The Mike and Joe Show

News policy is a weapon of war.
It's purpose is to wage war and not to give out information.

— Joseph Goebbels

For 40 years, the scientists at CDC have issued a weekly "morbidity report" to help doctors combat disease. Since April, the weekly report itself has been doctored by a Trump lackey named Michael Caputo.

A GOP flack at war with the "deep state," Caputo has no science creds; he's merely a low-end buildup boy—and an unseemly one, at that. 

After leaving a PR job in the army, Caputo linked up with Ollie North, helping spread American lies in Central America. He then studied advanced propaganda under Roger Stone and packed off to Moscow for six years to aid Vladmir Putin and his crooked friends. Caputo has spent the past 20 years peddling Tea Party candidates and staging paltry stunts designed to help Trump buy the Buffalo Bills at a rock-bottom price.

Now, as Trump's assistant secretary of public affairs for Health & Human Services, he's again doing the Emperor's bidding by cooking the books on Covid-19.

By way of self-justification, Caputo told Politico last week, “Our intention is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC."

Critics attribute Caputo's propagandist style to his mentor, but it owes more to Joseph Goebbels than Roger Stone.

While Hitler waged war, his propaganda minister kept a 20-volume diary in which he formulated his playbook. 

Among the proverbs therein:

"Not every item of news should be published; rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."

"I regard myself as responsible for the morale of the German people. From that fact I derive the right to keep out of the German press everything that is harmful or even fails to be useful."

"The Minister formulates the principle for the immediate future that in enemy reports anything that could be dangerous to us must be immediately denied. There is no need at all to examine whether a report is factually correct or not."

Unless Caputo is fired for doctoring the CDC's reports—an unlikely event—it's certain he will next turn to publicizing "alternative facts" about the virus, using $300 million of taxpayers' money he has appropriated from the CDC's operating budget.

You might call these alternative facts "bald-faced lies." 

Caputo prefers to call them "best practices." 

Goebbels would have called them "poetic facts."

In November 1944, as Germany's defeat began to look certain, Goebbels' assistant Rudolph Semmler observed that his boss "has introduced a new expression into the vocabulary of propaganda. 

"He is now using the phrase 'poetic truth' in contrast to—or rather in amplification of—the 'concrete truth.' We should describe things as they might have happened.

"Many events, he said, could not be understood unless we embroidered them a little with the 'poetic truth' and so made them understandable to the German people."

So stay tuned for The Mike and Joe Show.  

Gaslighting you with best practices.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 15,2020: According to breaking news reports, Michael Caputo went off his rocker yesterday. Rumors had it that Goebbels also suffered a nervous breakdown in December 1938, while writing a book he planned to title, Adolph Hitler—A Man Who Is Making History. 

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020: Michael Caputo left HHS today on extended medical leave. Congress is investigating his abuse of power.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 26, 2020: Michael Caputo has been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. While Goebbels never suffered cancer, he loved to discuss the subject with Hitler.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 18, 2020: Michael Caputo's dream has been smashed by Congress.

UPDATE, DECEMBER 16, 2020: Emails reveal Caputo had been pushing the herd immunity theory on CDC officials. Journalists uniformly react with scorn.

UPDATE, MARCH 19, 2021: A federal investigation has revealed that, before joining HHS as assistant secretary of public affairs, Caputo had been working for Russian state propagandists on Trump's behalf.

UPDATE, APRIL 9, 2021: Congressional investigators have released emails proving Caputo altered data from the CDC to conform with Trump's claims that Covid-19 was harmless.

UPDATE, APRIL 12, 2021: Forensic News has revealed Caputo failed to disclose to the Justice Department a lavish gift he had accepted from Russian agents just weeks before he was appointed to his role at HHS. "The failure to report his gift to the Justice Department has raised numerous questions about the true purpose of Caputo’s work, given his concurrent work with Russian spies."

The Unbearable Power of Stupid

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

— P. J. O'Rourke

Human history is rife with stupid. 

Stupid's sway is sometimes unbearable.

In warfare, medicine, governance, engineering and product design, stupid can be tragic; but in big business the sway of stupid can be the stuff of comedy, as these four Hollywood tales make clear:

Too slow

In 1939, Eddie Mannix, an executive at MGM, insisted "Somewhere over the Rainbow" slowed the opening of The Wizard of Oz and offered a brilliant idea during the edit: cut the song. But the film's two producers threatened to quit, if the three-minute song were removed, and Mannix relented.

