Lately that most familiar of technological marvels, the telephone, has been making me crazy and my life miserable almost daily because of abuse, misuse, and overuse.
1. I just saw an allegedly hilarious TV add about “multi-processing” showing people walking into poles, tripping over obstacles and falling into trash cans while walking in public while either staring at a smart phone screen or chatting away using the speaker. I don’t even recall the product (Effective ad there, guys!), but it did tick me off. it’s not a funny phenomenon. Just yesterday, and asshole walking along staring at his phone nearly collided with me and Spuds, startling both of us, and I had to fling all of my weight against the leash from keeping my protective dog from biting the asshole’s face off—which he deserved, but my dog would be the one blamed. One woman nearly did the same thing a few weeks ago jogging while looking at her phone. People who do this are inconsiderate, reckless and self-absorbed fools, and dangerous as well. Yet such conduct is rapidly becoming a social norm. Last week, also while walking Spuds, I noted that eight straight pedestrians I encountered including three dog-walkers, one mother pushing a toddler in a stroller and three teens were all proceeding while staring at a phone screen or talking into a phone held in front of them. They are effectively cutting off the world while they are in the world, furthering the isolation of humanity, and increasing the alienation of American from each other. It is uncivil—rude—as well. When ethics fails law takes over (and usually makes a mess of things), so I am not advocating a law, but social disapproval, beginning with parents telling their kids not to do this would be a nice start.
2. I recently had to call the D.C. Office of Corporate Registration (or whatever it’s called) to eliminate my still-born law firm, BernsteinMarshall, PLLC. Screwed up beyond belief like everything else in the District, the “convenient website” had no link for ending a company, so I had to call the office. The pert, friendly, chatterbox of a recording went on for ten minutes telling me all the things the office could do for me, then spent another five telling me about all the options (“which may have changed”), then after I pushed one button, started down another list of topics while I screamed, “SHUT UP!!!!!” like Michael Palin in the Monty Python Torremolinos” travel agent skit.
I thought the clip from “Poltergeist” fit here: Welcome back, Dana!
The New Republic, biased and dishonest as usual, bleats, “Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees: Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.” It terms this as “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”
Oooh, banning students! Sounds like a mad dictator to me!
The President isn’t “banning students” or degrees. This is a financially and educationally responsible move that should have been done decades ago. If a student wants to waste a college education on majoring in “Queer History,” or “Slavik Literature” (Plymouth State University allows students to major in “Adventure Education” by taking “Rock Climbing Fundamentals,” “Canoe Paddling Fundamentals,” “Wilderness Expedition,” and “Whitewater Kayaking”) that’s swell: they just can’t use taxpayer funds they will never be able to pay back to do it.
The Department of Education, or what is left of it, tweeted in response to that unethical New Republic analysis,
“This is fake news at its finest. First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs. Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job. Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”
There is a strong case to be made that college itself is now a high-cost scam that doesn’t prepare students for the work force, just anti-Israel rallies and pro-illegal immigration riots, but okay, let’s go with the hoary myth that college is essential to life success. The student debt crisis in this country has reached levels that never should have been permitted, and higher education is as expensive as it is because the schools realized that could charge absurd tuitions and the US government would enable it by backing bigger and bigger loans. Taxpayers and the government subsidizing degrees only makes sense if it incentivizes the development of skills from which the the nation and society will derive tangible, quantifiable, practical benefits. Those are also skills that have a fighting chance of translating into jobs with sufficient compensation to allow reasonable loans to be paid back.
Declaring that the government will only back a student’s loan when 1) that loan is likely to be repaid and 2) when the loan is paying for a benefit to society rather than a self-indulgent frolic is responsible leadership. Unique among U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump sees his most responsible acts reflexively condemned through a combination of misrepresentation, bias and animus. I’m surprised there isn’t a college major in that.
I’ve been remiss in posting deserving “Comments of the Day,” and I apologize. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy submissions, its just been a fact that getting content up on EA at all has been especially challenging of late. The last Comment of the Day was almost a month ago. Yikes.
Below, after a brief observation on the specific incident inspiring the post, Charles Abbott segues from the CEO fired for trolling the Trump Deranged in social media with a photo saluting “Lake America” to the ideological grandstanding that has taken over Facebook, at least based on what I am reading there.
It seems the safest thing to do is simply to shut up. That will be a post for another day.
I want to redirect this comment to the topic of your experiences on Facebook. I’m not an expert on the the topic but I’ve had a Facebook account for approximately 20 years now. Like many of us.
You often post that you are surprised by the sorts of posts and comments and behaviors you see on Facebook from people you know personally and/or professionally.
