“Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.”
If the ancient Roman states­man and philoso­pher Seneca who wrote that had met Jeff Bezos and his ilk, he might have added the caveat. “but only in those decent enough to recog­nise, or care, when some­thing is fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong.”

Shame is defined as “a painful feel­ing of humil­i­a­tion or dis­tress caused by the con­scious­ness of wrong or  fool­ish behav­iour.”
Those inca­pable of the emo­tion are the embod­i­ment of ridicu­lous. Bezos’ gut­ting of the Wash­ing­ton Post puts him in that category.
At the time of writ­ing, nei­ther he nor his spokesper­son had com­ment­ed on the oppro­bri­um his per­fidy has gar­nered in pro­por­tion to the prof­its he covets.
Maybe he has a mod­icum of shame?
But that would require a pass­ing acquain­tance with his­to­ry and moral­i­ty, so I guess not.
If he had any­thing resem­bling male attrib­ut­es that come in pairs, Mr Bezos would at least make a per­son­al appear­ance in the Post’s dec­i­mat­ed news­room to explain why he feels lav­ish­ing $75-mil­lion on ”Mela­nia”, the bribe pass­ing for a doc­u­men­tary, and then fir­ing respect­ed jour­nal­ists and effec­tive­ly trash­ing one of the best known and most respect­ed news­pa­pers in the U.S., if not the West­ern world, is noth­ing to be ashamed of.
The late tel­e­van­ge­list Bil­ly Gra­ham (whose “pro­fes­sion” I gen­er­al­ly hold in lower-than-a-snake’s‑belly regard) was being rather harsh on ordi­nary folk when he lament­ed: “Self-cen­tered indul­gence, pride and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the Amer­i­can lifestyle.” But he pigeon-holed the third or fourth rich­est man in the world, and a good­ly num­ber of his fel­low bil­lion­aire CEO ‚with pre­ci­sion bor­der­ing on divinely-inspired.
For proof, refer to the Epstein files that have been released so far.

                               CRETINS-IN-ARMS

If hav­ing no shame what­so­ev­er was an Olympic sport, Israel’s behav­iour over the Rafah bor­der cross­ing between Gaza and Egypt would be a shoo-in for the gold medal.
UN offi­cials esti­mate around 18,500 peo­ple, some  4,000 of them chil­dren, des­per­ate­ly need to leave Gaza to get treat­ment for war wounds or seri­ous ill­ness­es, includ­ing cancer.
Rafah is the only route available.
Hav­ing dec­i­mat­ed Gaza’s med­ical ser­vices and  barred med­ical NGOs and oth­er aid agen­cies from work­ing freely amid the ruins, the Israeli mil­i­tary is still cur­tail­ing the flow of aid, includ­ing med­ical sup­plies into the enclave, while severe­ly restrict­ing the dai­ly num­ber of sick and injured Gazans allowed to strug­gle through a morass of bureau­crat­ic and secu­ri­ty checks to reach help elsewhere.
On Tues­day of this week, only 16 of  about 100 who showed up to try, made it.
If that’s what it takes for the Mid­dle East’s best-armed and self-pro­claimed world’s most moral army to ensure the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty of Israel, shame and ridicu­lous apply in equal measure.
A less bru­tal but no less ridicu­lous exam­ple of no sense of shame is the six decades-old U.S. obses­sion with pun­ish­ing Cuba for insist­ing on and main­tain­ing its own sys­tem of gov­ern­ment, inef­fi­cient and repres­sive though it may be.
Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump decreed that any coun­try sup­ply­ing vital oil to Cuba will be pun­ished with tariffs.
Con­sid­er­ing an island with a pop­u­la­tion rough­ly equal to New York City and  a GDP 80 times low­er than the U.S, a threat requir­ing that kind of counter mea­sure, ought to be a source of shame, not a bat­tle cry.
Then again, such is the lev­el of Trump’s per­son­al inse­cu­ri­ty that he feels it nec­es­sary to sue CBS, NBC and the Wall Street  Jour­nal for pur­port­ed slights, claim $15 bil­lion from the New York Times for being “nasty” to him, call for late night talk show hosts who crit­i­cise him to be tak­en off the air and sue come­di­an Trevor Noah, whom he calls “a total los­er”, for mak­ing Epstein jokes.
Add in the litany of out­ra­geous and bla­tant lies Trump barks as eas­i­ly as he breaths and pret­ty much as often, and you have a man with a lack of shame that sur­pass­es ridiculous. 

                          ABOVE AND BEYOND

On a glob­al lev­el, New­START, the treaty to lim­it nuclear weapons, has been allowed to expire, with no plans to replace it, rais­ing the dan­ger of a new nuclear arms race.
The exist­ing stock­pile of nukes has “the poten­tial to cause cat­a­stroph­ic destruc­tion on a glob­al scale.”
Between 100-mil­lion and one bil­lion peo­ple would die, 80 per­cent of the infra­struc­ture would be destroyed, and glob­al cli­mate pat­terns would be dis­rupt­ed, lead­ing to wide­spread famine and disease.
If not doing what­ev­er is pos­si­ble to pre­vent that isn’t shame­ful and ridicu­lous, then pret­ty much noth­ing is.
Those who have no shame can be mea­sured by a line from the Book of Proverbs:  “The wise inher­it hon­our, but fools get only shame.”

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