Thoughts and Prayers

I am a proud supporter of the Second Amendment and will do everything I can to oppose gun grabs by the Far Left.

— Rep. Tony Gonzales

Tony Gonzales represents Uvalde, Texas, where the morgue is stuffed this morning with young children.

Most are so badly shot up, the coroners can't identify them.

Gonzales used Twitter a few hours ago to provide constituents an 800 number to call, if they feel distressed and "need to talk." 

A call to the number will be answered by a federal employee who works at one of the 180 "Lifeline" call centers operated by the US government. 

Each call costs taxpayers $82.

If every adult in Gonzales' district were to call the 800 number just one time, taxpayers would owe nearly $63 million.

That's how Republicans spend our money?

Anyway, from his biography, Gonzales looks like an admirable guy.

He used the US Navy to climb out of poverty and today champions hard work and education. He's married to a woman named Angel and has six children.

My thought for the day is that, although his fellow party members would deny it, Rep. Gonzales and the GOP stand squarely behind the Uvalde shooter. You could say the GOP's finger was on the trigger.

My prayer for the day is that Gonzales finds the words to explain to his six children why so many other kids have to die every month to prevent "gun grabs by the Far Left."

Good luck with that, Congressman.

Fake News' Forerunner

When you strike at the morale of a people,
you strike at the deciding factor.

— William "Wild Bill" Donovan

You may recall that, in March, a web video circulated in which Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked fellow Ukrainians to surrender.

Forensics experts within hours identified it as a "deepfake," and the major platform providers deleted the video—but not until this Russian-made propaganda piece had reached millions.

When we think of fake news, we tend to think of Russia, Q-Anon, and—first and foremost—Fox News.

But the US government perfected the art of fake news—at the time called "black propaganda"—80 years ago.

In March 1943, against FDR's wishes, Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan formed the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Forerunner of the CIA, the OSS had been Wild Bill's brainchild. 

He modeled it after Britain's MI-6 to function as an immense spy ring comprising 13,000 soldiers and civilians, including celebrities like John Ford, Sterling Hayden, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood, Paul Mellon, Carl Jung and Julia Child (over a third of the spies were women).

But the Moral Operations Branch was something else. 

It was specialized.

A distant admirer of Joseph Goebbels, Wild Bill fashioned Morale Operations to be the US government's propaganda arm. 

Its mission: to sow doubt and distrust within the armies and civilian populations of the Axis nations.

You win a war, "by mystifying and misleading the enemy," Wild Bill said.  

"When you strike at the morale of a people, you strike at the deciding factor."

To this end, Morale Operations manufactured and delivered tens of thousands of pieces of fake news during World War II:

• It airdropped into Germany fake newspapers that claimed anti-Hitler resistance was on the rise.
  
  
• It airdropped flyers that showed the US produced a new warplane every five minutes—far more than Germany.
  
  
• It printed facsimiles of an official Nazi flyer after D-Day, changing the text to instruct German soldiers to shoot their own officers, should they order a retreat. The Germans unwittingly circulated the fake flyers among their troops.
  
  
• It mailed fake letters to the families of German soldiers that claimed their deceased sons were victims of mercy killings by Nazi doctors.
  
  
• It produced a fake weekly economics newsletter that suggested German businesses would prosper if the Nazi Party were removed from power.
  
  
• It instigated rumors designed to incite rebellion in Nazi-occupied territories. The rumors described successful revolts and assassinations that had never happened.
  
  
• It broadcast music programs on a fake radio station, embedding news reports of German defeats every hour on the hour. After Operation Valkyrie, the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, newscasters announced the names of hundreds of "suspects," hoping Germans would conclude that the plot was widespread than it actually was. The Gestapo executed 2,500 of the "suspects."

Even though FDR deplored such tactics, "Wild Bill" outlined them in the Morale Operations Field Manual, a 60-page handbook he published in January 1943.

The top secret manual stated that field personnel engaged in Moral Operations must be reliable Americans with "demonstrated proficiency in administrative affairs and the theory and practice of influencing human beings."

In their jobs, all field personnel would "within the enemy's country, incite and spread dissension, confusion, and disorder; promote subversive activities; and depress the morale of his people."

Monetizing Mania

The grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a breaking point.

— President Joe Biden

Marketing guru Mark Schaefer thinks businesses can cash in on Americans' mania.

Mania may be "the biggest marketing megatrend of the decade," he says. "It’s bigger than the metaverse because it impacts almost everybody."

Businesses can monetize mania in any number of ways, Schaefer suggests. They can:

• Offer customers spas, massages, and "stress-relieving activities like yoga, meditation, and running;"
  
  
• Provide them sleep aids, alcohol, comfort food, and games;
  
  
• Offer psychological counseling (both online and in-person);

• Support customers' hobbies (painting, knitting, cooking, woodworking, etc.); and
  
  
• Deliver products and services that capitalize on nostalgia.

"If you think this through," Schaefer says, "the changes being forged by stress and mental health could impact how, when, and where customers shop, how they consume content, and who they trust."

I think Schaefer is onto something. 

The pandemic has brought about a sea change. 

Every day is now a Manic Monday.

