Ethics Train Wrecks

Lunchtime Ethics Appetizer, 2/12/20: With Just Desserts!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Bon Appetite!

In a perfect example of how avoiding bias can create bias, I am accumulating a backlog of genuine and valuable ethics stories that are triggered by or related to political developments, and deliberately talking myself out of posting them. As regular readers here know, this has been a problem since the beginning of the Trump administration, when the Democrats, the resistance and most of the media  resolved to try to bring him down and cancel the election results with a campaign to delegitimize President’s Trump’s election. I regard this as one of the greatest ethics crises in U.S. history (another, running concurrently, is the near complete abdication of professional ethics by journalists), and I can’t ignore it. But doing my job, as repetitious as it seems, also means that I am reluctant to write about other political stories that I would have included otherwise, and often they involve important issues.

1. Which reminds me: One of the Washington Post’s most reliable anti-Trump columnists, Greg Sargent, issued an opinion piece that would be a strong entrant in a “Hypocrite of the Year” competition. Here’s the line that made my head explode: “Such delegitimization of the opposition strikes at the core of our system. Recognizing the opposition’s legitimacy is a key pillar of accountability in government…”

Astounding! Sargent’s ideologically compatible pals have been working overtime to deny the legitimacy of Trump’s election, from attacking the Electoral College to claiming a Russian conspiracy,  encouraging and cheering “Not my President!” demonstrations, manufacturing impeachable offenses out of thin air, and turning such once-neutral and unifying events as the Inauguration, the Kennedy Center Honors and the White House Correspondents Dinner—and more recently, a State of the Union address where the speaker of the House, on camera, symbolically rejected the legitimacy of the speech by ripping it up on live TV——into opportunities to directly challenge this President’s right to be in office and to be accorded the same respect and civility of his predecessors. If anyone who has been part of this assault, and Sargent definitely has, makes the accusation that Trump is wrong to “delegitimize the opposition,” that critic is either deliberately gaslighting the public, or so devoid of self-knowledge as to be functionally crippled.

2. Here’s an unscientific poll result that should give Democrats chills. Ann Althouse asked her readers whether they would vote for Bernie Sanders or President Trump if that was the choice in November. Ann readership is Madison, Wisconsin heavy, consisting of many of her former students. She is resolutely politically neutral, laning Left, as she voted for both Hillary and Obama, twice. She has also criticized many of the attacks on Trump, including in the news media, causing her commenters, if not her readership, to see an exodus by the Trump-Deranged, much as what has occurred on Ethics Alarms. Those commenters remaining, I believe, are not uncritical of the President, and I would expect to find them on the “disapprove” side in a Gallup poll. I was very surprised at Ann’s poll results:

In a related development… Continue reading →

It’s Comforting To Know That Yale Is Educating Future Lawyers As Incompetently As Harvard, I Guess

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Actually, it’s terrifying.

A core function of lawyers in our society is to give everyone equal access to the law irrespective of their believes, interests, or motives. Without them, the public and all of its entities, institutions and organizations become slaves and victims of laws rather than beneficiaries of them, with an elite and corrupted professions using their knowledge and skills to distort democracy rather than protect it.

The relentless ideological corruption of academia is slowly but surely corrupting the professions it is trusted to train, with lawyers being a striking example. Now law students are increasingly taught that their interests, not their clients, should be the focus of their passions, and those interests have been dictated by progressive and leftist agendas, with the aim of transforning a profession designed to be equally accessible to all into a tool of dominance by one side of the political spectrum over the others.

This developments is the reason ethics alarms must sound over the students of both Yale and Harvard Law Schools condemning a major law firm’s choice of clients. They are trying to build a national law student boycott of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison until the firm drops  ExxonMobil as a client. Climate change, you know. As we increasingly see, the environmentalist cult is being used to justify weakening democratic institutions and principles.