"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" won that year's Oscar for best original song and became Judy Garland's signature tune.

Too long

In 1961, Martin Rankin, an executive at Paramount, insisted Breakfast at Tiffany's was running too long during the edit, and offered a brilliant idea: cut "Moon River." But the director, actor, and composers objected so strenuously, Rankin relented.

The two-and-one-half minute "Moon River" earned the composers the Oscar for best original song that year and ranks today as Number 4 in the American Film Institute's list of top film songs.

Too weird

In 1985, a cadre of Columbia executives signed a 35-page memo insisting the title of director Joel Schumacher's new film was weird, and offered a brilliant idea: change St. Elmo's Fire to The Real World. Schumacher, uncertain he'd win his way, in turn instructed the film's composers to omit from the theme song's lyrics any reference to the movie's title. But the composers ignored him.

"I thought the title fit in the song," lyricist John Parr said. "In the movie, St. Elmo's is a bar. But to me St. Elmo's Fire is a magical thing glowing in the sky that holds destiny to someone. It's mystical and sacred. It's where paradise lies, like the end of the rainbow."

"St. Elmo's Fire" hit Number 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Chart after the film's release, and remains a favorite 35 years later.

Too boring

In 1989, Disney chairman Jeffery Katzenberg insisted the three-minute ballad "Part of Your World" was "boring," and offered a brilliant idea: cut the song from The Little Mermaid. But Katzenberg relented when the two directors, the lyricist, and the animator hit the ceiling.

"Part of Your World" is today considered a classic Disney tune and the film's hallmark song. It's also thought to have inaugurated the "Disney Renaissance" and Disney's "Broadway Age."

P. J. O'Rourke is right.

Stupid is indeed a great force—maybe the greatest—in human affairs.

Decade

Goodly is 10 years old.

What began as a meager stab at search engine optimization a decade ago has become a vocation—you might say, a compulsion—of mine.

With nearly 400 thousand readers, Goodly no longer serves as a device for driving website traffic, but as a way of shouting, Hey, I'm still here.

I recently launched Blog, a new venture that's going to consume my time if it's to succeed—as, I hope, it will.

Meanwhile, God willing, Goodly will continue, pandemic or no, recession or no, civil war or no, global warming or no. 

I'm still here.

The Pleasure of Hating

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference and disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

— William Hazlitt

The genteel among us can't help but see vigilantes as living symbols of Hate. But we don't always call them for what they are: sadists.

Americans didn't invent Hate; it's bred in our bones.

Wracked by civil wars, the Ancient Greeks understood Hate to represent Love's equally passionate opposite—and a source of tremendous pleasure to men who nurse it within.

But it took another 2,500 years for anyone in the West to realize how Hate is baked into our species.

Sigmund Freud—borrowing a theory from his disciple Sabina Spielrein—called Love the "self-preservative instinct" and Hate the drive that compels us to "lead organic life back into the inanimate state." 

In other words, Hate manifests our species' self-destructive "death instinct."

When I see vigilantes, I think of Freud, grappling as he was with the horrors of World War I. And I see vigilantes' conspicuous Hate—their vivid displays of anger and aggression—as open expressions of a narcissistic neurosis; as the "dark side of love" on parade for all to watch.

Their conspicuous kind of Hate—Hate, American Style—reveals that Americans crave discord, division, destruction, and death.

It shows Americans love to hate.

Can a second civil war be far away?

Rich People

Rich people in cars never look at people on the street. Poor ones always do.

― Lucia Berlin

 

The rich can't empathize, according to a new study appearing in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Researchers at New York University and the University of California, Irvine asked subjects from various economic classes to examine photos of other people and describe the others' emotional states. The poor scored much higher than the rich in the test.

The researchers concluded that, while poor folks can read others' emotions accurately, the rich lack empathy. 

"Lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals,” the researchers wrote. 

In other words, the rich have little use for the poor—so objectify them—while the poor folks are "people who need people."

Another new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the rich often deny class privilege "by increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work." 

The rich "cover privilege in a veneer of meritocracy,” the researchers wrote, because "evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes."