Who couldn’t see this coming—years ago? A decade ago?
Long before the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts instead of secure servers designed to protect sensitive information. Security lapses by the justices apparently were routine, making the embarrassing and public-trust-wounding leak all but inevitable while also rendering an effective investigation difficult as well.
Supreme Court employees used printers that didn’t produce logs. They were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking. So-called “burn bags” containing materials that needed to be shredded were left open and unattended in hallways. Employees could remove documents, including draft opinions, from the SCOTUS building Continue reading →
Let’s get one thing settled right off the metaphorical bat: the Cardinal Local School District is run by a bunch of incompetents and ethics dunces. However one thinks this fiasco could and should have been handled, they made the worst possible mess of it possible.
On January 25, 2023, the school board for the district (in Middlefield, Ohio) killed a student production of the 2005 Tony-winning Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” citing as a justification their assessment that it was “vulgar.”The show is, as that date would suggest, 18 years old now, and has been performed all over the world as well as at many high schools. Its artistic pedigree is impeccable: the lyrics and music is by William Finn (“Falsettos”) and the original production was directed by Stephen Sondheim collaborator James Lapine. The show is excellent theatrical training for students as it involves improvisation.
Presumably the “vulgar” accusation arises from “Chip’s Lament,” a controversial song in which one of the young characters blames his failure in the competition on an embarrassing erection. Here are the lyrics:
Fritos! M&M’s? Oreos. All for one dollar! It is tradition that the person eliminated from the competition, is fair game for derision, especially the Alpha-Male, who will sell goodies at the bake sale. Anyone for brownies? Anyone for chocolate chips? Anyone for anything that isn’t dated? How could I have been eliminated? You wanna know how? You wanna know how? You wanna know WHY? My unfortunate erection Is destroying my perfection It is my recollection that everything I once did I did perfectly. LAST YEAR’S CHAMP, DEFEATED! Because of Marigold Coneybear Because there’s something and not a thing between us I don’t blame my brain but I do blame my penis. My unfortunate protuberance, seems to have its own exuberance. Anyone for M&M’s? Delicious and appropriate! Anyone for Chewy Goobers? Inexpensive… Anyone for buying the SHIT that I’m selling because my stiffie has ruined my spelling. ERECTION! ERECTION! MY UNFORTUNATE ERECTION! WHY? Is ruining my life Is ruining my world Is ruining my Ruining Ruining Ruining My Life MY LIFE Adulthood brings its own peculiar rejection Which is why I’m selling this PTA Confection It will ruin your complexion All because of my unfortunate Erection Oh God!
Following accusations in the wake of its decision, the Cardinal School District denied that the move was made because the musical includes two gay parents. Jesus also makes a comic appearance in the show. (He also appears rather prominently in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which is frequently performed in high schools.) If that had anything to do with the show’s demise, this school district is a danger to intelligent life on earth.
I want to start next week out with as little inventory as possible, so I’m going to go to the potpourri format a second time today. This morning’s installment is here.
1. My current quest is to locate as many popular songs and records from the 1950s (and early Sixties, which were the Fifties in spirit, pre-British Invasion.) that are effectively “cancelled” today for being politically correct. As I note in a comment earlier today, I am trying to persuade Pat Boone to do this as a “theme” for his weekly Sirius show on the Golden Fifties Channel. He’s a terrific host, by the way—great voice still, smooth, fascinating comments on the songs. Pat also likes playing his own hits, understandable enough, and one of them was the infamous “Speedy Gonzalez,” which traffics in more Mexican stereotypes than you would think could be packed into a song. ( I wrote about the Chuck Jones cartoon character here; Mel Blanc even does “Speedy” on Pat’s record.) That song above from “The Most Happy Fella” is another. Boy, it’s creepy, with lyrics like,
Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by Standing on the corner underneath the springtime sky Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking Or for the “Woo!” look in your eye You’re only standing on the corner watching all the girls Watching all the girls, watching all the girls Go by!
