens.

Mask-wearing, however, doesn't fall into the same category. 

Mask-wearing, in fact, deters the spread of Covid-19.

Naturally, you can always find a medical practitioner or two who insists masks are hooey; but they'd be lacking evidence. 

You can also assert that the entire scientific community is stupid and wrong; but you'd be lacking evidence.

My problem with anti-maskers is simple: their behavior is unconscionable. 

By ignoring the fact that Covid-19 has killed 1 million Americans and isn't done with us yet, they're guilty of criminal negligence.

And rather than delight in their guilt, I'm saddened. 

I'm sad that a microbe is smarter than the millions of our fellow citizens who'd tell you mask-wearing is whimpy.

They skew Conservative and represent the same crowd that voted for Trump in 2020 (although they'd deny it).

They're the "fake news" bunch.

They don't believe in science and medicine and don't accept civic duty, unless it's convenient, justifying their irresponsible behaviors with the argumentum ad populum.

I'm sorry, but accepting without evidence another's beliefs—or even many people’s beliefs—is just wishful, lazy thinking.

It's thinking of the kind that, throughout history, has produced absurdities like these:

• The earth is flat.
• The fifth day of every month is unlucky.
• Drinking gladiators' blood will cure epilepsy.
• Mice originate from cheese wrapped in dirty rags.
• The earth is 6,000 years old.
• Proximity to the sun determines IQ.
• Blistering the skin with a hot iron cures disease.
• Tobacco enemas revive drowning victims.
• Plowing the ground will make it rain.
• The speed of trains crushes passengers’ brains.
• Implanting goat testicles in the scrotum will cure ED.
• Lower taxes for the rich benefit everyone.
• All Mexicans are rapists.
  
• Vladmir Putin is admirable. 

We don't need anti-maskers' absurdities.

The world is absurd enough.

Dutch and the Donald

Nothing personal, just business.

— Dutch Schultz

A judge last week ruled that Donald Trump must testify in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation of his company.

With the decision, Trump can no longer avoid justice. 

"He's running out of the tricks that he used in the past," one journalist noted.

Not quite.

He can take a page from fellow New Yorker Dutch Schultz. 

He can kill Letitia James.

In 1935, the Jewish mobster Schultz found himself the target of New York City’s special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who'd pledged with his appointment to rid the city of racketeers.

Dewey was a crusader, with eyes set on higher office (he would run for US president three times between 1940 and 1948). He pursued Schultz with vigor, indicting him for tax evasion. As Dewey wrote in his 1974 memoir, Twenty Against the Underworld, "I regarded it as a matter of primary importance to get Dutch Schultz."

Schultz's reaction was true to form. 

"Dewey's gotta go," he told associates and put out a contract on the prosecutor's life worth $25,000 (over $500,000 in today's money).

When Schultz advised the New York syndicate of the contract, the other family bosses balked, insisting that to rub out Dewey would only bring more government prosecution. They refused to authorize Schultz's hit.

"I’m gonna hit him myself," Schultz told the syndicate.

But the hit never happened. 

Instead, the syndicate rubbed out Schultz, whom they considered a loose cannon.

But, flashing forward, Trump doesn't have a syndicate to answer to. He can rub out Letitia James with impunity.

Stay tuned.

Fade up music.

Prediction

With all eyes on Putin, watch for this story to develop in the coming weeks: all along Mr. Obvious was a paid shill of the Russian autocrat.

Follow the money.

Goofy Governing

The repeal last week of Seattle's 30-year-old bike helmet law by the city's board of health exemplifies the sort of goofy governing that infuriates right-wingers.

As reported by The New York Times, Seattle scrapped the law—despite its proven ability to save lives—because police used it as a pretext to hassle Blacks.

“The question before us wasn’t the efficacy of helmets,” a board member said. "The question before us was whether a helmet law that’s enforced by police on balance produces results that outweigh the harm that that law creates."

As the basis of its decision, the board cited a local advocacy group's analysis of court records.

The analysis showed cops disproportionately ticketed Blacks for breaking the bike helmet law.

The analysis neglected to examine whether Seattle's Blacks wore bike helmets less frequently than other citizens, or rode bikes more frequently (both highly likely).

The same board declared racism a public health crisis in 2020.

You might credibly argue the bike helmet law was never fair, or that governments shouldn't "legislate safety" in the first place, and so the board's decision is the right one.

I don't see it that way.

Bike helmet laws have proven to reduce brain injuries and save lives everywhere. Their fair enforcement is a matter of police reform.

But if police harassment outweighs pubic safety, and social justice trumps public health, then it's only logical that all traffic laws be rescinded, and that police forces be defunded accordingly.

We don't need a lot of cops to enforce nonexistent traffic laws. Get rid of them! 

And it's that inevitable logic which sends right-wingers into apoplexy.

As it should.

Laws often have unintended consequences. (The mandate to stop at red lights, for example, often makes me late for my art classes, which really pisses me off.)

That doesn't make them laws we should rescind.

Goofy governing like Seattle's gives liberals a bad name. 

Endemic

There’s no finish line.

— Gov. Gavin Newsom

My hat's off to Gavin Newsom for declaring that Covide-19 is no longer epidemic, but endemic, in California. 

And so he's taking steps to mainstream it, acknowledging that government must combat Covid-19 perpetually, as it perpetually combats smoking, obesity, unsafe products, and water pollution.

And naturally, as with other public hazards, some people will die.

News flash, America: death is endemic everywhere. It always has been. It's inescapable and baked in.

Most of us simply choose to deny that cold fact.

Perhaps mainstreaming Covid-19, which to date has killed nearly 1 million Americans, will depoliticize it and wake sleepwalking citizens to the inexorability of their own deaths.

Our country would be a much happier place.

The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger defined the human being as finite, a "being-toward-death" (Sein zum Tode).

Where man is concerned, death is baked in, Heidegger claimed. Death is life's "fellow." 

Heidegger also believed that accepting death—your own death—brought you unbounded freedom—and unbounded happiness.

"Turning away from a flight from death," he said, "you see a horizon of opportunity." 

Embracing your death—denying your denial of death—"puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with a solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakeable joy."

Who knows but that mainstreaming Covid-19 could make common courtesy and civility—the "solicitous regard for others"—routine again; and make vaccination and mask-wearing badges of honor that announce to the world, "I can't outrun death and don't wish to try. I'm terribly mortal—and happy."

As to those discourteous, miserable many who resist vaccinations and masks I say, so think you can outrun your own death? Good luck with that. 

There's no finish line but one.

Moderates Rise Up

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

― Oscar Wilde

San Francisco voters this week put the kibosh on "Squad politics," according to Axios, when they tossed three lefties off the city's seven-member school board.

It seems the jettisoned board members went too far when they placed priority on renaming 44 public schools in honor of BIPOC over reopening the city's shuttered schools.

That in a nutshell is the problem with immoderate Dems.

Like their right-wing opponents, they never address problems; they only manipulate symbols. 

Moderates, on the other hand, roll up their sleeves and get shit done. (For a vivid history lesson in this, listen to the LBJ Tapes. They're remarkable.)

Moderates also know that America looks like more like Maybury than Roxbury. 

What happens in San Francisco doesn't stay in San Francisco, alas, and as a result left-wingers on the national stage are freaking out.

Their loud-mouthed obsessions with punishing police, tearing down statues, and renaming buildings now threaten their re-elections—and the majority enjoyed by Democrats.

"It's a huge problem," one political strategist told Axios.

Squad politics are left of most voters', who want fixes not to systemic injustices, but to galloping inflation, violent crime, illegal guns, crumbling bridges, diseases like Covid-19, and a rigged tax system.

"The hard-left politics of the so-called 'Squad' are backfiring big-time," Axios says. The Squad has turned the Democrats' brand toxic in the hinterlands.

