Holy cosmic guacamole! It’s the end of the world! No, the end of the galaxy! No, the end of the universe! No, the end of Donald Trump!

No, it won't look like this. You should be so lucky.

Fortunately for everyone involved, it’s all probably going to take a while. That black hole that scientists found, or announced that they found earlier this week, is 55 million light years away from earth. So we don’t have to sweat it. 

At least not for a few days. 

But maybe by next month.

Here’s my thinking on that.

A black hole, in case you’ve been hibernating so deep in a black hole of your own that you’ve missed the news, is a kind of gravitational vacuum cleaner in space. It’s so powerful that it permanently sucks up everything that comes near it, compressing the mass of the stuff it swallows, then adding the new mass to the old mass.

Quantum physics for dummies

Now, gravity equals mass times momentum. So, even if things keep going along at the same rate of speed, the more mass the black hole gobbles up, the more its gravitational power grows. 

Anything that falls into a black hole never gets out again. It just gets squished into a mushed-together clump of gravitational whatever-the-hell it is. Its gravitational pull is so powerful that even light can’t get out of it.

I confess that all this is kind of, oh let’s say several thousand light years above my pay grade. So let's just consider everything that's said here an interpretive extrapolation. Or a speculative construction. Or a conflative reduction, whatever the hell that means. 

Even so, it seems to me that like the ramjet whose behavior can be described as, “the faster it goes, the faster it goes,” the rule of thumb on black holes ought to be, “the more it eats, the more it eats.”

It’s not just an insatiable appetite. It’s an appetite that gets increased by eating. Which means that in time, it will eat its entire galaxy. Which will make it even hungrier — okay, more gravitational, if you insist. Which means it will start eating other galaxies. Which will make it even hungrier. Until it finally eats our own galaxy. Although I understand our own galaxy has its own black hole to worry about.

Salt the margarita glasses now, Mabel

‘cos we’re all just cosmic guacamole

Shorter version? You, and I, and whatever political philosophy we rode in on are doomed to get squished into an extremely dense, and probably highly unappetizing form of cosmic guacamole.

There’s no escape. Not even for those well-heeled Silicon Valley dudes who bought up property in New Zealand to stay safe when “It” happens. Because “It” is global this time. In fact, it might be universal.

Even the Silicon Valley guys who took the trouble and the mega millions to build a rocket ship outta here won’t escape. (Got that, Mr. Space X?) Because the black hole gravity is so powerful, nothing’s getting outta here. And even if they got out, where would they go? The moon, and Mars, and the planet Venus, and the planet Saturn, and the former planet Pluto, and Jupiter are all getting squished into the same bowl, or hole, or guacamole. Ditto the Milky Way.

That’s the bad news. 

The good news is, so is Trump.

What will Trump do?

Not that I expect The Trumpster to take it lying down. First of all, he's probably familiar with the concept of black holes. Why do I think that? Because his attorney general is making one in which to insert any meaningful findings of the Muller investigation. But I digress.

If Black Hole Panic begins to spread during the next election campaign, you can count on Trump to do two things. Well, come to think of it, three things:

1. Find a way to blame it on Hillary and Obama.

2. Promise us that he alone can fix it.

3. Demand immediate appropriations to build a wall around the Milky Way to keep the black hole out. (And that will, of course, work no better than a wall on our southern border will keep out immigrants. There’s no stopping a massive mass, whether it’s a mass of matter or a huddled mass of immigrants yearning to breathe free.)

Meanwhile, expect all the usual suspects to have a field day with this.

Look out for “They”

The conspiracy theorists are going to point out that “They’re not telling us,” how fast the black hole is growing, or how long it’ll be before it swallows up the earth.

The “They” who aren’t telling us are, of course, are The Deep State. Or Democrats. Or “The Muslims.” Or “The Jews.” Or Socialists. Or Barack and Hillary. Or paid professional Crisis Actors from the Stanislavsky School of Method Crisis Acting, reconstituted as an evil cabal of conspiring astrophysicists. Or whatever They is at the top of the secret conspiracy list this week. 