A pledge is circulating declaring that top students will no longer interview for summer associate positions or work at the firm until Paul, Weiss, and of course there will be other firms, no longer represent the oil and gas giant, and, inevitably, other energy companies.  Providing Exxon with competent representation in a series of climate change lawsuits makes firms complicit in the planet’s destruction. Thus the legal system must be rigged against them.

The last sentence is my fair and accurate translation of the objective behind the pledge, which reads, Continue reading →

Thank God It’s The Friday Ethics Warm-Up, 2/7/2020: What A Week! [ CORRECTED, After I Mixed Up Joe Walsh With Joe Wilson For The Hundredth Time]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Whew!

This has been more ethics drama than I could stand every week; I sure hope the rest of the year isn’t like this. First the Superbowl is won by an NFL team whose fans do the tomahawk chop. Then the Iowa Caususes self-destruct in an orgy of incompetence and finger-pointing as the Democrats blame white people and Trump. Nancy Pelosi makes Joe “You lie!” Wilson look civil, the Left has a conniption over  Rush Limbaugh being honored, the Senate acquits the President, and most notable of all, the Boston Red Sox named Alex Cora’s bench coach, Ron Roenicke, its new manager.

Since the Sox are under investigation for their own alleged cheating scandal, this was a fascinating choice. The team must have done its due diligence, questioning Cora, Roenicke and others to be 100% sure that Roenicke had no hand in whatever it was the Red Sox were doing to steal signs in 2018, if they were. If they didn’t, they are, to be blunt, morons with a death wish.

1. OK, I’m getting paranoid now, but what the heck is up with the new voice of Tony the Tiger? After decades of the startling bass of voice artist Thurl Ravenscroft growling “They’re GRRRRREAT!” (Ravenscoft is the one who sings “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch!” in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”), Tony now sounds like an accountant. If they wanted to find a tiger-like voice, or even a Ravenscoft imitator, Kelloggs easily could have, just as Warner Bros. has been able to find passable (though inferior) replacements for Mel Blanc.  Am I being conspiratorial to think this is more woke cultural indoctrination by Madison Avenue, with the kinder, gentler, wimpier Tony avoiding toxic male aggressiveness? In the new Life cereal commercials, you know, “Mikey” is now a girl.

2. “Yet” arrives. In a post a couple of days ago, I wrote that the Democrats and news media hadn’t blamed the President for the Iowa Caucus implosion “yet.” Long time commenter Neil Doerr helpfully passed this along:

Supporters of President Donald Trump inundated a hotline used by Iowa caucus precinct leaders to report their tallies, contributing to significant delays in the final tally, Iowa Democratic Party officials said….NBC News reported on Thursday that the party’s hotline number was repeatedly posted on the online message board 4chan as voting took place on Monday night. Its users, who are anonymous and have trolled and harassed the president’s political opponents, urged others to call in. “Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines,” one user wrote, according to NBC.

4Chan is a pro-trolling progressives group. It is wants to promote chaos, not  Trump. The callers were anonymous; they cannot be called “Trump supporters” just because they wish the Democrats ill. (Nobody knows this mind set better than I.) Moreover, the phone lines appear to have been the least of the Iowa Democrats problems. The DNC has even called for a do-over, and it is beginning to look like there will never be definitive and reliable results. This is the fault of the Democratic Party. Nobody else.

Meanwhile, Nicole Fleetwood, a Rutgers American studies and Art History professor, tweeted on the Night They Tore The Caucus Down,  “Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness.”

That’s a irremediably racist statement. If the country is going to get proactive about eliminating ideological poisoning in our institutions of higher learning, insisting on the removal of unapologetic racists from faculties is a modest but necessary start. Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Respite, 2/5/2020: On Accountability, Karma, Never-Trump And Mookie

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

What a delightful afternoon!

