Briefly

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.

I had another reminder this afternoon how fleeting life can be. When I got to my office Tuesday afternoon after lunch, police had blocked the street off for about a block. It turns out that two teen-agers — a male and a female — drove past our office at about 12:30 and then failed to make the turn at the top of Shades Mountain about a block from us where the road dead-ends into Shades Crest Road. Their SUV went over the top of the mountain and ended up about 150 yards below. Both were dead before rescue workers got to them (and the vehicle was recovered later in the afternoon). It’s just another routine accident, but since it happened right at my office, there’s something powerful to me about knowing these two teens were alive and probably happy just six hours ago. We’re in denial when we put off the lives we need to be living.