I first paid attention to the song in the 70’s, and they bothered me then. How cute: a bunch of guys ogling women and thinking about illegal things to do with them or to them. As you might discern, I see no reason to censor these songs. The Fifties was the most lively, varied, experimental and interesting time in U.S. pop music, with Broadway, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, Doo Wop, and orchestral all vital, the iconic rockers like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Elvis on the way up, and the old-style crooners like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Frankie Layne and Tony Bennett still knocking out hits. Hundreds of that era’s songs are still worth listening to, including “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” by Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, a Phil Spector-produced American rhythm and blues trio from Los Angeles. You know, I’m sure, that Disney has purged that Academy Award-winning song because it came from the allegedly racist “Song of the South” animated film. Among the platters I’ll suggest to Pat are “Please Mr. Custer,” “Ally Oop,” “Johnny Get Angry,” “I Told the Witch Doctor,” and Tex Ritter’s “Deck of Cards” song, which is openly Christian, so might “offend” someone. Please pass suggestions along, as well as the best way to contact Pat, who claims to have an email address. Twitter works, but I haven’t returned to that platform yet. I can’t tell if Pat himself ever checks his Facebook page. Continue reading →
This is a fact: most of today’s journalists really think like this, being arrogant, self-inflated, ignorant and incompetent hacks who believe “journalism” means advancing the “greater good” through their craft, the “greater good as defined, of course, by them..
During a National Press Club panel last month supposedly on the journalistic challenges of covering extremism—meaning “How do we make sure as many Democrats are elected as possible, since that is the party 98% of us support?”, Wesley Lowery, the former Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his coverage of the Ferguson race riots, told his fawning audience,
“We have one political party that traffics in the same talking points as white supremacists, be it on immigration, be it on Muslims, be it on any number of issues, where the mainstream political rhetoric could be written by avowed racists…I’ll be honest, I don’t think very much about the mantle of neutrality. It’s either raining outside or it’s not raining outside. I’m not particularly interested in sounding neutral about which it is….[The Republican Party] is a mix of nativism, of anti-urbanism, of anti-cosmopolitanism, a fear of immigrants. It’s the exact same things that drove the Klan movement of the 1920s. But to say that in public—the way that Newsbusters is going to headline the write-up of this panel is going to be that I compared Donald Trump to the Klan. Right? Now this is a literal true factual description. How can we understand our moment if we are not allowed to make any comparison or add any context?”
Great thanks to my friend and Ethics Alarms reader Jeff Westlake for reminding me of the prescient and relevant episode from one of my all-time favorite (and shamelessly silly) sitcoms, “F-Troop.” That was “Crazy Cat” prodding the Hekawi chief; he took the place of medicine man “Roaring Chicken” Edward Everett Horton in the show’s final season (in color!) when the great old character actor became too ill in his eighties.
More spy balloon humor: one Twitter wag said that shooting down the Chinese balloon was the first thing the Biden administration had done to successfully combat inflation.
1 Regarding today’s headline: Not all that long ago, I used to watch as much of all the Sunday talking head programs on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS and CNN (skipping Fox News and MSNBC because they were so one-note and shrill). Now I can’t watch any of them. All five shifted to full-partisan bias in 2016, and it just intensified since then. Even the evidence that Donna Brazile had used her role as a CNN “contributor” to let Hillary Clinton get advance notice of questions in a town meeting didn’t stop her from being featured as a pundit. George Stephanopoulos screaming Clinton conflict of interest continued to be ignored by ABC, and he stopped even trying to hide it. Chuck Todd turned “Meet the Press” into an hour-long infomercial for Democrats, and “Reliable Sources” under Brian Stelter became a literal fraud, an unethical media ethics show. I miss those shows, just like I miss journalism that at least tried to be informative, fair and ethical. Wouldn’t you think just one would have concluded that it would be wise to contrast with the others by actually being objective, rather than being indistinguishable?
2. Now that I’m reminded of our Native Americans so soon after this super-woke idiot complained about the Washington Redskins, the presence of the Kansas City Chiefs in the upcoming Super Bowl has once again triggered the Indian team names and mascots Nazis, notably in Kansas City itself. KCUR, the PBS affiliate in KC, published a story on its website last week titled, “As Kansas City Chiefs head to the Super Bowl, their violent traditions alienate even some local fans.” Violent traditions? What violent traditions? Do Chief fans traditionally try to massacre the fans of their opponents? No, the “violence” referred to is the “tomahawk” chop gesture the fans sometimes perform in the stands, like the home fans of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. You know, violence to the air. Or something. The petty, silly and obnoxious feature quotes Rhonda DeValdo, an activist and professor from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas: Continue reading →
A three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down a law requiring objects of domestic violence restraining orders to surrender their guns. Good.
The law is a Federal statute. The plaintiff, Zackey Rahimi, was convicted of possessing a firearm while he was subject to a domestic violence restraining order. His convictionhad been upheld by the district court and a prior Fifth Circuit panel. Following the Supreme Court of the United States’ Bruen (2022) decision, the Fifth Circuit panel “withdrew its opinion and requested supplemental briefing on the impact of that case on this one.” After reconsidering Rahimi’s case in light of Bruen, the Fifth Circuit panel reversed itself and vacated Rahimi’s conviction.