And why aren’t They telling us? So that we won’t panic  and riot and destroy property, of course. Because property values are property values, even when your 500-acre weekend ranch and your $50 million yacht are both ninety seconds short of getting squinched down to the size of Donald Trump’s you-know-what. 

Or They’re not telling us so that They can institute Sharia Law. Or so that They can get all the jellybeans before the Apocalpse. Or, most likely of all, because They have just enough space ships to take Them off the planet and onto a secret and not commonly-known planet outside the gravitational field, while everybody else gets compressed denser than a lead brick.

Then there will be the deniers who, just for openers, will deny the Great Gravitational Squish to Come, because the Bible doesn’t say it’s going to happen that way. 

Or because they have a team of learned scientists with bought-and-paid-for degrees from the Betsy DeVos For-Profit College of Advanced Knowledge, and both those guys say it’s not going to happen.

Or because at least fifteen people woke up this morning and called in to work to say they felt light-headed, which means they can’t possibly be getting heavier.

But junk robocalls

must and will continue!

One thing’s for certain. Until the phone system goes down the black hole for all eternity, the junk phone callers will still be at it. 

While I was writing this, I got two — yes two junk calls! — from the scam artists in India who call to tell you they’re very, very official, and they need to fix the viruses in your computer. I asked my first caller if he was from the U.S. Government. He didn't deny it.

Maybe he'll call Donald Trump's cell phone next. Tell him to hurry. I'm suddenly feeling very heavy.

How to blow the next presidential election and hand it over to Trump — 3 surefire techniques for Democrats who want to lose

The Kindlifresser, a statue in Bern, Switzerland

of a monster that eats little children. Democrats

are eating their own candidates — and their

chances for electoral success.

1. Keep on calling it Socialism. This one’s for you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And you too, Bernie Sanders. And even you, Elizabeth Warren. I love most of the things you favor. Government-sponsored health care. Guaranteed incomes for all. Some long overdue redistribution of wealth. Publicly paid-for college education. Paid parental leave. Just one little catch.

The best way to get none of those things is to call them “Socialism.” 

“Socialism” is the Freddy Krueger of American politics to a wide swath of Americans. They want all the things you want them to have. But they don’t want Socialism, or at least they think they don't. You say Socialism, they see Venezuela. Yes yes, I know. That’s not true about your own base. But we’re talking about getting a majority of votes from as many of the 50 states as possible.

You’re really talking about Scandinavian-style Socialism in free and democratic nations like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Germany — the kind of countries from which Donald Trump says he wants to see more immigration to the United States. (Fat chance! Happy people don’t pick up and change countries.)

But accurately referring to the part of the world where the S-word brings happiness and stability might help progressive Democrats win. So don’t call it “Socialism.” Call it “Scandinavian benefits.” Or even better, “Aryan benefits.” Now let’s see The Trumpster lace into your program. What’s he gonna do — declare himself anti-Aryan and shoot his entire base in the head? 

Or call it Northern European benefits, if you want to tone it down. Just don’t call it Soc…Soc…Soc…you know.

2. Kill the candidacy of any male Democrat who gets accused of anything by a woman. Yeah, I know that touching a woman’s shoulder or smelling her hair seems kind of creepy these days. But it used to not be. The culture has changed. Fast. The notions of what are acceptable social behaviors always change and evolve. Give your fellow Democrats a chance to catch up.

Compared  to corruption, self-dealing, hypocrisy, unrestrained greed, habitual lying, "grabbing' 'em by the pussy," and, who knows, maybe even treason, smelling somebody’s hair is a hell of a flimsy reason to disqualify a candidate for office, even with our changed norms. We've already pretty much disqualified two strong vote-getters, Joe Biden and Al Franken, imprisoning them in the forever penalty box. They're finished. Done. Kaput. For what?

