Language Follies 27 (Chutzpah and Hypocrisy)

I’m not sure how this blog should be rated—maybe “G” for “Great” or “Godawful.” Anyway, it’s not rated “M” like a certain video game.

With no blood and gore, this blog is fit for consumption by all ages.

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But close enough to blood and gore, there was of course my hospital sojourn. Two little bits to offer:

1) At two o’clock in the morning one night, the person fiddling with my Lasix input said she would leave a tube or something in place so that she wouldn’t have to wake me when she came back at four AM. Dialogue ensues:

Me: What kind of nurse are you that you don’t want to wake me at four AM?

Her: I’m not a nurse; I’m tech.

2) Speaking of Lasix—When being informed that I was to receive Lasix, I said, “They give Lasix to racehorses. Show me a track and I’ll run six furlongs.”

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Would you trust your pipes to a company called Victorian Plumbing?

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Sometimes I think that I am Amazon’s only sane customer.

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And then there’s The New York Times—is anyone editing it?

“A pair of AG Jeans, a line Mr. Goldschmied founded in 2000 and sold to a partner in 2004, might have went (my italics) for as much as $130 in the early days . . .”

I pointed this out in the readers’ comment section, but the paper didn’t print my offering. 

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The Times alerted us to the fact that there exists a great financial opportunity (assuming you have a hole in your head) to invest in holes in dough: the Manhattan Bagel Equity Fund, a bagel-specific investment fund. Just the thing to fill a hole (or make a hole) in your portfolio.

New bagel shops are opening up and apparently poppy seed doesn’t cut it anymore.  At one shop,

[b]agels are made at all hours and in all flavors, topped with Buffalo- or birthday-cake-flavored cream cheese, sandwiched with trendy condiments like Mike’s Hot Honey or stuffed with red sauce and mozzarella.

Toto, we’re not on the Lower East Side anymore.

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If a bagel with a shmear doesn’t entice you, you could go to Burger King and get your sesame seed fix in a concoction with the following ingredients:

• Lettuce

• Original Chicken Patty: Boneless, Chicken Breast With Rib Meat, Water, Isolated Oat Product, Flavor (Maltodextrin, Flavor), Salt, BREADED WITH: Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Salt, Spices, Contains Less Than 2% Of Natural Flavor, Dried Whey, Vegetable Oil (Soybean And Sunflower), Dried Yeast, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Leavening (Monocalcium Phosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate) And Dextrose., Battered With: Water, Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Salt, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate), Corn Starch, Whole Oat Flour And Natural Flavor., Cooked In Vegetable Oil [(Corn Oil, Cottonseed Oil) Or (Corn, Canola, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil) Dimethylpolysiloxane]

• Mayonnaise: Soybean Oil, Vinegar, Eggs, Egg Yolks, Salt, Sugar, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Ground Red Pepper, Dried Garlic, Mustard Oil

• Specialty Bun: Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Folic Acid), Water, Sugar And/Or Liquid Sugar (Water, Sugar), Soybean Oil, Yeast, Salt, Wheat Gluten, Yeast Food (May Contain One Or More Of The Following: Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Dough Conditioners (May Contain One Or More Of The Following: Wheat Starch, Distilled Monoglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid, [Ethoxylated] Mono- And Diglycerides, Calcium Stearoyl-2-Lacytlate, Calcium Peroxide, DATEM, Potassium Iodate), Guar Gum, Enzymes, Milled Flaxseed, Maltodextrin, Ascorbic Acid, Cultured Wheat Flour, Corn Starch, Soy Flour, Soy Lecithin, Sesame Seeds

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Or, if you’re the stay-at-home microwave type, you could feast on an offering from Birdseye with these ingredients:

Vegetables (Broccoli, Carrots, Corn), Cooked Enriched Pasta (Water, Enriched Wheat Flour [Durum Wheat Semolina, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate [Iron], Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid]), Sauce (Water, Cheddar Cheese Powder [Pasteurized Milk, Salt, Cheese Cultures, Enzymes], Seasoning [Cheese Powders {Cheddar Cheese (Milk, Salt, Cultures, Enzymes), Whey, Buttermilk, Salt, Blue Cheese (Milk, Salt, Cultures, Enzymes), Disodium Phosphate, Sodium Citrate), Maltodextrin, Enriched Wheat Flour {Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid}, Yeast Extract, Natural Flavors, Hydrolyzed Milk Protein, White Pepper, Xanthan Gum], Whey, Salt, Soybean Oil, Modified Corn Starch, Butter [Cream], Cheese Flavor [Cream, Cheddar Cheese {Milk, Starter Culture, Salt, Enzymes}, Natural Flavors, Yeast Extract, Sodium Citrate, Water, Disodium Phosphate], Buttermilk, Nonfat Milk, Parmesan Cheese Flavor [Whey, Parmesan Cheese {Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes}, Disodium Phosphate, Lactic Acid], Annatto Extract [Color], Citric Acid, Paprika Extract [Color], Turmeric Extract [Color], Xanthan Gum), Cooked White Meat Chicken (Chicken Breast Meat with Rib Meat, Water, Isolated Soy Protein, Seasoning [Sugar, Garlic, Romano Cheese (Part Skim Cow's Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt,enzymes), Dehydrated Onion], Salt, Sodium Phosphates, Natural Flavor Coated with Corn Flour, Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron,Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Salt, Corn Starch, Spices, Paprika, Maltodextrin, Caramel Color, Garlic Powder, Extractives of Paprika

