I heard some mocking talking heads on Fox News joking about this yesterday and it made no sense to me at all, so I ignored it. Then I found out what had provoked all of the giggling about turtles.
The state of Oregon has appointed JD Holt to an Oregon Mental Health Advisory Board. JD says her pronouns are “they/them/terrapin.” She/they/it is not kidding. So she is out of her frickin’ mind.
From Fox News: “JD Holt, who also goes by “JD Terrapin” on Facebook, is one of roughly two dozen “consumers” on the OHA’s Consumer Advisory Council (OCAC). The council, established by administrative statute, is appointed by OHA Director Dr. Sejal Hathi, who was appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek (D, of course.) The purpose of the OCAC is to advise Hathi on the state’s provision of mental health services, including through investigations and reviews of current practices.”
To be fair, that headline is supposed to be funny: it is the work of the humorous news aggregator and satire site “Fark,” which posts links to stories that can support snarky, sarcastic, vulgar or wise-ass headings. I don’t find that headline anything but obnoxious, however, especially since a large number of “Think of the children!” saps and pro-open borders activists will be shaking their heads sadly after reading it.
The linked story is by NBC News which sports the only slightly less obnoxious header, “U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer deported to Mexico with undocumented parents.”
A fair, un-biased headline would read, “Illegal immigrant couple deported, along with their children.” That’s what happened. The fact that one of those children has a medical condition is irrelevant. (That’s the girl above. I would think her blurry face problem is at least as serious as her brain tumor…). The implication that the child was the focus of the action rather than her parents is deliberately misleading (that’s deceit, by definition). And the parents aren’t “undocumented,” they were here illegally. The use of “undocumented” is always a tell: anyone who uses it it trying to glide over the illegal status of someone who has no ground to complain if they are sent back to their nation of origin.
We shall see if the ethical value of accountability is completely dead in our culture by how many people are fired by Major League Baseball in the aftermath of the Great Baseball Cap Disaster of 2025. It should be a lot.
Baseball finally figured out that the clubs could make a lot of money by constantly adding new uniforms and baseball cap options to each team. (I blame former Commissioner of Baseball Peter Ueberroth, whose entire function during his tenure was to modernize the sport’s merchandising and public relations.) I thought this hustle had reached its apotheosis with the dreadful “City Connect” uniforms that were inflicted on the teams a few years ago, creating inexplicable eyesores like this for the RED Sox…
but the sport’s greed and lack of taste knows no bounds. Fans and collectors actually bought those jerseys and caps (to be fair, some of the redesigned uniforms aren’t quite that bad), along with the “vintage” uniforms and caps, the Mother’s Day uniforms and caps, the stupid “nickname” jerseys, the boring All-Star team jerseys and caps, “turn-back-the clock” uniforms….As P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
So someone got the bright idea to foist these ugly team caps off on the public, since obviously baseball fans will buy anything:
Texas A&M students started holding “Draggieland” (“drag” mixed with “Aggieland,” get it?) at the campus theater complex in 2020. Five years later, however, the tradition was slapped down as the school’s Board of Regents voted to ban all drag events on the 11 Texas A&M campuses.The board’s resolution reads in part,
“The board finds that it is inconsistent with the system’s mission and core values of its universities, including the value of respect for others, to allow special event venues of the universities to be used for drag shows [which are] offensive [and] likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women.”
I’d guess a pre-law student with a closed head injury could correctly explain what’s wrong with that silliness, but luckily the student body at Texas A&M will have a better champion than that, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, aka FIRE. FIRE moved in to fill the breach when the ACLU decided to be woke rather than defend free speech and expression regardless of which side of the partisan divide was attacking them, and this low-hanging fruitcake edict prompted the organization to file a federal lawsuit. It backs the Queer Empowerment Council, a coalition of student organizations at Texas A&M University-College Station and the organizers of the fifth annual “Draggieland” event that was scheduled to be held on campus on March 27, and aims at blocking the policy as a clear violation of the First Amendment. Which it is. FIRE asked a court in the Southern District of Texas to halt Texas A&M officials from enforcing the ban.
Trust me, I am going to post on the head-exploding reaction of House Democrats to the necessary and just censure of Al Green two days ago. That post is coming: I’ve just been in a quandary over which movie or TV clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive to use. It’s amazing how many apply to the behavior of the once honorable party of Jackson, FDR and Carter (but not Clinton or Biden) as their behavior becomes less professional and more loony seemingly by the hour. The options are daunting. I could justify using, in addition to Dana’s scream of confusion above from “Poltergeist,”
The clip from “A Man for All Seasons” (“….but for Al Green?”)
The “Animal House” “futile and stupid gesture” speech.
“You know: Morons.”
Sidney Wang on the “stupid theory.”
“Madness! Madness!” (Bridge Over the River Kwai”)
“He chose…poorly.”
“The Naked Gun’s” “Nothing to see here!”
“Snap out of it!” and Cher’s classic slap.
George’s “Was that wrong?” (This is a strong contender…)
The “Plan 9 From Outer Space” clip (“Your stupid minds!”)
“This business will get out of control!”
Marty McFly’s “He’s an asshole!”
The “one big pile of shit” from “Jurassic Park”
That’s more than a third of the total, and I omitted a few that were on the cusp. Well, you’ll see which clip wins the prize very soon.
Meanwhile, please write about something else relating to our mission here, and save your comments for the Democratic Party’s latest disgrace for that post.
—“Hollywood in Toto” blogger Christian Toto as tonight’s much hyped “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” looms.