It’s getting to the point where, if I were a Republican strategist, I would wait until the Democrats nominate someone and then hire a few nobodies to claim the candidate breathed on them. Or kissed them on the cheek. Or called them "darlin'." What if the candidate is a woman? 

Make the claim anyway. Accuse her of being a closeted lesbian predator. Or of coming on to male high school campaign volunteers. Trust me, I’m not giving the Republicans any ideas. They probably began inserting these ideas into ring binders for distribution among the party weeks ago. But if we keep going the way we’re going, the Republicans won’t need to sic fake accusers on our candidates. We’ll have killed off all our own candidates for them.

The only way to prevent this is to draw a red line. Credible claims of rape, undue and repeated pressure to engage in unwanted sexual activities, or pederasty? Sure, if those are credible, throw the creep out. In fact, call the cops out. But as for the rest of these piddling grievances, drop it, willyuh? We’ve got an election to win. And a vulture named Trump to send home to his Fifth Avenue aerie where he can feed on his own golden bile. Or orange bile on his golden toilet. Or whatever.

3. Play stupid manipulative games with your own voters.  Normally I don’t contribute to political candidates. Oh shut up, I know I should, too. I just don’t. Except once, recently, when a Democrat I admire sent me an e-mail asking for “Just $5” for some urgent thing or other. Hey, for five bucks, why not? I filled out the online form. I charged it to a credit card. I clicked on the “contribute” button. I started to feel good about what I'd done. I began thinking that this was so painless, I could do it more often. Until…

….maybe three minutes later. I got another e-mail, from the campaign committee of the same politician. Y’know, they told me, it costs money to process all these contributions. Would I please send another three dollars “processing fee?” 

Say what? They killed any hope I'd ever contribute another nickel not only for their own candidate, but for any candidate from my party who might ever ask me for money again. If you wanted eight bucks, you scuzzball, why didn’t you just ask for eight bucks instead of jerking me around? You've not only fouled your own nest, you've fouled every Democrat's nest. At least for me.

Positive afterthought: Remember the Hillary Clinton - Donald Trump debate, where the Trumpster wandered away from his own podium and stood way, way too close behind Hillary while she was answering a question? If Hillary had wheeled around, snarled, “Back off, Buster! and then kicked Trump in the nuts, right there on TV, she would today be President of the United States. 

I hope all the nice women who feel the sudden urge to go whine to the news media that a politician made them “feel uncomfortable” will remember this. If somebody’s making you feel uncomfortable, and that’s pretty much the extent of it, tell him firmly and loudly to buzz off — and forget about crying about it to the news media. 

Utah Senator Mike Lee’s heroic plan to destroy humanity, the epidemic of Republican logorrhea, and how we know that at least 20 percent of Georgia’s Trump voters are going to spend eternity in hell.

Slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee. (Photo
courtesy of slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee.)

Quick, who talks too much, blurts out whatever’s on his mind, and spouts crackpot ideas sometimes worthy of a world-class lunatic, the rest of the time worthy of a confirmed nincompoop?

If you said, “Donald Trump,” well, of course. 

But who else?

Well, if the headline and photograph made you think it must be Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, you’re certainly right, of course. 

But who else?

Probably every Republican on the planet, that’s who. 

The Republics are coming down

with virulent logorrhea again

There seems to be an outbreak, no, an epidemic of mindless Republican logorrhea. More and more Republicans, from Donald Trump, to Mike Lee, to some obscure Georgia preacher who seems to think he has his own personal direct line to the Almighty are are spewing it. They’re seizing microphones and delivering rambling addresses full of crackpot notions and self-satisfied conceits.

Let’s deal with Mike Lee first. In what appears, from a video, to be an address to a considerably-less-than-packed Senate chamber, Lee recently delivered a smirking oration punctuated by what appeared to be illustrations swiped from some George Lucas storyboard that accidentally got left  behind in a Hollywood conference room. 