It never fails. After a stretch where I am especially pleased with the quantity and quality of Ethics Alarms content, I lose followers. Occasionally someone has the courtesy to contact me and tell me why they are dropping Ethics Alarms, but usually not. I know I obsess about such things, but it is like being defriended: I deserve the courtesy of a direct contact and an explanation. One well-remembered exit was by a woman who was very active the comments but always regrading formal ethics theory. I know that stuff, I studied it, and it bores me to tears. I also view the academic approach to ethics as substantially responsible for the public’s general disinterest  in ethics generally. When I finally told the ethics enthusiast that this wasn’t the kind of ethics blog she was looking for, she sent me an email that announced her departure.

1. Of course, the big news yesterday…was that the Boston Red Sox traded their best player, Mookie Betts, to the Los Angeles Dodgers for two young players and the willingness to take on the ridiculous contract of an aging, injury prone ex-ace, David Price. Boston being Boston, this was a story of much more consequence in the Hub than the State of the Union, the Democrats continuing inability to run  caucuses in Iowa, or the resolution of the impeachment washout. This shows, as I have always known as a born and bred Bostonian, that the city has its priorities straight.

Betts is that rarity, a young, great player who can do everything well, and do it with charm and modesty. He should be the face of the franchise for the next decade, but there’s a problem: Mookie wants to test the free agent market after this season, when he is eligible to do so. The Red Sox have offered him a long term deal in each of the last two seasons, and he recently rejected an offer in excess of 300 million dollars for ten years. On the open market Betts might get 30% more than that, and the Sox are loath to get into a bidding war. Thus, to avoid the fate of the Washington Nationals, who allowed their similarly young superstar Bryce Harper to flee without getting more than a draft choice in return (Mookie is better and nicer that Bryce), the Red Sox swallowed hard and traded him to the Dodgers.

Ethics notes:

  • In the trade, Boston gave up the best African American player in its long prejudice-stained history as well as its single African American starting pitcher. It says something about the team’s progress in this area that nobody has seemed to notice.
  • In trading Betts and Price after firing Alex Cora, the team’s manager implicated in the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, the Red Sox just happened to bid farewell to the three most vocal boycotters of President Trump’s invitation to the team to be honored at the White House for the its 2018 World Series victory. Red Sox cohesion was never the same after the grandstanding “Orange Man Bad” explosion that split the squad down the middle. Mookie never seemed quite as nice after that; Cora never seemed as wise, and Price always was a jerk.
  • Betts has told anyone who would listen that he wanted to stay in Boston, that he loves the city and fans, and that the Red Sox were just proving that baseball is a business. That’s disingenuous spin, and clearly so. If you really want to stay with a team, then you accept the paltry wages of more than 30 million dollars a year to do so.

2. Since there seems to be a strong disagreement among the commentariat on this question, I need to poll it:

Continue reading →

Rep. Adam Schiff’s “Have You No Sense Of Decency?” Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Well, another “Have you no decency?” moment…

“Trump could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election, or decide to move to Mar-A-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war.”

—Lead House Impeachment Manager Congressman Adam Schiff of California during closing arguments in the Senate impeachment trial Monday, bringing  unconscionable partisan fear-mongering and anti-Trump hysteria to a new low.

Res ipsa loquitur.

And failure to recognize Schiff as an unprincipled and shameless buffoon is a symptom of Stage 5 Trump Derangement.

Ethics Dunce: Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ugh.

Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said yesterday, “I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened. Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.’”

No, no, no. Someone should wash Ernst’s mouth out with soap. That door needs to be slammed shut, and Ernst is a fool for suggesting otherwise, even hypothetically.

What the Democrats did, by deciding from the moment Donald Trump was elected to seek a way to remove him, undermined our democracy and its institutions. It also threatened—threatens-— to institutionalize  a  precedent that would make every  elected President to come a permanent target  of a soft coup by those who lost the contest to decide who was “fit” to be President.  From the beginning, one of the main reasons the Democrats’ undemocratic strategy was so evidently dangerous was the powerful “tit for tat” reflex in politics. Sometimes, the understanding that in politics “what goes around comes around” is a restraining force on irresponsible and unethical partisan warfare. This time it wasn’t, but that does not mean that the Republicans should reciprocate in kind. That is exactly what they must not do. If that is their approach, they will complete the destruction that the Democrats started. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Steve-O-From-NJ authored an epic Comment of the Day, checking in at nearly 1800 words, which may be a record–it will take too long to check. The question is, since it an analysis of the soon-to-be-a-really-bad-memory-that-both-parties-will-constantly -remind- us-of impeachment, or as it is known on Ethics Alarms, Plan S, the Trump Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck, and one more car in the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is this an ethics post?