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Which all leads us to the world of that great gourmet Donald Trump, who has put down his cheeseburger to pay back the Catholic Church, whose head Trump has called “WEAK on crime.” To protect our country, Trump 

has abruptly canceled a multimillion-dollar contract with a Catholic charity that houses and cares for migrant children amid the president’s feud with Pope Leo XIV.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami has helped provide vital services to unaccompanied minors for more than 60 years, but could now shut down within a matter of months after the administration canceled an $11 million federal contract.

. . . 

Writing for the Miami Herald, Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami, said it is “baffling” that the government would want to shut down a service that has helped thousands of children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-yanks-millions-catholic-charities-090511215.html

That’ll show those orphan criminals!

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Speaking of Catholics, there’s seven-year-old Vice President J. D. Vance, who “admonished Pope Leo to be more ‘careful’ if he was ‘going to opine on matters of theology.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/just-war-vance-pope.html

Somehow, attempting to instruct the Pope on theology would seem to be worthy of being cited by Merriam-Webster as the epitome of chutzpah.

In another attempt to supply a classical dictionary citation, Vance said,

[i]n Budapest, while extolling Mr Orban as a “profound leader” and a “model to the continent”, . . . he was not telling “the people of Hungary how to vote” and attacked “bureaucrats in Brussels” for having the gall to interfere in the election.

According to The Economist’s columnist Lexington, Vance has a “gift for righteous hypocrisy.”

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/04/16/jd-vances-theory-of-trumpism-is-no-match-for-the-practice

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To conclude, let’s bring together The Times and Trumpworld.

In a review of a new book on the life of Rasputin, Sophie Pinkham notes that

[s]ome of Rasputin’s counsel was good; he warned Nicholas not to fight the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. When Nicholas refused to listen, taking command of the armed forces, it left Alexandra in a position of alarming authority. A newly appointed minister of the interior heard voices and talked to the dead . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/books/review/rasputin-antony-beevor.html

Here in the US, we have Trump’s FEMA official in charge of dealing with fires and floods, Gregg Phillips, who claimed 

that he once teleported to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

A CNN report last month detailed how, on two occasions, he recounted finding himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWttv__GZ2m/

There’s nothing like having rational people in one’s government!

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Wait! One thing more: The best bit of advice from The Times this week:

If He Leaves You on a Mountain, End Your Relationship.

 

It's All Right, Ma, . . .

. . . It’s Only Juden

On October 7, armed homicidal Hamas terrorists attacked the Tribe of Nova music festival in Israel. They killed at least 260 attendees. 

It would be nice to be able to say that the massacre evoked universal condemnation. Unfortunately, that is not possible. While there has been a great outcry against the perpetrators of the act, some groups have found it a perfect occasion to celebrate the cause that the murderers espoused. Here’s a “die-in” staged at Harvard University:

While the protesters held signs bewailing the loss of Palestinian lives, the fact that the initiators of the conflict were Palestinians and that the victims of the massacre were Jews was (not so) mysteriously omitted.     

 

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Almost exactly six years ago, on October 1, 2017, another attack on a music festival occurred. Shots rained down on the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. The perpetrator, Stephen Paddock, ensconced in a room high up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, fired more than 1,000 rounds into the 22,000-person crowd. Sixty people were killed and more than 800 wounded.

Paddock died of a self-inflicted gunshot. He left no message behind explaining his actions. The Clark County Sheriff stated,

"What we have been able to answer are the questions of who, what, when, where and how... what we have not been able to definitively answer is why Stephen Paddock committed this act.”^*

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Stephen Paddock’s Mistake

Half-a-dozen years after his infamous act, Stephen Paddock’s name does not rest on the tip of anybody’s tongue. Unlike, say, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, who is remembered in history, Paddock espoused no cause when he unleashed death from his hotel window. If Paddock had left behind a statement supporting—or denouncing—some cause or other, his name would probably be celebrated by Harvard students at an annual die-in. Instead, those students have to settle for the Hamas assassins and their crimson bloodshed.  

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting

"Munich" 2023

This has been a blue-ribbon week in exposing the hypocrisy mill known formally as Fox News. E-mails released prior to the soon-to-be-tried Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News Networks and its parent company, Fox Corp, reveal that in private Fox on-air personalities disparaged the false voting fraud claims that they pushed on their shows. Perhaps the most outrageous dichotomy between private and public proclamations about the election was evidenced by the network’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson. As the New York Times pointed out, 

Mr. Carlson — who ridiculed claims about a plot to steal the election as “shockingly reckless” and “absurd” in his November 2020 text messages — also continued to give credence to lies about widespread voter fraud this week.(1)

In fact, Carlson in an e-mail has stated, “I hate [Trump] passionately.”

But that was in private. In public, the following picture seems to be more in character.

