Happy Mother’s Day to all those who should be so greeted on May 11. I’m never quite sure, myself. Thinking about the four mothers in my immediate family, three of whom are gone now (and one is bitter about how her children turned out), makes me sad. Mother Grace was cynical about the celebration, in part because she always said that she was a lousy mother (she wasn’t), in part because she missed her own mother (who died in our home after we converted it into a hospice for her), and in part because “it’s a fake holiday invented by the greeting card industry.” Is it? If I were Ann Althouse, who appears to be going nuts again (she’s been obsessed with having conversations with Grok lately, the Twitter/X AI bot), I would muse about why it’s “Mother’s Day” and not “Mothers Day” or even “Mothers’ Day”. Mother Eleanor, my mother, regarded Mother’s Day as an opportunity to be appreciated when she tended to feel unappreciated (middle child hangover, I have decided). Dad always made a big deal out of the day—he cared so deeply about her—and would remind my sister and me about it weeks in advance.

Meanwhile…

1. I can’t wait to see how my Trump Deranged Facebook friends find ways to frame the administration’s efforts to help stop an India-Pakistan war as a bad thing. They will probably conclude that it’s all a lie, or simply insist that Trump had nothing to do with the cease-fire. Progressives and Democrats still can’t bring themselves to give President Reagan proper credit for winning the Cold War and being the catalyst for the end of Western Communism, which to me is almost in the same category as insisting that Nixon faked the moon landing.

2. The New York Times has an annoying feature for those of us with dead mothers, “25 Questions to Bring You Closer to Your Mom.” I don’t want to be closer to my mom, thanks: she’s dead. But the first question would have stopped me from reading even when she was alive: “Who made you feel seen when you were growing up?” The obsession with “feeling seen” is part of the same “New Age” sickness that urges us to “be our authentic selves,” to “embrace our personal truth” and other pat slogans. “I say its spinach, and I say to hell with it.”

3. Now THIS is an incompetent parent! Holly LaFavers says she let her son “become familiar with Amazon and other shopping sites during the pandemic, when she regularly ordered supplies. Since then, she has occasionally let him browse the site if he keeps the items in the cart.” Wait, the kid was three when the pandemic lockdown started! Anyway, he was familiar enough with the site that he ordered, and she received having paid for, 22 boxes containing 50,600 lollipops. The New York Times story keeps saying that the order was accidental, but clearly it wasn’t, because the boy shouted out excitedly, “Mom, my suckers are here!” when the boxes arrived. She got a full refund from Amazon, an obvious PR move. In an email, the company said that it “worked directly” with her “to turn a sticky situation into something sweet.” (Ick.) Spangler Candy Co., the company that makes the lollipops, invited Ms. LaFavers and Liam to visit its factory in Ohio. The Times refers to “the financial treachery of online activity” and “how to prevent and dispute unauthorized purchases in online shopping and games.” Bollucks. LaFavers isn’t a victim of anything but her own stupidity.

4. I’m surprised someone didn’t start a GoFundMe for her, which reminds me of the horrifying progression in this Ethics Train Wreck story from May 3. Remember Shiloh Hendrix, the woman who called a little boy a “nigger” and was doxxed by a witness, and then created an online funding appeal for herself that raised almost $300,000? She eventually was rewarded $600,000. For getting inconvenient social media attention after revealing herself as a crude, unapologetic racist. Nice.

Conservative substacker and lawyer Jeff Childers spins mightily to make this seem less than disgusting conduct by the rightwingers who gave money to this bad mother. After all, he implies, she’s stuck in a section of Minnesota crawling with Somalians, so no wonder she lashed out. He writes, “Shiloh Hendrix is a poor candidate for being a white supremacist. Among other inconvenient facts from her past, doxxers and foreign media reported she’d previously dated a black man, apparently even adding him to her profile picture in 2011. So there’s that.”

Yeah, and slaveowners had sex with their slaves. She called a black child a nigger, and was unapologetic about it. Then Childers tries to make this Ethics Train Wreck out to be a positive sign, writing that “it strains credulity that America suffers from endemic racism if it becomes national news whenever a random single mom in a Rochester playground drops the “N” word. If it happens all the time, how could it be news? The excitement over the story proves the reverse is true. It’s rare.”

Not rare enough, if a jerk like Shiloh can be enriched for her racism and unethical conduct.

5. Speaking of that story, when was it decreed that one couldn’t use the word “slave” and only “enslaved person” was acceptable? Linguistic game-playing that substitutes four syllables for one that is perfectly clear is unethical.

6. And speaking of spin, read the Manhattan Contrarian’s “everybody does it” and “it’s not the worse thing” rationalizing of the Times story, “Trump Shapes the Policy On Crypto, and Cashes In. Hushed Deals and Foreign Investors Propel President’s Digital Money Start-Up.: World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.” The blogger writes, “Trump himself may be benefiting from the de-regulation of crypto, but everyone else also has the opportunity to do the same. And any gains could be undone by a crackdown in a subsequent administration. Meanwhile, despite the frequently over-heated language of the Times piece, it never makes any suggestion of illegality. If there is any basis under which this may be illegal, I am unaware of it. Perhaps some readers may have a theory.”

The issue is ethics, not law.

He concludes, “Anyway, if you ask for my view of the biggest political corruption incidents of the past few years, numbers one and two would be (1) the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars of funding for the institutions of the Left from the government, and (2) the Censorship Industrial Complex put together by the Biden administration to suppress conservative speech. Those things don’t seem to draw big front-page articles from the Times.”

That goes right into the Rationalization #22 Hall of Fame.