Left-brained and
out of pocket

It’s funny the things that  stash themselves in memory’s lower drawers, how a word or name can niggle with demands that you place it, remember why it was once important or, more to the point, why it has just now pinged an immediate reaction.  Such has been the case these past few days with the name Charlotte Cowles (above). a New York magazine writer who says she was conned out of $50,000(US) by a man she knew only over the phone and believed to be a helpful CIA agent.

What makes this so amusing is that Ms Cowles is the magazine’s financial advice columnist, her job to advise readers on the best ways to build and safeguard their wealth.

Sympathy for another’s plight would normally suppress raucous merriment at the expense of a slick, sophisticated Big Apple know-it-all who put “$50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment” except that the mark has invited ridicule by outing  her stupidity at some length, revealing a little about herself in the process. “I could have put it toward the master’s degree I’ve always wanted,” laments the Columbia BA, “I could have housed multiple families for months.” Dripping with that special, elite species of virtue, she’d fit right in at the ABC.

But what of that name, why that distant bell? Then, as these things do, the synapses found each other. Trump — yes, that’s right — it had to do with Trump. Way back in November of 2016, when the Left was reeling from the over-confident Democrats’ failure to stuff the ballot boxes in sufficient volume, a mistake they would not make four years later, a former port-canted colleague sent me a link to an article by Ms Cowles in which she painted the grimmest of grim pictures of what the new president would do to America’s women. That article can be read in full here,  and don’t miss the recommendation that women “pad your emergency fund” in the expectation groping bosses and Hunnish behaviour would become the new office-culture norm.

It’s laughable at a distance of years, but also instructive. The unfortunate Ms Cowles, so wise, so savvy, so confidently entitled in decreeing her lockstep-left vision of what the future holds, just emptied her savings into the pocket of a bogus spook.

The Left and its media heralds, not half so smart as they think they are.

UPDATE: Some cynics believe Ms Cowles is a pulling a scam to avoid paying taxes, as  theft losses  are deductible.

— roger franklin