In response, I believe, businesses can take steps now to attract and retain crazed customers:

• First, redesign your frustrating telephone tree. Allow customers the option of skipping all announcements and dialing the CEO. Encourage them to leave him verbally abusive messages and offer weekly prizes for the most creative ones.
  
  
• Retrain all customer service reps (CSRs) to impersonate Mr. Rogers. Retain only those whose impersonations are dead on.  
  
  
• Provide cannabis-laced cookies and brownies in your reception areas and waiting rooms. Serve customers only CBD-infused coffee and tea.
  
  
• Imprint punching bags with the faces of your senior executives and place the bags throughout your offices.
  
  
• Send post-purchase surveys that allow only complaints.
  
  
• Instead of tee shirts, give away branded straight jackets.

Mania represents the marketing megatrend of the decade.

How will you cash in on it?

POSTSCRIPT: I don't make light of America's mental health crisis, only marketers' urge to monetize it. Should you be suffering, find a quiet room, grab a cool beverage, and sit down and read Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. 

Target

I know how it feels to be the Kremlin's target.

After establishing that I'm a homosexual (although I'm straight), the Kremlin engineered my lifetime erasure on LinkedIn. All because I spoke in favor of limited gun ownership.

Don't cross these boys, as Nina Jankowicz also learned this week.

A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, a Fulbright scholar, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a noted author, Jankowicz was removed Wednesday by Homeland Security from its new Disinformation Governance Board.

The Kremlin doesn't care for her, because she served while a Fulbright scholar in the foreign ministry of Ukraine in Kiev in 2017 and wrote a book in 2020 titled How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict.

Worse yet, Jankowicz advised Volodymyr Zelenskyy on matters of Russian disinformation.

So when President Biden announced in April that she would head the new board, the Kremlin went into overdrive, deploying all its favorite mouthpieces (including Tucker Carlson and Senator Ron Johnson) to belittle Jankowicz.

These Kremlin mouthpieces threatened to rape her, kill her, and murder her family members. They called her mentally ill, a whore, a propogandist for the "great replacement," and—worst of all—a "nasty Jew" (Jankowicz isn't nasty or Jewish, just as I'm not homosexual).

They pulled out all the stops and the hatchet job worked in under three weeks.

One thing you can say about the Kremlin and its American mouthpieces: they may be effective, but they're not terribly original.

Womb with a View

Claiming to be a victim is not a sign of virtue.
It's a strategy for narcissists.

— Adam Grant

The day after the news broke that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, Stephen Colbert quipped, "Congratulations, ladies, your decisions are being made by four dudes and a woman who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is a rom-com."

That pretty much sums things up.

In this week's edition of Crisis Magazine, walking womb and resident wacko Samantha Stephenson argues that the two of three Americans who want the Court to uphold Roe, by disagreeing with the Court's decision, are "persecuting" pro-life Catholics. 

Poppycock.

Pro-life Catholics are not the victims of persecution; they're narcissists claiming to be so. If they want dominion over women, they should move to Afghanistan.

Not content with martyrdom, Stephenson further argues that Roe is "deeply damaging to women," because the right to an abortion is damaging.

"Abortion is not an equalizer," she says, "but an assault."

Again, poppycock.

Has any female patient ever said she felt assaulted by an abortionist?

Stephenson grounds her arguments on an essentialist claim: women are by definition child-bearers. 

Given this, any law that suggests otherwise must be "oppressive" and "coercive."

Roe not only sanctions abortion, Stephenson says, but makes it "increasingly difficult to opt out of its use." 

The law's real purpose, she claims, is to compel women to have abortions and "forgo childbearing."

"Instead of fighting for the freedom of women to be women—whose fertility and desire for motherhood are integral parts of their identity—abortion advocates insist that our liberty can only be found by muting our fertility and forcing our healthy bodies to mimic those of men," Stephenson says.

And there you have it: essentialism at its finest.

Women are by definition mothers. 

Roe compels them to be otherwise.

Therefore, Roe is wrong.

Essentialism has a long history of abuse by narcissists like Samantha Stephenson.

In fact, two and a half millennia of abuse.

Essentialism has been used to defend religious wars, slave-trafficking, colonialism, pogroms, and segregation. 

Now it's defending the overturn of Roe.    

Essentialism holds that everything has an essence—a set of attributes that make it what it is.

In other words, for any kind of thing, there exists a set of attributes all of which the thing must have to be correctly called by its name.

A man, for example, by definition walks on two legs, not four; uses tools and language; and is born, grows old, and dies. 

Those attributes define a man—and, by extension, every man. Every man shares in common what we call "human nature."

Ethical essentialism insists there are "essential rules" (absolutes) by which we live. 

The moral absolutism Samantha Stephenson favors claims that a law like Roe is wrong absolutely, because it contradicts a natural law and victimizes a whole class of citizens.

I don't buy that.

Women—non-Catholic ones, anyway—aren't just walking, talking wombs.

They're citizens. 

Roe protects their rights; it doesn't restrict them.

People like Stephenson who cry victimhood simply feel entitled.

In her case, she feels entitled to have children—three so far.

That's fine.

But she wants a trophy for it.

Narcissism engenders her feeling of entitlement. 

And narcissism makes Stephenson an aggressor and predator.

Not quite a wolf in sheep's clothing—more like a psycho in sackcloth.

What an insult to women's dignity.