My sock drawer organization is in true crisis, so I had programmed my schedule to handle that task tonight long before I knew of the special. Otherwise, I would have certainly wa…oh, who am I kidding? No I wouldn’t have watched the show if my Roku was malfunctioning and the only alternatives were re-runs of “Rosanne” and “Hart to Hart.” As Toto correctly explains, the show betrayed its mission, its origins, its original fans (like me), the culture, and the tradition of political humor, satire and comedy itself.
Toto points out that “Saturday Night Live” had the power, influence and ability to be at the forefront of a counter-culture revolution. In doing so, it would have been a national unifying force, holding the excesses—and it has been almost all excesses—of the extreme progressive capture of the Democratic Party to the public ridicule and derisive finger-pointing it deserved and needed. James Carville recently ranted that “It’s like, there’s a plant somewhere in quote–progressive—unquote America, that just to seize how many jackass, stupid things that they can embrace. It’s stunningly stupid.”
A good friend who is a legal, ethics and theatrical colleague of long standing was discussing his skepticism about Elon Musk’s DOGE mission. He reminded me that in 1982, my musical political and legal satire performing group “The Music Lobby” was hired to handle the entertainment for a Washington trade association’s convention during the 1982 mid-term campaign, when Ronald Reagan was urging voters to “stay the course” as he tried to reign in spending.
The opening number I wrote was a parody of the Four Aces’ most famous hit (I love the Four Aces), “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” from the sappy William Holden-Jennifer Jones movie of the same name. My friend, who is one of the rare vocalists who can approach that group’s astounding tenor ( the great Al Alberts) in range and blast, was part of the quartet that night (as was I), and we killed.
He told me today that it wouldn’t take much to update my lyrics to the present day. It didn’t. So here is the 2025 version of “Love is a Cut in Spending Thing.” Play the video above and sing along. And repeat…
Love is a cut in spending thing! The elusive rose that voters chose Donald Trump to bring…
It’s the engine of destruction Of waste, fraud and corruption To give back the economy its zing!
Fighting with passion, guts and will, There is Elon Musk, from dawn to dusk Finding scams to kill…
Once those wasted billions stabbed my heart, But now it wants to sing! For true love’s a cut in spending thing!
A social media jokester used AI to create the “painting” on the left, and implied on “X” that it was an eerie premonition of the Trump administration, writing “This 1721 painting by Deitz Nuützen predicted the Trump-Elon-RFK McDonalds dinner.”
How dumb and gullible would someone have to be not to instantly realize that this was a gag? If the whole thing weren’t enough, there’s the name of the artist, “Deitz Nuützen,” as in “Deez Nutz,” web slang for testicles. Never mind, though. The Axis media is so wary of anything that might enhance the image of Trump and his team that even an obvious silly joke had to be factchecked.
I hate to throw an ethics flag on Musk while he’s doing such essential work and being attacked for it. Still, this kind of stuff doesn’t help. At all.
Yeah, I know, I know. Musk is one the autistic spectrum and in some respects is a bout 10 years old, and like Donald Trump, he enjoys trolling and doesn’t care who he alienates. Conservative pundits and wags were crowing about CNN’s Dana Bash saying solemnly on the air, “”Now the ‘Disruptor in Chief, Elon Musk, who apparently has adopted the alias, at least he changed his social media handle, to ‘Harry Bōlz’, tweeted this morning, ‘Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. An activist judge is not a real judge.”
Indeed this thrust us into Poe’s Law hell, where it is impossible to distinguish reality from satire. Musk was mocking the breathless doxxing of one of his fuzzy-cheeked geeks as “Big Balls” by the Axis media, and I’m sure he got a good laugh out of it; I’m sure Trump did too. Nonetheless, what he is doing with DOGE is too important to be vulnerable to the accusation that the man in charge is just fooling around, having fun, and not taking seriously decisions that effect the lives and livelihood of so many people.
It is easy to make the news media look foolish because they are foolish. Still, Elon Musk (and the President, but he’s beyond reforming) can’t afford to go after this low-hanging fruit and behave like Bart Simpson tricking Moe into calling out in his bar, “I.P. Freely ! I.P. Freely on the phone here! ” He must be seen as the serious analyst that he is if the DOGE effort is to have any chance of succeeding.
Here’s now sinister this ad is: I must have watched it six or seven times before I thought, “Hey…wait a minute!”
The male “bad date” in the ad is so disgusting a viewer is half-hoping the woman pulls out a .44 and shoots him right between the eyes. This is masterful manipulation at work…he begins with an insult framed as blame causing him disappointment: “You’re too short.” Asshole. Then he reveals his narcicissm and boastfulness, showing the selfie “by the dumbbells.” Giant asshole! Next the air-drumming comment…UNBELIEVABLE asshole! When he gets to the bit about forgetting his wallet and “Sugarmamma,” the viewer is seeing red, and feeling that the victim of this toxic creep is being noble by just sneaking out rather than setting him on fire.
But she isn’t. She’s being an asshole too, just a slightly better one. Leaving the table on false pretenses to escape is cowardly and indefensible. Moreover, someone who misbehaves as outrageously as the “bad date” needs to be told just clearly how unacceptable his conduct is and why, since he obviously doesn’t know. His next victim will at least partially be the runaway date’s fault.
The commercial also showed an anti-female bias by making the bad date a male and his victim female. A genders switched version would inspire at least a substantial reaction from viewers of “What a weenie! The jerk doesn’t have the guts to confront that jerk!” But teh woman in the ad is also a weenie—it’s just that the Hyundai marketers are calculating that running away from confrontations and unpleasant situations is a girl thing, and socially acceptable.
No, it really isn’t. This is not only a stereotype, it’s a damaging one. Why haven’t we elected a female President yet? Accumulated cultural poison like this commercial is one of the reasons.
Incidentally, I hope that actor who plays the asshole was well paid for his performance, because he may end up dying single and alone as a result.
Ethics Alarms 