While rambling on in a thirteen minutes-long monologue that clearly demonstrated he has no future as a standup comedian, Lee said:

“The green new deal is not the solution to climate change. It’s not even part of the solution. In fact, it’s part of the problem.”

And then, a few seconds later he added: 

“You know where the solution can be found, Mr. President? In churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity awards across the country and around the world. Mr. President, this is the real solution to climate change. Babies. Climate change is an engineer problem. Not social engineering, but the real kind. It’s a challenge of creativity, ingenuity and most of all technological innovation. And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws. They’re solved by more humans. More people mean bigger markets for more innovation.”

Into the deep

hole we go

Uh Mike? The Green New Deal is an innovation. But more and more babies, and more babies after that, will just put further pressure on resources, consume more energy, result in further acceleration of climate change, and dig us deeper into a hole.

Now, I admit that nature has a way of compensating for excesses. An example? A forest fire will burn most of the trees. But it will also clear spaces for new trees to catch the sun and grow.

Similarly, on a planet overcrowded with imbeciles who are destroying the place, the planet will let the imbeciles have at it for a while. Sooner or later, some of those imbeciles will unleash a nuclear war. Or they’ll raise such havoc with the climate that there will be earthwide annihilations by means of famines, floods, and droughts, causing the deaths of millions, or perhaps billions, and forcing others to kill huge swaths of invading hordes — maybe with nuclear war again — to get humanity down to manageable levels.

After all, if humanity were an endangered species, with perhaps only 500 living examples, then even if they all drove gas-guzzling SUVs with no pollution controls, the consequence would be something that nature could handle. It’s only when the earth’s 7.54 billion people are burning carbon and mowing down forests all at once that we become a problem.

Give Mike Lee

a vasectomy

So it sounds to me as if at least a tiny part of the problem could be solved if we forced Mike Lee to have a vasectomy before he adds to the problem again. Speaking of which, what’s with the blonde in the lower left-hand corner of the video, who seems to be laughing at all of Lee’s lame jokes? 

I have no idea who she is, or why she’s there, or why nobody else seems to be there. But should it ever turn out that she’s having an affair with Mike, I wouldn’t be completely flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, in Georgia...

Speaking of undesirable gene pools getting perpetrated, a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives, one Trey Kelley, recently stood by while his father, Pastor Doyle Kelley, was the House’s pastor-for-a-day. It was more than just a demonstration that idiocy may be a hereditary trait.

The event also demonstrated, yet another time, that you can’t fix idiocy by handing the idiots a microphone. Toward the end of a lengthy invocation that seems to have violated the shaky line between church and state, Pastor Kelley declared:

The command is there: Do all in the name of Jesus Christ. People always ask me, ‘Why are there so many lost people in the state of Georgia?’

“The statistics came out that there’s 70 percent of the people in the state of Georgia that are lost. That are lost. Seventy percent. There are over 10 million people in the state of Georgia. That means there are 7 million people lost. 

“Now you want to hear it in Baptist terms: Seven million people that are lost are dying and on their way to Hell. That’s what that means.”

Well, Pastor, let’s do a little bit of arithmetic here. During the last Presidential election, only 49.6 percent of the voters cast their ballot for Hillary, Gary Johnson, or some obscure candidate. That’s a total of 2, 025,341 voters. Assuming every one of those voters is going to hell, that’s still far short of the 70 percent of Georgians who are hell-bound. And you know what that means?

The Georgia delegation in hell

Right, at least 20 percent of the 2,089,104 Georgians who voted for Trump — very roughly 410,000 of them. are going to hell. Along with roughly four and a half million Georgians who voted for nobody.  (On the other hand, all those folks may simply be going nowhere, same as they’ve done for their entire lives, but that’s an argument for another day.) 

Anyway,Trump-voting Georgians, I look forward to seeing you all in hell. And yes, you can remind me that Pastor Doyle Kelley told me you’d be there.

