Briefly

I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but Mark Zuckerberg isn’t nearly as powerful as most people seem to fear. I don’t think especially highly of him. I think he misunderstands humans and I think his business ethics are terrible. But he doesn’t actually have power over anybody other than his own employees. He has an indirect business relationship with many millions of people, but those people hold power over him. If they chose to walk away from Facebook, his career and wealth would be destroyed. As long as our relationship with a company is voluntary, we are the ones with the power — even if you wish other people would make different choices than they do.

Busybodies with bad ideas are destroying modern culture with their constant claims of being offended. More people need to point out — clearly and politely — that many of the ideas of the outraged are moronic and need to be ignored. I’m sick of a tiny politically motivated group of people pushing their views so aggressively that others end up kowtowing to them to avoid their wrath. Disney is the latest company to back down in the face of idiots. In the 1955 film, “Lady and the Tramp,” two of the most memorable characters are a couple of conniving Siamese cats. They were great, and if you know cats, you know they were being portrayed the way some cats — including Siamese — are frequently seen in real life. Social justice warriors have claimed that the cats reinforce stereotypes of Asian characters as conniving and duplicitous. Does anybody understand these are cats, not Asian people? If you think Asians are conniving, that’s on you; it’s not because of a couple of wonderful cartoon cats.

Do you want to know why Donald Trump doesn’t want to release his tax returns? I’m not a psychic, but I’m pretty sure I know. Trump has made his career peddling the illusion that he was a brilliant and fabulously successful businessman. The truth is far different. He’s a charlatan who routinely swindled smaller vendors and he lost lots of money making bad deals. He’s a liar and a cheat. His entire persona has always been built on the ability to bamboozle gullible people who accepted his bombastic lies. The New York Times has now obtained 10 years of his income tax information — from 1985 to 1994 — and it paints a pictures of a money-losing operation which is completely at odds with his lies about success. Trump has spent his entire adult life pretending to be something he’s not. Tax records would prove he’s been scamming the public — and his ego can’t take that.