No surprise, Squad members and their Congressional aides are refusing to comment on the voter uprising this week. No doubt they're working in closed session on a new name for San Francisco.

How about Graybury?

NOTE: Learn more about the voter uprising this week in San Francisco.

Torpedoed

Sometimes a little subterfuge is in order.

— Justina Ireland

I despise subterfuge. Despise it.

And I despise the developers who so often use it.

Developers in Alexandria, Virginia, are about to torpedo a favorite old haunt of mine, the Torpedo Factory, evicting the artists who've occupied it for 40 years.

In their relentless pursuit of profits, the developers will replace the artists' studios with Burger Kings, Cinnabons, and Gap Stores—even though these sorts of dumps are already within five minutes' walking distance.

Reading the naïfs on the city council, the developers used the cause of the month, diversity, as a ruse. 

The Torpedo Factory, they claim, isn't diverse: the artists are all White.

They've hung a big banner on the grounds demanding "A Torpedo Factory for All" and have promised to engineer diversity into their newly commercialized Torpedo Factory.

Their chicanery sickens me. And their hypocrisy.  

The developers are all White, as well. Lilly White.

The City of Alexandria, which owns the building, wants to earn a profit from it, too—even if that means evicting the artists.

The developer's promise of future profits for the city is yet another subterfuge.

A local waterfront preservationist told ALXnow, "Looking at the Torpedo Factory as a negotiable source of revenue that we would farm out to some developer who would make the future profits is a grave mistake."

The art community isn't happy with the plan, either.

"We’re being asked to step aside and sacrifice our livelihood and this institution in the name of development," one artist told The Washington Post.

NOTE: For accuracy's sake, I'll acknowledge there's in fact one Black on the developer's 48-person senior staff. Odd, for a firm using diversity in its self-promotion.

Toiletgate

Our Commode in Chief may no longer be on the seat of power, but he occupies the headlines daily.

Axios reported this week that Donald Trump routinely flushed White House documents down the toilet, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires their preservation.

Aides regularly found the papers clogging his personal toilet.

Trump, of course, pronounced the story "fake."

But I think the story holds water. Far too many White House aides saw this Super Bowl to doubt it.

If Trump were half as smart as Richard Nixon was, he'd have called the White House Plumbers to fix things.

The Washington Post called called Trump’s action a "wrenching testimony to his penchant for wanton destruction.”

I agree wholeheartedly with The Post, as I agree with Harvard historian Heather Cox Richardson's assessment of Trumps' document dump.

"The idea that he was flushing so many documents that he periodically clogged the toilet seems a commentary on his regard for the American people."

Trump promised a "Great America;" but he dealt us a royal flush.

Now can we please flush Donald down history's drain?

Heroes

A Hero of Liberty is a person who either promoted freedom, faith, or family values.

— Heroes of Liberty website

A new publisher of kids' books hopes to combat wokeism in grade schools with a series of books that glorify so-called "Heroes of Liberty," including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Fox News has called the series, written for second grade readers, "phenomenal," failing to recognize that it's above the reading-skills of 99% of Fox News' viewers.

As right-wing Supermoms move to ban classics like Maus, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 from curriculums and school libraries nationwide, the Delaware-based publisher has released its first title in the series, John Wayne: Manhood and Honor.

House editor Bethany Mandel, formerly a staff writer at the Heritage Foundation, thinks John Wayne: Manhood and Honor can rescue kids from the wrongs of feminism.

She told Axios the book "counters the narrative that 'masculinity is toxic.'

"Boys are conditioned to behave like women," Mande said. "We wanted to give boy readers a glimpse of a positive male role model who doesn't apologize for being manly and masculine."

While she wants the "Heroes of Liberty" series placed in school libraries, Mandel also wants "inappropriate" books removed.

You can guess what those books might be.

For my part, the only heroes I want to celebrate are the sandwiches that go by that name.

I want to see them removed from federal watchlists and made a standard menu item in every school cafeteria. And I want to see September 14 made a national holiday.