This was already on my mind, having read today another legal ethics blogger complaining that the impeachment debacle has forced her ethics blog into politics. Yeah, tell me about it.

Yes, it’s an ethics post. The impeachment was the culmination—for now–of what Ethics Alarms has been covering for three years as what I labelled early on as one of the most important and dangerous examples of unethical partisan conduct in decades. Steve-O hits many issues that have been extensively covered here from an ethics perspective, and, frankly, a summary right now is helpful. It also helps lay the foundation for a post I have been working on a while with his phrase–twice!–mixed motives.

Here is Steve-O-From-NJ‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition.”

A few thoughts on the all but over impeachment:

After Friday’s vote, it’s all over but the formalities for the third impeachment and the second attempt at a soft coup by Congress against the president. It’s also the least legitimate of the three impeachments plus the one effort that never got to impeachment because the president resigned.

The Radical Republicans tried to push Andrew Johnson out of office because, as a Democrat and a southerner (he was from Tennessee), he was in the way of their harsh program of Reconstruction they wanted to impose on the South after the Civil War, so they essentially took a policy dispute up to eleven. Nixon oversaw criminal activities and lied repeatedly, so his trust was shot and he could no longer lead. Bill Clinton had a sleazy, but probably not impeachable, affair, but then perjured himself, which is a crime, to cover it up, a classic case of the coverup being worse than the act. The best the Democratic Party could come up with on this one was a phone call with, at best, mixed motives.

Nowhere in the Constitution or the other laws of this land does it say that the president or any other official must act totally selflessly at all times in the discharge of his duties, or he risks being impeached and removed from office. Nowhere does it say that, as chief diplomat of the United States, the president is not empowered to engage in political jiujitsu with other governments. Nowhere does it say that, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the president is not empowered to look into dealings by others with foreign governments that he has a question about. Most importantly, nowhere does it say that the president, or any other executive official, must defer to Congress, particularly to the House, in all things.

The Founding Fathers were very clear on the concept of separation of powers when they drew up the Constitution. They did not want any one official, or even one institution, making the laws and then prosecuting and punishing anyone accused of breaking the laws. They specifically did not want any of the three branches of government becoming more powerful than the others. That’s why it’s called checks and balances. The nation is still working out how that is supposed to work in every situation, but that’s the basic concept we all learned back around 3rd grade. They built in the power of impeachment to guard against gross abuses by corrupt officials, but they specifically rejected the idea of a parliamentary system where the legislature holds most of the power and can call a vote of no confidence in the government fairly easily.

They also specifically rejected the idea of one branch of government encroaching on the prerogatives of the others. Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but, unless the president signs them and later enforces them, they mean nothing. Congress can also do all the overseeing it wants, but, its power to demand testimony, documents, or anything else can be checked by the courts. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Continue reading →

My Impeachment Freak-Out Rebuttal To A Smart And Fair Facebook Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I just wrote the longest reply to a Facebook friend I have ever authored, not counting pasting in Ethics Alarms columns. He’s a fair and smart man, but he’s in the performing arts, which  means he’s surrounded by knee-jerk progressives who think Robert De Nero  and Meryl Streep are persuasive political commentators and who cheered when the cast of “Hamilton” ambushed Pence. In his post, he opined that historians would condemn ” spineless, groveling, boot-licking Republican Senators who covered their ears and willfully chose not to hear from fact-witnesses like John Bolton.”  He said he was sure “the truth will come out” concerning Trump’s “corrupt motives and his misuse of presidential power,” but that “giving a pass”  to an  “unstable, narcisisstic” President “convinced that he is above the law” was very dangerous. And so on–this is the standard mainstream media babble. I decided to write a detailed rebuttal, because I know my friend is an ethical and perceptive person, and view his acceptance of this false narrative issuing from the Left as evidence that he is the victim of propaganda. I think what might have tipped the scales for me was one of his friends citing with approval James Comey’s vomit-inducing op ed, yesterday, sanctimoniously telling us that despite the recent failure of the soft coup attempt he helped to advance, “we’ll be all right.” Gag, Ack, Yecch!