And here, if you can bear it, is the whole long, boring, discourse on hellfire and damnation in Georgia. Have a nice day.

"Bullshit receptivity" and the flat earthers — a metaphor for....? Well, you decide.

What is the following video a metaphor for?

Anti-vaccers?

People who believe 9/11 was an "inside job" — because roughly 36,000 gallons (over 107 tons) of jet fuel, delivered by a speeding jet plane that crashed through a wall and then exploded in a building all at once couldn't possibly burn hot enough to melt the steel girders supporting a World Trade Center tower and bring the building down?

Donald Trump has done nothing wrong?

We are being invaded by Mexicans? 

Hillary something something something?

Decide for yourself.

I have nothing to say again today, but here's a cat

 I haven't died. I haven't gone away. (Well, actually I did go to San Diego for five days, visiting The Crank's cranky brother and the Crank's cranky brother's cranky cat, but now I'm back in New York. But even after a five-day change of scenery I still have nothing important to say. I'm just writing this because I don't want everybody to think I died.)

Tell you what: people go to blogs just to look at cats, so I'll show you my cranky brother's cranky cat. Here's a photograph I took in San Diego with my cell phone. Are you happy now?

However, I'm still feeling brain dead. Keep on returning to this space anyway. I'll snap out of it eventually. And then I might have something to say that you wouldn't want to miss. Or maybe you would want to miss it, but I'll say it anyway — whenever I get around to saying whatever it is I'll eventually say, if you follow me.

The rusty Crank turns slowly and  the handle makes a creaking noise, but it still turns. Or at least it does when I'm up to turning it.

Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank

Cows, Gas, and Trump — a nearly free-associative ramble. Or amble. Or emotional purge. Or something.

Yes, I'm getting into this. So kill me.

Irritability has been my default position for more decades than most of you who are reading this have lived, kiddies. All the same, I must say that I’m feeling more irked than usual these days. 

My teeth are gnashing. My head is about to explode. I’m ready to throw a chair through a window — preferably somebody else’s window. 

A case in point has been prompted by just one stinking issue of the New York Times — today’s issue. I'm talking about hamburgers.

I mean, trust defensive Republican strategists to take a more-or-less mild suggestion and blow it into a near-nuclear meltdown. In the past few days the hysterical right, from the Trumpster to Sebastian Gorka, have been raging that Democrats want to take away….No, not your guns. Not your so-called religious freedom to insult and exclude from public accommodation anybody you personally don’t like. Not even your God-given right to enjoy the next fatal and fiery NASCAR collision.

The Republicans are ramping up the hysterical notion that Democrats want to take away your hamburgers.

What sparked all this is a goal, propounded by Democratic Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Democratic Senator Edward Markey, calling for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas omissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

Get that? "working collaboratively"  “as much as” “technologically” “feasible.” Hardly a demand to call out the dreaded, armed, and infamously murderous Hamburger Swat Squad.

I keep looking for buzzwords like “confiscate” and “hamburgers” in the OAC-Markey manifesto. Or even for a mention of sirloin, T-bones, filet mignons, flap steaks, well-marbled chunks of stewable chuck, or grandma’s pot roast. I find nada. Not even the forced purchase of Hamburger Helper.

What AOC and Markey are really  talking about, it would appear, is better agricultural management, and by implication, the problem of farting cows. It seems that cows emit a fairly significant dose of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere every time they fart or belch.

I’ll hazard a speculation that one possible solution might be to trap a good portion of those gasses and convert them into fuel which we could use in lieu of fracked “natural gas” to heat our homes and cook our, uh, hamburgers.

Overlooked in this brouhaha is the fact that we humans also emit our fair share of methane by farting and belching, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are cows.