Which is why I recommend Delawarean Vince Watchorn's A Meal in One: Wilmington and the Submarine Sandwich.

A Meal in One tells the story of how the foot-long gut-bomb first came about—and why. It's an enthralling book about poor immigrant laborers and the small-time entrepreneurs who kept them fed.

You want to talk about "family values?"

There are more family values packed between two halves of an Italian roll than than in all the bombast ever spewed by Wayne, Reagan, Thatcher, or Barrett.

None other than President Biden wrote, in the foreword to A Meal in One, "I frequently stop in one of Delaware’s established sub shops to pick up lunch, dinner or a late-night snack without thinking twice about the role the sub played in putting Delaware on the culinary map.

"I must give credit to the Italian-Americans who settled in Delaware’s Little Italy and developed and popularized the culinary creation Wilmingtonians simply and affectionately call the 'sub.'

"I give further credit to Vince Watchorn for publicizing this relatively little-known fact about our proud city to everyone who loves good food."

John Wayne may know a thing or two about manliness, but I prefer my heroes to come with capicola, sweet peppers, and an extra dab of mayo.

Our Caligula

I judge you harmful and cruel, selfish and conceited, but I cannot hate you since I believe you’re unhappy.

— Albert Camus, Caligula

Caligula, Rome's emperor from 37 to 41 AD, was so capricious and cruel that his name became synonymous with despot.

Infamous for his misdeeds, Caligula humiliated enemies, butchered allies, plundered the treasury, chased after vanities, and even declared himself a god. While wallowing in vice and luxury, he taunted and tormented those who served him, dressing in weird costumes and staging vast orgies with senators' wives. 

His favorite expression was, "I have the right to do anything to anybody.”

But Caligula discovered he did not have that right. After four years on the throne, he was assassinated by the head of the Praetorian guard. A Roman historian said, "Caligula learned by experience he was not a god.”

We have our own, home-grown Caligula.

In his four years on the throne, he too humiliated enemies, plundered the treasury, dabbled in vanity projects, and tormented the people around him—all the while wallowing in luxury.

So, like a modern-day Praetorian guard, we deposed him.

I've been bellyaching about Donald Trump since January 1, 2017. It's been wearying to have had him around.

 

Like the majority of Americans, I wish now he'd simply vanish from the earth.

Though he's harmful and cruel, selfish and conceited, we cannot hate him, because we know he's unhappy.

But we can hate the sight of him, and the sound of his despotic voice.

Coup

Trump boasted Sunday he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

While our first president to stage a coup, Trump is by no means the first plutocrat to do so.

That dishonor is shared by the leaders of the American Liberty League, a cabal of CEOs that included J.P. Morgan, Jr., Irénée du Pont, Robert Clark, and the then-heads of General Motors, General Foods, and Birds Eye.

The year was 1933. The target was FDR.

Inaugurated in March, FDR had promised a "New Deal" to help lift the nation out of depression. A boon to working men and women, as well as the unemployed, the New Deal incensed the nation's CEOs, who labelled the patrician FDR a "tyrant" and "traitor to his class."

FDR wasn't in office month when the Liberty League sprang into action. 

It plotted to recruit a popular Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to lead a half million angry veterans in a march on Washington, with the goal of removing FDR from the White House at the barrel of a gun. 

The League's leaders were ready to spend $30 million to supply the veterans Remington Rifles—the equivalent of $500 million today.

But General Butler, a patriot, would have none of it and exposed the League's plot to the FBI. He also shared before a Congressional committee the details of what the newspapers called the "Wall Street putsch."

The Congressional committee's final report, delivered 11 months after FDR's inauguration, stated that the committee had "received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country.

"There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

Thirty-four years later, the committee chair, Rep. John McCormack, told a reporter, "We were in the depths of a severe depression, and we had a good man, Roosevelt, in the White House. 