Here’s the way it looks to me. If Facebook has ever been a place where people went to debate things in good faith, or to seek the truth, or to strive after correcting error, that time is long gone.
With this post, I am belatedly adding “Ethics Villain” to the Ethics Alarms categories. I should have done it before: frankly, properly adding categories and tags to each post after I have finished it is a chore, and I often wonder whether it is worth my time. I’ve posted around 20,000 essays, and the tagging and categorizing process takes about 3 minutes, which means I have spent 5 days worth of waking hours doing it already with no end in sight. I could really use those 60 hours right now.
Anyway, back to Ethics Villain: I have used the term to indicate sort of a super-Ethics Dunce, but that that’s not quite right. Ethics Villains are more like ficks, the EA designation for the people who know what they are doing is wrong and shamelessly do it anyway. In March, I posted an incomplete inventory of Ethics Villains, leaving off Dr. Fauci, who was properly branded with the designation later. Upon reflection, the list was very incomplete, omitting, for example, both Clintons and Barack Obama.
It did include “Virginia Democrats,” however, and that’s from whence today’s Ethics Villain oozed.
***
Local news reports here in Virginia and newly released transcripts from a House July deposition reveal that Arlington’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Taftiac admitted that her office follows a policy in which a DUI charge may be reduced to a different Class 1 misdemeanor when the drunk driver holds DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. After all, these drunks are special: they are “good illegal immigrants” who face severe immigration penalties for serious law-breaking in addition to the penalties for drunk driving. An office memo urges prosecutors to consider lesser charges when a DACA recipient is arrested for endangering legal, law-abiding citizen drivers and their families as well as pedestrians who looked both ways and waited for “WALK” before crossing a street in what they assumed would be a safe crosswalk. Hey, all they want is a better life!
And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.
But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.
Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.
—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.
Political parties, politicians and candidates, and
The lazy, incurious, complacent public itself.
More than a third of U.S. adults (35%) can’t name all three branches of the government. The 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults from August 6 to 9. Only 65% can name the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The results of that poll were 70% in 2025 and 65% in 2024.
Parents have an obligation to teach such basic civics, if they know it themselves. That any high school lets a student graduate without being able to name the three branches of government is disgusting and constitutes the negligent killing of democracy. I wonder how many teachers are in the 35%? I probably will be happier if I don’t find out.
Other news in the Annenberg poll are ominous but have fewer real consequences. When asked in to name the specific rights protected by the First Amendment, 73% cited Freedom of Speech, less than the 79% who got it right in 2025. Under one-half (43%) could name Freedom of Religion (because, I surmise, less than half care much about religion in today’s America), fewer than one-third (31%) named Freedom of Assembly and, surprisingly at least to me, only 29% named Freedom of the Press (29%). Almost nobody, just 12%, remembered the right to petition the government. In all, only 9% of respondents could correctly name all five rights in the First Amendment, while 24% could name none of them. A similar number, 25% thought the Right to Bear Arms, the Second Amendment, was part of the First.
You know. Morons.
The poll helps explain the infuriating campaign ads I have been seeing during the telecasts of Red Sox games this month. Democratic House member Chris Pappas (Mass.) is the most flagrant villain, telling two-digit IQ voters that he will “fight I.C.E” (Congress can’t fight I.C.E., which is an Executive Branch agency) and “block abortion bans.” If there are abortion bans they are at the state level, so Congress has no say. Nobody has seriously proposed an abortion ban at the national level, which would probably require a constitutional amendment, and that’s not happening.
“Ignorance is costly,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have.”
Bingo. And that’s exactly why aspiring totalitarians like the state of U.S. civic competence just the way it is.
🚨 THE VIEW HOST QUESTIONS PATRICK CLANCY FOR DIVORCING LINDSAY CLANCY ‼️ Sara Haines questioned how Patrick’s marital love ended so quickly after Lindsay killed their 3 children. Patrick has since remarried. Do you agree with Haines? #LindsayClancy#PatrickClancy
[Sorry for stooping to using TikTok, but it had the only suitable clip that WordPress would let me embed…]
“The View” is trying to get its own private dining car on the Lindsay Clancy Trial Ethics Train Wreck. First Sunny Hostin uses the issue to declare that she was the “lone juror” who got a man declared not guilty after he killed a woman and made her into a delicious soup…and it turns out that she was lying about the whole thing and wasn’t the “lone juror” after all. Now Sara Haines—how can anyone determine which of these opinionated, wokeness-infected, ignorant women is the dumbest?—expressed her shock that Lindsay Clancy’s husband (now remarried) would divorce the woman who murdered his children. After all, Haines says, don’t the marriage vows state “in sickness or in health”?
