I had two and a half hours of painful dental work (bill, with insurance, 2,300 bucks) this morning, followed by blood tests from my doctor in the afternoon. This followed the Red Sox losing a game in Toronto after a two-run homer by the Jays with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. The dental work was more fun. Then I learned that my drug prescription insurance had been cancelled thanks to an administrative screw-up on their end. Life is bleak.

1. Is it me? It’s possible that “Gaslit,” the Starz move purporting to be about Martha Mitchell, strike me as more ham-handed anti-Republican/conservative propaganda because there is so much of that now from all angles of the media that my eye is permanently jaundiced. It’s also possible that it’s one more smug “Remember, conservatives are evil and stupid!” entry employing the same broad, unfunny approach that characterized Alec “Oops!” Baldwin’s Trump imitation and “Don’t Look Up!” Whatever the Watergate crowd was, they weren’t stupid, but that’s the version of history we get in “Gaslit.” Julia Roberts is getting races for a completely lazy performance that doesn’t evoke Mitchell at all, ad isn’t amusing either. (She can do better.) Then there was the portrayal of John Mitchell by some obviously too-young actor who was so smothered in padding and double-chin latex that he looked like Jiminy Glick’s father. He still didn’t look like Mitchell, sound like him, move like him or evoke Nixon’s Attorney General and bag man in any way, but he was gross and repulsive, and that’s clearly what mattered to the director and producers. Similarly unrecognizable to anyone remotely familiar with the Watergate cast is the portrayal of John Dean, who would be a fascinating character in a drama. In this amateurish satire, he’s just another idiot, something Dean was definitely not. I guess its not as ridiculous as it seems that the actor playing G. Gordon Liddy is getting raves for playing him as certifiably insane; in fact, it’s predictable, since the cheering reviewers are of the same bias as the film-makers, but it’s a lousy impression. They couldn’t even get the mustache right! Making Liddy into a buffoon removes all menace from the character, and Liddy was genuinely scary, because he was not stupid. In fact, it is clear that there are quite a few G. Gordon Liddy types behind the scenes in the Biden Administration (as there were in the Trump White House), but never mind: only Republicans threaten democracy.

The fact is the Nixon and the gang almost got away with their attack on democracy; that they didn’t was just chance. It remains to be seen if Biden’s puppeteers will do better. To me, “Gaslit” seems like one more diversionary tactic from the Hollywood wing of the Democratic Party.

But it might just be a crummy movie.

Continue reading →

Captain Compliance brings ethics reliance!

After I wrote here that I was inclined to return to Twitter once it stopped partisan censorship and double standards, commenter Michael West asked if I would keep the same handle, “Captain Compliance.” I realized I had never featured my alter ego, the visitor from the distant Ethics Planet who ethics-bombed corporate meetings, conventions and retreats to inculcate eager managers and employees in workplace ethics. I portrayed the always masked Captain primarily under the auspices of Altria, which even sent me to try to inject ethics into the operations of its subsidiary R.J. Reynolds. (It did not go well.) I created the character as one of the “out there” options for introducing Altria’s new compliance program, and, to my amazement, they bought it. (They were especially impressed that I shaved my head for the role.)

That photo was part of a feature on the Captain in the D.C. bar’s magazine, showing CC as he burst into a local home to point out some neighborhood ethics. Now the Captain is all but forgotten…did he really exist? Has he gone to the Ethics Planet for good? Nobody knows.

But I still have his costume, should he decide to return…

1. Some progressives, it seems, have just nightmares, not dreams. Here is how the New York Times reviewer began her critique of the new revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth”:

[H]ave human beings really proved their worth? We have brought the world calculus, the sonnet, no-knead bread. But think of what we have inflicted: environmental devastation, species collapse, atrocities of various complexions. Humans keep surviving. We’re fit that way. But when you think about it — should we?

Once, I would have dismissed such a reflection as reviewer gamesmanship, but now I wonder. The Left’s recent tantrums and excesses have made me wonder if progressives are permanently and irredeemably unhappy, literally dissatisfied not only with their nation, its culture and and their heritage, but also with humanity and life in general. The Times reviewer praises the director for reversing the ultimately optimistic view of Wilder’s 1942 comedy. She muses, “The stage blooms with a thousand flowers, and when characters traverse that meadow, it feels like a dream. Do we really want to wake from it? When “The Skin of Our Teeth” first opened, in 1942, the world wobbled on the threshold of disaster. Now, it seems, we are wobbling again.”

Yes, she really compares 2022 to World War II. Well who can blame her? The mask mandate was overturned! Elon Musk might let Donald Trump back on Twitter! Republicans are requiring voters to prove they are who they say they are! The Supreme Court is about to rule that nascent human beings can’t be killed if they are more than 15 weeks old!!!! People seem to resist the international dictatorship that will eliminate capitalism and individual liberties to save humanity from a fiery death in ten years! Well, 20 maybe. OK, a hundred at the most…

Of less import, but significant nonetheless, the Times critic notes that

[I]n most productions, the Antrobuses are white, but here they are Black, which lends that choice particular resonance, twisting the knife of human cruelty. This strategy doesn’t warp the play so much as deepen it.