Population reduction might make a considerable contribution to a less overheated planet, not only by eventually eliminating billions of daily farts and belches, but also because the fewer people we'll have, the less fuel we'll need, and the few farting cows to feed us.  Moreover, we’d better do something about population before Mother Nature does it for us. As somebody — I forget who — once remarked, “Nature is a hanging judge.”

But how can we begin?

I modestly propose that we start to ameliorate this situation by converting the biggest gas bags in government into hamburger, thus, uh, killing two birds with one stone. 

“Trumpburgers,” assuming they were the actual thing, might be the first product  in America with the Trump name on it that is both honest  and socially useful. Ditto all the other Republican gas bags (and a few iffy Democrats whose names I shall not mention here to avoid a digression into intramural outrage.)

This could turn into a game — not that I’m suggesting we have to play it — in which we nominate various Republicans, neo-Fascists, and other ethics-free legislators to be converted into various dishes, for the sake of diminishing gas emissions in the halls of Congress.

Oh what the hell, as long as I’m on the subject, I might suggest that Mitch McConnell could be converted into Mock Turtle Soup. 

Just sayin’.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Warren Buffet has a few words for those self-satisfied types who think they made their billions all by themselves

See below 

From Buffet's 2019 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway stockholders, page 14:

Charlie* and I happily acknowledge that much of Berkshire’s success has simply been a product of what I think should be called The American Tailwind. It is beyond arrogance for American businesses or individuals to boast that they have “done it alone.” The tidy rows of simple white crosses at Normandy should shame those who make such claims.

 And while we're at it, from page 5 of the same letter:

Abraham Lincoln once posed the question: “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?” and then answered his own query: “Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.” Abe would have felt lonely on Wall Street.

Or, I might add, in today's Republican party. Or today's White House.

One more, because while Buffet is talking about corporate behavior, he might just as well be talking about political behavior. From Page 7:

Over the years, Charlie and I have seen all sorts of bad corporate behavior, both accounting and operational, induced by the desire of management to meet Wall Street expectations. What starts as an “innocent” fudge in order to not disappoint “the Street” – say, trade-loading at quarter-end, turning a blind eye to rising insurance losses, or drawing down a “cookie-jar” reserve – can become the first step toward full-fledged fraud. Playing with the numbers “just this once” may well be the CEO’s intent; it’s seldom the end result. And if it’s okay for the boss to cheat a little, it’s easy for subordinates to rationalize similar behavior.

* "Charlie" refers to Buffet's business partner, Charlie Munger. 

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court to sick and dying Americans: Drop Dead!

"They say drug prices are too high? Shove the prices down their throats!"

The fearless defenders of the right to life of fertilized eggs, blastulas, gastrulas, and fetuses have new reason to rejoice at the appointment of right wing justices to the United Stated Supreme Court.

The right-to-life-loving justices have just delivered a message to the sick and the dying: Be sick and die. We don’t give a damn. We have obscene drug company profits to protect. Not to mention the right of rich corporations to pillage the little guy.

Maryland’s humanity 

vs. conservative greed

All of the above emerged when an attempt by the State of Maryland to regulate the outrageous prices of generic and out-of-patent drugs — drugs that help sick and dying people — was rejected first by an appeals court and then effectively by the so-called conservative Supreme Court.

Reports from Reuters and other news media, this one for example, say the Supremes refused to review the case, which was originally brought by a drug trade association representing manufacturers of generic drugs, and decided in their favor by the appeals court. 

The drug makers took deep umbrage at a Maryland law that would prevent, for example, companies like Mylan and Turing from hiking the prices of drugs whose patent has expired (or their generic equivalents) to stratospheric levels — within Maryland's borders.

This would have undone, in Maryland only, a practice that presents  many desperately ill people with a simple proposition: Your money (if you have enough) or your life.

Pay up or die

Just to remind you of what we’re talking about here, Turing raised the price of Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug that was keeping AIDS victims and others alive from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. And yes, you'll need a lot more than one pill.