Well yes, Sarah, but at least the vows I took didn’t have a “whether one of us murders our kids or not” clause in there.
Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?” Gee, that’s a real brain-teaser. Domestic abuse activists argue that “marital love” has been abandoned once a husband punches his wife in the face, but that’s obviously bad and inexcusable. Murdering the children is more nuanced. Good question, Sara. I’ll have to think about that….
How is someone as dumb and confused as Haines on television anyway? The inconvenient truth about all journalism is that the vast majority of reporters just aren’t very bright, and certainly not as smart as they think they are. Nonetheless, we allow them to have public platforms and exposure that consistently accomplish the opposite of what our Founders believed made “the press” essential to a functioning democracy. Heck, we allow them to manipulate elections. Haines and her colleagues—not just the confederacy of dunces on “The View” but reporters and pundits generally—make the public less informed, less astute, less ethical and less responsible. Somehow this stupid woman—yes, I hold that asking why a man would divorce his wife after she murdered three children, especially their three children, is signature significance: no intelligent person even thinks that’s a puzzle, never mind announcing it on national TV—managed to be a correspondent on NBC and ABC. What does that tell us about the competence, judgment and trustworthiness of broadcast news?
Related questions:
Will anything cause ABC to recognize that calling “The View” a news program is a disgrace, and that the network metaphorically soils itself and the culture every time it gives this coven of morons gets another hour to lobotomize the public?
How do Democrats continue to get votes when siding with progressives means associating oneself with the likes of Sara, Sunny, Whoopi and Joy, never mind Bernie, Kamala, AOC, Fredo, Ayanna, Jasmine, Gavin, and Zohran?
When did American woman lose their ethical bearings?
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.
I wonder if and when enough people will wake up to the fact that when they vote for progressives, this is the kind of culture they are voting to live in. You know: hysterical, power-mad, and insane.
The footwear and apparel company Converse was attacked this week by the woke social media mob for an ad in a new sneaker campaign. It featured the bottom half of a person wearing a white garment and holding a pair of black sneakers.
The shadows that suggest the outline of a long, tapering triangle was obviously reminiscent of the pointed hood of a Klan robe, see. And the lighting makes the black sneakers look like someone is being hanged. The sneakers are black, get it? And have a single leg in two shoes, or something. The alleged lyncher was K-pop singer Karina wearing a skirt and holding a pair of Chuck 70 X sneakers, but never mind: some genius figured out this was another opportunity to hold 21st century America guilty of racism.
Naturally, Converse groveled an apology, thus ensuring more of this crap from the race-baiters and political correctness thugs. “We’re sorry,” Converse said in an emailed statement. “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong. We removed it from our channels and are working to remove it everywhere it appeared,” the statement added. “This should not have happened and we will do better.”
I wish I bought Converse merchandise so I could boycott the brand. Their craven behavior harms every American, the culture, society, commerce, kids, brains, everything. Just listen to these idiots:
“As a Black man and someone who loves Converse shoes, I find this very insensitive and distasteful,” Kendall Peacock, who runs the Education Firm, a tutoring and mentorship program in Atlanta, said on social media. “Deliberate racist intent hasn’t been established yet, but that doesn’t erase the impact,” he added.
Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney based in Texas, posted on Instagram that Converse’s apology “doesn’t undo what got past legal, marketing and leadership at every step.”
Stephanie Schwartz, a social justice photographer, wrote on social media, “Every photographer can tell you, whoever did this ad knew EXACTLY what they were doing.”
I discovered the racist sneaker ad because Holly Mathnerd wrote about it on her exotic and eccentric substack. I can’t do better than Holly’s evisceration of the latest woke obsession, and besides, she’s sharp, she’s funny, she writes well, and she deserves attention. She wrote in part,
“What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence. In recent years, California has proudly defied a national trend: On average, about 40 percent of its students are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. More than half qualify for free tuition. The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition. Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”
—-Woke book author and writer Miriam Pawel, in a gobsmacking op-ed (gift link) in the New York Times.
You might think that I am being unfair, that the quote above is obviously taken out of context. Surely, surely, such a paragraph must be preceded by a convincing set of statistics proving that indeed the University of California system has not sacrificed excellence in its quest for “access” [Translation: “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”].
Nope. There is nothing. This woman, marinated in progressive cant her whole adult life, truly believes that DEI is excellence. Not knowing how to read, add, reason or write. The diploma is the sole benefit and the sole objective. That the diploma falsely conveys the belief that its holder actually is competent, responsible, knowledgeable, skilled and accomplished doesn’t matter to Pawel. “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she writes. “The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition.”