Why did Fox News, despite acknowledging behind the scenes the falsity of its claims, pivot to support of Trump’s stolen election fantasies on its shows? As News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said about allowing Mike Lindell, an avid conspiracy theorist, to run MyPillow ads on the network, it was purely a purely financial decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green.”(2) 

After the network correctly called Joe Biden the victor in the voting in the state of Arizona, thereby putting up enough electoral votes for the Democrat’s victory, hordes of rabid MAGAs defected to (fake) news outlets even crazier than Fox, leaving the latter to worry about falling profits.

Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”(3)

Thus the decision to appease the MAGA faithful—to promote false narratives that would keep the pointy-headed rabble tuned to Fox and their $$ on the company’s balance sheet.

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Trump, himself, the other day paused long enough from crying into his Diet Coke about the “stolen election” to claim that he could end the Russian-Ukraine war by practically snapping his fingers. According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Donald Trump indicated that he may have ‘made a deal’” with Vladimir Putin “if he were president at the time of the invasion.”(4)

The great master of “The Art of the Deal” claimed, admittedly in his usual inarticulate manner:

I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal.”

Now that “deal” sounds just like Trump, a man who gives nothing of his own to charity; he asserts the right to steal from others (the Ukrainians, who obviously would have no voice in this) and hand their land over to a beady-eyed tyrant. 

Does this remind you of anything? Hint: I used the verb form above. That’s right: Appeasement —The Munich Agreement, (September 30, 1938), the settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.(5)

Of course, we all know how that deal worked out. 

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(1)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/media/fox-dominion-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=4

(2)  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/28/rupert-murdoch-deposition-fox-news-dominion-voting-systems

(3)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/fox-news-dominion.html?searchResultPosition=1

(4)  https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-d-let-putin-194231988.html

(5)  https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement

  

Beer Bust

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Unless you’ve been unconscious for the past week or so, you know that the world’s most prominent sporting event—the FIFA World Cup, the soccer tournament of tournaments—has been going on in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. Holding the tournament in a land of (to put it kindly) soccer minnows of course makes as much sense as holding the premier auto racing series, Formula 1, this year in such noted automotive venues as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Abu Dhabi. 

Qatar, after winning its bid for the World Cup, set about hiring thousands of workers from impoverished countries such as Nepal to build a number of world-class stadiums. Many international companies signed on to be sponsors of the tournament, including Budweiser, who was assured that it would be the only beer allowed to be sold in those new stadiums. Imagine the chagrin in the suds headquarters when two days before the opening match, a decree came down that, Qatar being a Muslim country, it would not allow alcohol sales at the sporting venues. This turnabout was especially hard on the England supporters, who like to get tanked before kickoff. In The Guardian, Marina Hyde’s cynical take on this development was

let’s face it – serving only Budweiser was already a de facto beer ban.*

One didn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to expect that the “no-alcohol-please-we’re-muslim” proclamation was not all it seemed to be. 

The New York Times reported that 

[t]he main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol.**

The so-called ban, The Times reported,

didn’t affect the flow of free beer — or free champagne, Scotch, gin, whiskey, wine and other drinks — available to non-regular fans in the V.I.P., V.V.I.P. and hospitality areas. The rules, it seemed, did not apply to them.

At a $3,000-a-seat hospitality lounge at Al Bayt during the U.S.’s game with England, for instance, the bar menu included Taittinger Champagne, Chivas Regal 12-year-old whisky, Martell VSOP brandy and Jose Cuervo 1800 tequila.

 

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Upon reading The Times report, I couldn’t help but couple it with an exposé of a week earlier by The Guardian of the £29 million a Tory peer, Michelle Mone, secretly received from a firm supplying PPE through a government contract during the coronavirus epidemic. It was a firm that Mone actively lobbied the government for.

Documents seen by the Guardian indicate tens of millions of pounds of PPE Medpro’s profits were later transferred to a secret offshore trust of which Mone and her adult children were the beneficiaries.***

Alas, all was not smooth sailing for Mone after PPE Medpro secured the government financing. The poor dear had to cancel a planned wedding ceremony in the Palace of Westminster because of COVID restrictions. So she and her fiance, Douglas Alan Barrowman, switched the venue to Barrowman’s home on the Isle of Man, which had fewer COVID restrictions.

While the couple were making wedding arrangements from this base, Barrowman seems to have also been focusing on moving profits gained from PPE Medpro around various Isle of Man registered trusts, companies and accounts.****

But the bride had her Jimmy Choo shoes, the affair had an opera singer and five bands, and the couple could go on to enjoy their yacht, which, presumably, had smooth sailing.

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All of which proves Fitzgerald right and Hemingway wrong: the rich are different from you and me—they are hypocrites and cheats on a higher plane.

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* https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/18/beer-ban-beckham-and-a-vagina-stadium-the-world-cup-in-inglorious-technicolor-qatar

** https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/sports/soccer/qatar-world-cup-vip.html

*** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/revealed-tory-peer-michelle-mone-secretly-received-29m-from-vip-lane-ppe-firm

**** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/the-yacht-the-wedding-and-29m-michelle-mones-life-during-the-covid-crisis