I have never seen a production of “The Skin of Our Teeth” in which the Antrobus  family, the play’s stand-in for the human race, wasn’t multi-racial. But as we have all learned after the George Floyd Freak-Out, everything is “deepened” and improved by replacing white people with black people. Jake from State Farm! Vice-Presidents! Supreme Court Justices! Continue reading →

Today is the anniversary of a heart-warming ethics story that seems especially bitter today. Worse, it had a terrible ending.

1983 on April 25, Russian leader Yuri Andropov released the letter he had written to Samantha Smith, an American fifth-grader from Maine. She had sent him a letter the previous December asking if the Soviet Union was planning to start a nuclear war. Andropov’s response assured her said that Russian people wanted to “live in peace, to trade and cooperate with all our neighbors on the globe, no matter how close or far away they are, and, certainly, with such a great country as the United States of America.” He added, “Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are endeavoring and doing everything so that there will be no war between our two countries, so that there will be no war at all on earth.”

It was a propaganda and public relations stunt, of course. President Reagan had the Soviets on the defensive as the Cold War was at another peak; he had called the USSR an “evil empire,” and was increasing defense spending. Sending a kind, avuncular letter to a fearful child was a no-brainer. The adviser who came up with the idea probably got extra food rations.

Smith accepted Andropov’s invitation and flew to the Soviet Union with her parents. The episode turned her into an international celebrity and an adorable advocate for peace. Smith had natural charm and charisma, allowing her to be an appealing speaker and to begin an acting career, landing a role on TV series. She also wrote a children’s book, all of this before she was out of junior high.

In August 1985, Samantha Smith died in a plane crash at the age of 13.

1 Just bite me, Microsoft. Microsoft Word now has a “diversity” category in its document editing softwear. It just told me that I shouldn’t write “Mrs.” and that the “correct” word was “Ms.” I was writing about a domestic abuse lawsuit, and “Mrs.” was the appropriate title. Political correctness policing isn’t “proofreading.”

2. Speaking of masks...

• Roland Martin, one of the more obnoxious of the CNN stable of race-baiters, outed himself as a full-fledged pro-mask wacko with this photo…

…and the tweet, “I don’t give a damn what some grossly unqualified Donald Trump judge said, I’m double masked and wearing goggles on this Nashville to DC flight,” Martin tweeted. “I had COVID in December. Y’all can KISS MY ASS about me not wanting it again. And any fool saying they don’t matter is a damn liar.”

And the goggles, you ass? Meanwhile, social media sleuths quickly found another photo of Martin two weeks ago in a group where neither he nor anyone else was masked. As for U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, her credentials as a legal scholar are impeccable. Martin is an unethical journalist who knows nothing about the law, but he can brink Donald Trump into any subject.

• Physician Dr. Kavita Patel, an NBC News medical contributor,told viewers that you should bring extra face masks with you when flying and pressure the people sitting next to you on the plane wear them.
• Now, as they so richly deserve to be, mask requirements are finally completely without integrity, consistency  or rationale, with different rules for types of transportation and different cities and contradictory policies everywhere you look. The closest thing CNN has to a moderate, occasionally objective news host, Michael Smerconish, actually said on the air that it made no sense for the Biden Administration to be appealing the end of the public transportation mask ban while preparing to end Title 42, the legal authority for contagion-related expulsions of illegal aliens and migrants. Ya think?

3. Gee, can you think of any other reason, you lying, cowardly hack? In an interview on “60 Minutes” FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed that there was a 59% increase in the murders of police officers in 2021, with 73 officers killed.  CBS News’ Scott Pelley asked what caused the surge of homicides, and Wray said, “Certainly the pandemic didn’t help. There’s a variety of ways in which that contributed to it.”

The fact that the mainstream media, the Democratic Party’s mayors and officials and BLM-bootlicking corporate lackeys spent months painting police as murderous racists had nothing to do with it, of course.

4. Aaaand  one of the states that helped get some of those police killed just saw passed a law banning the word “marijuana” from official state law and documents. Democratic Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill into law in March. Why, you ask? Listen to the bill’s sponsor: “The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and racist,” Washington state Representative Melanie Morgan (D) said during testimony regarding the piece of legislation she  sponsored. “As recreational marijuana use became more popular, it was negatively associated with Mexican immigrants,” she said. “Even though it seems simple because it’s just one word, the reality is we’re healing the wrongs that were committed against Black and Brown people around cannabis.” There is not now nor has there been in my lifetime any negative racial implications to the word “marijuana,” and I hereby pledge to never again uses any synonym for the corrupting and destructive drug. Marijuana it is, and nothing but. I request that all EA commenters observe this custom as well.

5. BREAKING! Elon Musk has taken over Twitter. Once that’s final, I will one again get on the platform, which I ditched in protest of its ham-handed, partisan double standards.

Musk is a weird guy whose ethics are suspect, but this is a positive development for free speech and social media accountability.