And Mylan, raised the price of EpiPen, an injection device that prevents allergy sufferers and others from going into anaphylactic shock and dying, raised the price of its product from $100 for a two-pack in 2009 to $608 in 2016.

Martin Shkreli, the former head honcho of Turing, is currently blogging, not always completely coherently, from a prison cell, where he belongs. He still has, according to his blog, 30 months left to serve on his sentence. The sentence is for an unrelated or loosely-related crime. And no, I’ll be damned if I’ll voluntarily link to his blog. Ever.

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, is less likely to do time, for any reason. That's because it’s who you’re related to, and not basic human decency or ethics that counts. Bresch’s father is U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, who also flacks against controls on global warming for coal interests. He says he’s a Democrat. Sometimes our tent is a little too big to suit my personal taste.

Maryland tries to

save its citizens. 

Lotsa luck on that.

Remember, the awful, unconscionable, outrageous thing that Maryland attempted to do was to regulate prices for generic drugs within its own borders. That law was struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals last spring on the grounds that controlling prices in Maryland would somehow regulate trade outside of Maryland’s borders.

I’m not going to get tangled in the weeds concerning the finer points of law here. Feel free to go here and read the technical details until your eyes cross, which I can almost guarantee they will. 

Suffice it to say that the convoluted argument in favor of raping and pillaging sick people is ridiculous, and the legal justification is contradicted by other drug industry practices around the nation.

But your Conservative Supreme Court in action refused to review the lower court’s ruling, much less to change it. 

So much for the right to life when it stands in the way of making a quick and sleazy buck. 

Boof on that, Mr. Justice.

Is Jeff Bezos a good guy or a bad guy? Also: cockroaches, meerkats, a deadly snake, and an app for persecuting women.

Is this your ex-lover? Don't answer until you read the post below.

I’ll get to Jeff Bezos in a bit. Just bear with me while I explain that I’m old enough to remember when television only came in black and white. I’m talking 1948-ish. The screens were so small that some television sets were sold with a giant magnifying glass that stood on a pedestal in front of the screen — the better to see the grainy, static-y images.

Since all television shows were new, there were no reruns. The closest thing to old television series were old westerns, full of good guys, bad guys, and people jumping on and off horses.There wasn’t much room for subtlety on those grainy little black and white screens, so the cowboy movies made the job of telling good guys from bad guys easy-peasy. The good guys, who were all good, from their pure intentions to their boot-shod toes, wore white hats. The bad guys were all bad, from their evil scowls to their nefarious intentions, and wore black hats. 

In real life, especially in this day of color screens that can be big enough to cover a wall (or small enough to slide into your shirt pocket) things are a bit less subtle. And not only television programming. Case in point?

Jeff Bezos. Should Jeff Bezos be wearing a white hat or a black hat? Considering that the guy appears to have two heads, I’d say both.

On the one hand, one Jeff Bezos good guy head has had the courage (admittedly backed by more money than you or I are likely to even imagine having in a lifetime) to stand up to what appears to be a blackmail threat from David Pecker, the head honcho of American Media and, by some strange coincidence, a pal of Donald Trump. This led, unsurprisingly but delightfully, to tabloid wordplay headlines that will last long past the scandal.

So Jeff is a good guy, yes? Yes, indeed. But also no, no way. Which brings me to Jeff’s other head. Because Bezos is also also a very, very bad guy.

First of all, he got into this pickle with American Media by carrying on an extramarital affair. This happens often, to many people, but it’s never good guy stuff.

More importantly, Bezos is a sonofabitch. In his search for a second Amazon headquarters, if you want to call it that, he baited and switched cities like a polished con man. It costs tons of money and time for a city to put together a proposal for Amazon, and in some cases, according to this report, Amazon had no real intention  of ever locating in the cities that Bezos baited. The sole objective was to scare the hell out of other cities, so they’d pile on more incentives for Amazon to choose them.

