What's going on?

 The US will not sanction Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but will sanction Russian officials for the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny?

Has anyone received mail lately?  I ask because my February credit card bill never arrived.  And Louis DeJoy seems to think his work should be rewarded with further employment.  I suggest he learn the job from the ground up, by sewing mailbags for five to ten years.

Corporate America is a mysterious place.  Joe Hebert, who is 19, has a business called West Coast Streetwear which re-sells clothing.  He bought $132,000 worth of limited-edition sneakers from Adidas and Nike, using his mother's credit card, and sold them for a profit of $20,000.  Now his mother, Ann Hebert, has had to resign as general manager of Nike's North American division after working there for twenty-five years.  Because even a breath of scandal is unacceptable if you sell overpriced sneakers.  I guess my question is, how sharp can Joe be if he has to use his mother's credit card?  

Trump didn't spend all of January trying to overthrow the federal government.  It seems that America's sweethearts received a covid vaccine before leaving the White House.  Since they both had the disease, which is supposed to confer immunity, it probably represented one last chance to get something at someone else's expense, which is pretty much their life plan.  It's also remarkably brazen after a year of lying about everything from masks to social distancing.  I wonder if they remembered to get one for that tragic child Barron.  

The Roman Catholic Church remains a death cult fixated on a supposed Next World and on making life here as nasty, brutish and short as possible.   The Archdiocese of New Orleans, flouting the pope, says Catholics should not get the highly effective single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine because production involves cells cloned from a fetus which was aborted half a century ago.  (Ah, the heady first days of Roe v. Wade, when women were getting abortions just for the sheer excitement of it!)  And because there's always someone nuttier, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, says they should avoid all three vaccines and just -- pray, I guess.  To make things worse for Tyler, Greg Abbott can't wait to drop all the mask requirements and re-open the whole state, where people still lack water, never mind vaccine.  Pray hard.

Oh.  France is investigating the sexual abuse of more than 10,000 children at the hands of the Catholic Church.  But tell us more about how cloned cells are "morally compromised."

They're censoring Dr. Seuss!  "They" being Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which sounds like a foundation set up to deal with his books after his death.  Even Ted Geisel would have trouble explaining this in rhyme to the likes of Junior Trump, but the company reviewed the books and decided six of them contained material which was offensive to some people.  In addition to being our greatest writer of books for young children, Geisel was a political cartoonist during World War II, when even the president occasionally referred to one of our opponents as "Japs."  Whatever he was thinking when he drew stereotypical African and Asian characters, his own publisher made a free-market decision to stop bringing out more copies -- kind of like Simon & Schuster dumping Josh Hawley.  Oh, won't somebody think of the children.  And if you think If I Ran the Zoo is racist, wait till you read about Dr. Doolittle.

Adults should read Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People, an astonishing account of how ideas about which Europeans were really, acceptably white evolved over the centuries.  Especially the owners of the British holiday park chain Pontins, who got caught circulating a list of Irish surnames whose owners are not welcome.  The object of their policy is Travellers, a nomadic group similar to Roma.  Pontins will tell you it's not racist, they're just...unruly.  They leave a mess.  They break things.  Sort of what Fred Trump told his son about not renting to "the colored."  And no one is more indignant than Boris Johnson, who used to write about "piccaninnies" and "bumboys."  Professor Painter would understand.