I burned this week’s open forum on Tuesday night as my remedy for enforced absence from EA (dead laptop, ethics road trip), so I’m waking up this morning with a different low energy feature. This was an awful week from a scheduling standpoint; on the other hand, at least my ethics wisdom was in demand. I had back-to-back seminars to teach for the first time since Ethics Villain Dr. Fauci and the totalitarian Left wrecked my training business (and the economy, children’s socialization, education, culture…) with their lockdown. Oh, and it killed my wife, too, I mustn’t let them off the hook for that. But I’m not bitter…

1. TCM has cancelled Porky Pig. It is hypocritical for a station that purports to preserve American film history and present the screen entertainment of the nation’s past for enlightenment and perspective to engage in any censorship at all reagrding the content its mission dictates, but I guess Porky doesn’t count. TCM often shows Warner Bros. cartoons between its main features, and as any culturally-literate person knows, these always ended with Porky Pig poking through the screen and stuttering, “That’s all folks!” the traditional Loony Tunes coda. It took me a long time to figure it out (“Huh! That’s funny…this one doesn’t have Porky…”) but Ted Turner’s legacy project has erased Porky from the endings of all its Warner Bos. animated features. What petty, silly, cowardly, pandering morons. Porky stutters, see, so he’s being mean to the disabled, or “differently-abled,” or funny speech-enabled, or whatever the hell we’ve been ordered to call it by our moral betters. If “Make America Great Again” meant nothing more than “End Crap Like Banning Porky Pig,” it would still be worth cheering for. I am officially ECLBPP.

2. Speaking of mind-rot in the U.S., one of my most esteemed and once-rational Trump Deranged Facebook Friends demonstrated how the cult corrupts. He posted with favor an essay by a progressive journalist that purported to give “both sides” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and recommended that everyone read it. The essay was weakly camouflaged anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda, and obviously so.

Once my friend would have seen that, but Trump Derangement has eaten a substantial part of what had been an impressive brain. The party he is now pimping for has become, incredibly, pro-Islam, pro-Iran, pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism, so the Cognitive Dissonance Scale is forcing him to excuse these indefensible positions by embracing spin, rationalizations, and lies. The author my friend was promoting referred to Israel as an “occupation” and cited the position of the World International Court as evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing. There is a reason why the U.S. doesn’t recognize the anti-American, anti-Isreal WIC.

Those are flaming tells, and that my friend, a retired lawyer, couldn’t or wouldn’t see that is itself a tell. Tragic. And yes, this time I did comment critically on his post. No response, because he’s still smart enough to know I was right.

3. Back to TCM: the station is saluting director Stanley Kubrick this month, which is appropriate since almost every one of his movies is brilliant and he excelled in every film genre he tried. I stumbled upon a disturbing note, however. Sue Lyon, who played Nabokov’s teenage sex nymph in “Lolita,” was evidently raped and sexually abused repeatedly by the film’s producer during the shoot, which the actress reasonably believed derailed her emotional stability, career and life. Where was Kubrick while this was going on? It was his film and his project, and I hold him responsible if his child star was being abused during the production. This month HarperCollins UK announced it would stop selling the children’s books authored by David Walliams following allegations that he harassed female and junior employees. The UK has lost all common sense in its woke-mania: if we start banning artists based on their personal conduct, we’ll have decimated our cultural resources. Kubrick’s film achievements aren’t degraded by his human failings, but it is interesting to me that Porky Pig was banned because he stuttered yet the TCM progressives don’t think Sue Lyon’s abuse under the director’s metaphorical nose is worth mentioning. TCM’s hosts habitually mention all sorts of production details in their introductions and final comments to the movies they show. (“Gone With The Wind” is racist, you know!) But they admire Kubrick too much to tell “the rest of the story.”

4. Here is something artificial intelligence is good for: baseball statistics and history. Last night the Boston Red Sox lost to the Cleveland Ind..sorry, Guardians 1-0 on a home run around Fenway Park’s famous “Pesky Pole,” which marks the shortest outfield fence point of any baseball park still in use. I wondered if the Red Sox had ever lost a 1-0 game on one of those cheap homers, so I asked Google’s bot. The answer came in seconds: No, last night was the first time that has happened in all the games the Sox have played at home since 1912. Then I decided to check the information, as one must with AI until its annoying habit of making stuff up abates. It took me almost an hour, but the bot was right.