Here is what I wrote:

It pains me to see you fall into this intellectual trap, [my friend] though it is not your fault. Propaganda works, after all, and 90% of the reporting and punditry you get about the impeachment is incompetent and shockingly partisan. In fact, as with the illegal attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Republican Senators are saving the Constitution and the Separation of Powers by blocking a precedent that would have reduced elections to just a temporary democratic moment until the opposing party could figure out some way to reverse hem. Few if any of the GOP Senators care for the President any more than you do (or I, for that matter), but Presidents were not intended to be impeached because Congress decides they are assholes, and that’s all that is being attempted here. Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The good news: Other Bill’s get well bouquet (above) from the Commentariat to the fallen “Mrs. Ethics Alarms” is still thriving!

1. Humbly grateful...for all the gracious notes of forgiveness for the “Unethical Quote Of The Century” fiasco, explicated here in the early morning hours. Imagine: with all the hysterical, dishonest, apocalyptic declarations flying around the airwaves, news media and  web, I managed to write about one that was never said.

2. Ann Althouse on “rigged.” The politically neutral bloggress gave me a much needed laugh with this: Responding to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s unhingery in “The Senate impeachment trial was rigged!,” Ann wrote,

Yeah, it was rigged. Everything is rigged. The election was rigged. Trump isn’t really President. The impeachment trial was rigged. The acquittal won’t count as an acquittal. If Trump wins reelection, it will be because it was rigged. It’s all rigged. The Constitution itself is rigged. What’s with that 2/3 vote requirement? Rigged. Electoral college? Rigged! Life itself is rigged!…

Bingo. Do all the people screaming about the decision not to allow witnesses remember that the Clinton impeachment trial has no  witnesses, and neither Republican nor Democrats complained?  The ones who do are hypocrites, the ones who don’t. most. I think, are inexcusably ignorant. I’m not certain the Democrats really wanted witnesses, since their alleged “bombshell” witness, John Bolton, was not going to testify that he knew the reason Trump was pushing for a Ukrainian investigation was to “rig” the election, and the GOP was going to demand to question Biden and son. as well as the “whistleblower.” I suspect that the Democrats assumed that calling witnesses would be voted down, giving them a theme that Republicans were covering up for Trump. Or maybe not. Nothing about the Plan S impeachment sham makes sense. However, the screaming at the sky over a result that was inevitable and widely known to be so years ago was also inevitable, and, one would think, embarrassing. Continue reading →

Urgent Notice Of Correction: Chuck Schumer’s Apparently Non-Existent “Unethical Quote Of The Century,” And My Abject Apology Because Bias Made Me Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Last evening, I posted an Unethical Quote allegedly made by Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer that “Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal will be meaningless because we never accepted the results of the 2016 election in the first place. Anyone who accepts an acquittal is a danger to our democracy.” I originally titled it the Unethical Quote of the Day, and later, as I read it again while responding to the predictable shocked comments, I upgraded the comment to Unethical Quote of the Century, a designation I was prepared to defend.

This morning, momentarily awake and planning to go back to sleep, I decided to check the Ethics Alarms comments, and saw this, from frequent commenter Here’s Johnny.

Re: Unethical quote:
I would think that, for the unethical quote of the century, I would be able to find a few references to it in the news media. My best Google search efforts have turned up reports from Ethics Alarms and The Sacramento Brie. The Brie does not appear to be a legitimate news site, and their reference to this quote appears to show a Fox News screen grab. Searching at Fox News did not turn up the quote. The quote does not appear in the Senate Democrats text of Schumer’s comments at the press conference where he supposedly made the comment.
So, what is going on here? Is there evidence that Schumer actually said what is in the quote? I could not find it.