The statute makes it unlawful…
“for any person[] who is subject to a court order that: was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had an opportunity to participate; (B) restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child; and (C)(i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury . . . to . . . possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition . . . .
The panel consisted of Judges Edith Jones, James Ho, and Cory T. Wilson. Judge Wilson wrote: Continue reading →
That’s young Canadian woman Renée Lariviere above, before and after her weird injury. She was leaving her apartment to go to dinner and reportedly asked a friend to toss her the car keys. As she awkwardly grabbed the keys as they hurtled through the air, she managed to jerk them into her face. The result was that the business end of a key, as resulting X-rays revealed, was embedded nearly two inches into her nasal cavity and below her eye.
The car key was successfully extracted—get face started right up! (sorry)—and thanks to plastic surgery, she now doesn’t even have a scar. However, this was, I think all were agree, an accident that never should have happened. Who was her key-throwing friend, Roger Clemens? These are all basic life lessons:
Learn to catch. It’s an essential life skill. Practice. (My wife has never caught anything I’ve tossed to her, including keys. Ever. I stopped trying long, long ago.)
Learn what “toss” means. (Hint: it does not mean, “Whip it at me!”)
If you can’t catch, don’t ask people, even friends, to throw things to you or at you.
If you don’t know if someone can catch, don’t throw anything to them or at them, Walk over and hand it to them.
One tosses keys underhanded, like a softball. Although, given Renée’s apparent hand-eye coordination, even that kind of toss might have ended with her wounded, only with the keys impaled in the top of her head.
It didn’t happen here, but I could easily see it happening here, and…
It’s really, really, really stupid.
A bit of background: Samuel Beckett, the late Irish novelist and playwright of Theater of the Absurd fame ,best known for his minimalist drama and “Waiting For Godot” in particular, was a cantankerous old coot who didn’t trust directors (with good cause, say I), and directed them in his texts to change neither lines nor character, or risk legal action. Edward Albee was similarly strict on this point, having seen what happens to plays in the public domain (like Shakespeare’s works) when far less talented “artists” decide to make them “relevant.” So if you are going to produce a Beckett play, it’s Beckett’s way or the metaphorical highway.
Oisín Moyne, a fellow countryman of Beckett, was directing “Waiting for Godot” in the Netherlands and auditioned only men for the all-male cast of characters, as he was legally and artistically obligated to do. the college production been in rehearsals since November and was due to be presented at the University of Groningen’s Usva student cultural center in March. (Don’t ask me how or why it would take more than three months to rehearse this play, which primarily involves two guys sitting around talking, but never mind.) Continue reading →
Before we delve into the substance of the article at issue, let me express my gratitude to author David Kaufman for giving me another opportunity to post a brilliant cartoon by one of my heroes, New Yorker satirist/philosopher/humorist Charles Addams. If you read here often, you have seen his work highlighted periodically because it is so often appropriate. In this case, that cartoon above, which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a high school student, immediately leapt to mind when I read that Kaufman believes the little white figures in the “walk/don’t walk” traffic lights represent white people.
Did anyone, at the New Yorker, among its readers, among the millions of people who have seen that creepy but very funny drawing in the best-selling collections of Addams’ mordant humor think for a second that it had anything to do with race? No, because it didn’t, doesn’t, and until quite recently, before The Great Stupid spread hate, fear, darkness and toxic cretinism over the land, nobody would be so woke-mad and brainwashed to see racism in everything that they would come to such a bonkers conclusion. Continue reading →
Pop star Marie Osmond, seen above apparently being eaten by the same plant mass that devoured Barack Obama in his awful portrait that became a source of a scandal narrative, has announced that she will not be bestowing any of her current wealth, estimated to be about $20 million, on her 8 children or 8 grandchildren.
“Honestly, why would you enable your child to not try to be something? I don’t know anybody who becomes anything if they’re just handed money,” she said last month in an interview. “To me, the greatest gift you can give your child is a passion to search out who they are inside and to work. I mean, I’ve done so many things… I love trying. I wanna try everything,” she added.
Further parenting wisdom from Marie, whose plan is to spend what she has with husband Steve Craig and give whatever is left to charity when she goes to that big Osmond Reunion in the sky: “I just think all [an inheritance] does is breed laziness and entitlement. I worked hard and I’m gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband…” and she says she doesn’t want to set the stage for her heirs to fight over her estate. Marie has said that her role model in this conviction was actor Kirk Douglas, who reportedly left none of his wealth, estimated to be three times Osmond’s, to Michael (who was rich already).
Ethics Alarms 