"The plotters definitely hated the New Deal because it was for the people, not for the moneyed interests, and they were willing to spend a lot of their money to dump Mr. Roosevelt. 

"If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded."

HAT TIP: Thanks to Ann Ramsey for pointing me to this forgotten bit of history.

The Supermoms Assemble

O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,

The home of the brave and the free,

The shrine of each patriot's devotion,
A world offers homage to thee.

Thy mandates make heroes assemble,
When Liberty's form stands in view.

Thy banners make tyranny tremble,
When borne by the red, white, and blue.

— Thomas á Becket

Across the nation, a new American hero is emerging: the Supermom.

Uninformed and dogmatic, she is as great a threat to democracy as any Proud Boy.

Perhaps greater.

She is, after all, your mom.

The extreme right is enlisting Supermoms to oversee elections and run for local offices. 

Supermoms have their own PAC, Moms for Liberty, too; and have been singled out by Trump operatives for cultivation.

The Supermoms' goal is to turn back the clock 180 eighty years to the time "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" was penned.

Back then, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Columbia was indeed the gem of the ocean, which meant you needn't worry about porn or pervs or gang violence or uppity Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Queers, and Feminists.

Supermoms claim they are "fighting for the survival of America" by galvanizing parents to defend their rights against tyrants.

Of course, the tyrants in their sights are all Democrats—most especially those of color.

In the past few months, Supermoms in Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have organized state-wide door-knocking campaigns to uncover phantom voters; launched forensic audits of the 2020 election results; and lobbied state lawmakers to scrap all voting machines, so they can count the votes in future elections. 

And just this week, Supermoms on a Tennessee school board banned Maus because it's "vulgar," while Supermoms on school boards in Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming banned hundreds of books authored by Blacks.

In more ways than one, fiery Supermoms compose America's 21st century Luftschutz.

The Luftschutz was an all-volunteer civil defense league founded by Hermann Göring in 1933. At its peak, more than 22 million Germans belonged, many of them women.

Organized by local air raid wardens, the Luftschutz trained its members to place sandbags, fight fires, clear rubble, and respond with first aid in the event of aerial bombings and gas attacks. The wardens claimed the Luftschutz's purpose was Selbschutz (self- protection).

The darker purpose of the Luftschutz, however, was to recruit average German citizens into the Nazi party, which was a minority party in 1933. Göring understood that if you just let moms wear cool hats and attend gatherings, you could count on their silence when the time came for the Final Solution.  

Supermoms may consider themselves simply "concerned" soccer moms protecting their precious children, but they're in the grip of fascists.

That makes them wholly to be feared.

Above: Frau im Luftschutz! Nazi poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. 1936.

Values: Masturbatory Marketing

 Greed is not a financial issue. It's a heart issue.

— Andy Stanley

Spotify's unconscionable decision to keep Joe Rogan and drop Neil Young proves what I've long thought about tech corporations' self-professed "values."

They're pure, unadulterated snake oil.

Spotify's video on values includes a Latino marketing manager claiming "we do not approve any sort of campaign that we don't believe in."

How's that for masturbatory marketing?

Obviously, her statement is bullshit—or, worse, Spotify believes in Joe Rogan's relentless antivaxxer messaging.

Let's stop the "values" marketing malarkey and get back to basics. It may play to Millennials, but it's bullshit.

The hard truth is: Spotify believes in one thing and one thing only.

Profit.

Pure and simple.

HAT TIP: Neil Young deserves everyone's thanks for spotlighting Spotify's horrendous hypocrisy. Thank you, Mr. Young.

POSTSCRIPT, JANUARY 29: Since Neil Young's ultimatum to Spotify, his greatest hits album has rocketed into the Top 5 on Apple Music, and Spotify has lost $4 billion in market value."

POSTSCRIPT, FEBRUARY 3: Neil Young has been joined in his boycott of Spotify by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

POSTSCRIPT, FEBRUARY 7: Spotify's CEO confirmed the company won't "silence Joe," even though he spouts the N-word as well as disinformation.