Sorry.
The post about Britney Griner being caught betting on her own team’s games was improvidently posted. It was based on an entry on a suspicious website that I should have investigated further than I did.
I’ve been caught before, though not recently. This time it was confirmation bias that got me: I think Griner is a grifter and Ethics Villain, and was obviously (note the title) predisposed to believe the worst. As several commenter have noted, the report I was relying on didn’t make sense, but it was also, as web hoaxes often are, not sufficiently clever to tip me off that it was intended as satire. As Ethics Alarms has stated repeatedly, false stories on teh web should be flagged as such or are unethical. And despicable. I hate them to pieces.
So, here come the apologies: I apologize to Britney, readers here, the WNBA and anyone who was fooled by my carelessness and stupidity. I had an unusually busy morning, was distracted and tired from a bad night, and should have waited until I was in a more competent state of mind.
Let that be a lesson to me. And you. And everyone.
%$!@#$!
I‘m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” “kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”
***
Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.
Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”
WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”
Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.
Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.
__________________
Pointer: JutGory
Ethics Alarms 
I guess like you said me and you both had some confirmation bias going!
THESE THINGS happen to (modesty aside) the best of us. The whole thread, not just my falling hook_line_and_sinker, features a real Blast_From_The_Past!
PWS
The linked article seemed rather strange: I wondered why a WNBA player of Griner’s stature would be placing in-person bets with a bookie named “Art Tubolls” whose name did not lead to anything meaning full in a google search. Who places in-person bets unless you are actually in Las Vegas? MLB celebrates online betting houses (with the appropriate links to Gamblers Anonymous), as do other professional sports. But, because I care so little about basketball and even less about the WNBA, and by extension, Griner, I didn’t do any more inquiry, shrugged my shoulders, and continued researching how a party-in-interest in a case can intervene in an appeal to the Texas First Court of Appeals to prevent some stupid judgment from being entered against my client.
jvb
Satire or not, Britney Griner may have grounds for a libel lawsuit to whomever published that article on the Dunning Kruger Times.
Sure, the story was false, with the satire claim hidden. However, it’s a good example of why a nation without a trustworthy news media is such a danger. As was mentioned on the story itself, several fact checkers claimed the story was false. Fact checkers themselves have made false claims over the years. News outlets failed to cover the original story. News outlets have ignored stories for years because they could hurt their side. In a normal, healthy culture, it would have been easy to tell that the Griner story was fake. But the news media has made itself so untrustworthy, that the usual signs of a false story are nearly useless.