It used to be, the reason anyone would want to live anywhere near an industrial behemoth like Amazon was that the beast would throw tons of tax money into the city coffers. These days, it’s the opposite. Instead of paying taxes, monster corporations insist that taxpayers pay them to locate nearby. 

Yeah yeah, I know Amazon will employ some people — at least until Bezos finds robots that will be able to do most of the jobs for no salary at all. But inevitably, the benefit to those people could be more efficiently distributed if the government just sent a check to all the Joe and Josie Dufuses in the neighborhood.

Not to mention that Bezos hates unions and New York is still a union town. Trust the Jeffster to start pumping for local laws that cripple unions, if he locates his second headquarters here. 

On the other hand, Bezos bought the crusading Washington Post, thus assuring its survival, at least until he gets bored with it. Pat the Bezos head that wears the white hat. 

But on the other hand, the Jeffster’s management style at that newspaper has been all black hat. Just ask the journalist in charge of the union bargaining unit at the Post. Last year he said: “We are toward the end of settling this contract, and it’s not going to be a great contract. We know that. We’ve basically spent a year fighting off bad things.”

Personally, I’d like to bang both of the Jeffster’s heads together, good and hard.

P.S. The day after I posted this, Amazon announced it was pulling out of New York. Or at any rate, that it's not coming here. That's a good thing, not done for a good reason. As best I can figure it, Bezos wanted to punish New York skeptics who had doubts about giving him a huge tax break to change a Queens neighborhood, drive up rentals and force out the mostly working class folks who are hanging on there by the skin of their teeth now, enrich real estate speculators, and try to impose a silicon ethos on New York. Well, consider us punished, Jeff. Oh boo hoo!  And to the next municipality that thinks it's doing itself a favor by paying Bezos to locate his sweatshop there — lotsa luck. You're getting the head with the black hat.

Cockroaches and meercats. Speaking of bad things, do you have an ex who you dream about running into —  with a speeding Mack truck? Have I got an event for you! Down in El Paso Texas….No no! Calm down! This is not about Trump's wall!

Down in El Paso, the local zoo recently announced a Valentine’s Day event which enabled irked ex spouses and significant others to name a cockroach after their exes. But that’s only the beginning.

One of these adorable little critters may have just eaten
your former main squeeze

You could then watch the disgusting creature named for your ex get fed to a meerkat. (Who knew that such cute little animals ate such disgusting things?) Anyway, there’s the proof, if you ever desire it, that revenge is a dish best served up lukewarm and crunchy.

Then there’s the deadly snake — and no, you smartass, I’m not talking about Stephen Miller. A zoo in Sydney, Australia, held a contest to see who could name its new acquisition, “one of the world’s most venomous” snakes. Contestants were required to donate a buck (I assume an Australian buck, the equivalent of 71 cents, American) along with a brief essay explaining why your ex deserves the honor. Heck, it’s almost worth going to Sydney just for a better chance of naming the snake. Maybe you could go during feeding time and hope it’ll choke on a rat.

And now for some high tech persecution of women. It’s a Saudi invention. Moreover, in more ways than one, it's a 12th Century leap into the technological present. Turns out the in Riyadh they created a cell phone app that enables men to track their wives (yes, plural), daughters, sisters, and any other women they more or less own, so that the guys can tell if any of the women are traveling anywhere without patriarchal permission.

Speaking of big business and big bucks, the app has been installed on Google Play more than a million times, according to a report in the Washington Post. (Thank you White Hat Jeffster.) Apple also supports the app because, umm, hey, you wouldn’t want those girls sneaking out of the harem and getting lost while driving around in the desert without permission. If they dare try it, you'll just have to give them a good beating when they get home. Now the app makes it easier.

Amnesty International has complained that human rights abuses of women are “facilitated by the App, and mitigate the harm that the App has on women,” the Washington Post story continued.

Well at least it’s a bit more up-to-date than the bone saw that one Saudi agent was wielding in Istanbul a while back.