This was disturbing. The post had no link, which is unusual, and I couldn’t tracj down where I got it from, though I believe the pointer came from a Trump Deranged friend on Facebook who quoted it approvingly. I’ve checked my browser history to no avail. After reading HJ’s comment, I listened to every YouTube clip I could find from Schumer yesterday. He made a number of disingenuous and hyperbolic statements about a trial with no witnesses not being a trial (The Clinton impeachment had no witnesses, and Democrats seemed to be happy with that), but nothing as outrageous as the alleged quote I posted.

Like Johnny, I cannot believe that if Schumer said something that irresponsible, it wouldn’t have been widely reported. Thus I am suspending the post pending verification, and as of this moment, assume that it was false. I also deleted the tweet that the blog generates for every post. I will continue to  look for the quote and the source, and to identify exactly how this happened.

To some extent I know the latter: the news media and other Democrats have been foaming at the mouth for days, and many of the quotes are no less head-exploding than Schumer’s, except that they were not made by the leader of the party in the Senate. Assuming that there was no such Schumer quote, I was bitten by fake news that triggered confirmation bias. I have written for years that the Democrats/”resistance”/ mainstream media alliance have denied the legitimacy of President Trump’s election, and that conclusion is objectively unavoidable. Though I was stunned to see Schumer say so out loud, it was not as if what the quote indicated was out of line with reality. The second part, about “the danger to democracy,” echoed many of the irresponsible statements made by Rep. Schiff and others during the House impeachment managers’ presentation, and similar rhetoric by pundits and other Democrats. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), for example, tweeted yesterday,

“The Senate’s abdication of responsibility to the rule of law represents a much deeper threat to our democracy, our institutions, and our republic. The GOP knows that its agenda is incompatible with democracy, so their larger project is to dismantle it.”

That statement is as inflammatory and absurd as the alleged Schumer tweet, but not as shocking because OAC is, after all, an idiot. Schumer, however, is not.

I cannot apologize sufficiently for this. My attention has been even more divided than usual this past week—that’s not an excuse, but a partial explanation—and I’ve been bouncing around two computers and two many news sources to count, and, apparently, keep proper track of. I should never post a story or commentary with out verified links to the source, and, frankly, I don’t know why I didn’t this time.

Facebook is unreliable; I know that. There were plenty of aspects of the quote that should have set off my own ethics alarms, but I let my emotions take over: the quote really infuriated me, because as I suggested by noting the Schumer was “playing with fire,” that kind of rhetoric—and there has been a lot of it— rips at the connective tissue that holds this republic together. However, publishing unverified inflammatory rhetoric is just as wrong as saying such things.

Readers here have to be able to trust me; an ethics blog without trust is like a—oh, you can make up your own metaphor, I’m too upset to be clever—and this time I failed their, your, trust by not following my own procedures, and apparently being fooled  because I didn’t heed my most important rule, to avoid bias making me stupid. I apologize to everyone reading this, everyone who passed along what appears to be Ethics Alarms fake news, and everyone who might have been misled by the fact that the invalid quote was passed along. I apologize to the commenters whose reactions are vanishing with the essay: I’m so sorry. I wasted your time. I also apologize to Senator Schumer.

I am going to have to do better, and I will.

I could say that I hope I can find that the quote was accurate after all, but I don’t. I am relieved that it appears to have been fabricated. I felt, when I read it, and foolishly believed it, that this was a tipping point, and a dangerous one.

Now, before I go back to bed and dream of self-flagellation,  I am going to add the portion of the banned post that I know was accurate, because it had value. Indeed, another reason I accepted the quote impulsively, I think, is that it gave me a pwoerful lead-in to content I had already written. That will teach me.

I hope.

Here’s the remaining section of the now zapped post, and one more time, I am so sorry: Continue reading →