California lawyers in Marin County will soon be required to take a civility pledge as part of their annual renewal oath. The pledge, approved by the State Bar’s Board of Trustees, applies to all 286,000 licensed attorneys and will become mandatory on April 1.
Incredibly, California lawyers, a significant number of them, are objecting. The pledge is “vague,” they say, and could violate First Amendment rights. They also claim that it’s unfiar to change the entrenched courtroom habits of veteran lawyers; in other words, “How dare the bar hinder lawyers who have been successful being assholes?”
The frightening pledge reads simply, “As an officer of the court, I will strive to conduct myself at all times with dignity, courtesy and integrity.”
“The correct ask in this report is not the ask of an institution being condemned. It is the ask of an institution being held to its own standard by people who still believe it can meet it.”
That authentic frontier gibberish—I’m still not sure what it means, and I’ve read it a dozen times—is in “A Narrowing Gate, Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and its Peers | 1967-2025,” a report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance. The report found that that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has dropped to about 7% in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data.
I was going to write about the report itself, but if Jewish alumni of Harvard end up writing like that, maybe its a good thing not as many Jewish students are attending Harvard.
This is the Executive Summary. The report seems to be implying that anti-Semitism at Harvard has to be the reason for the unexplained drop, because none of the other possible factors it identifies explain it. Apparently Jewish applications to the school haven’t fallen off sufficiently to cause a 50% reduction, though I don’t know why. On national television Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee that she considered anti-Jewish demonstrations in Harvard Yard to be acceptable free speech, and was unable to articulate a basic truth, which is that anti-Semitic demonstrations on a college campus constitute unethical and intolerable conduct that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. Gay’s eventually firing for scholarly misconduct (not mealy-mouthed acceptance of campus enmity toward a minority) could not have provided aspiring Jewish applicants much confidence.
We also learn from the report that Jewish alumni had to gather the data for the report because Harvard no longer compiles data on Jewish students.
All of that is interesting, but when I read that statement, I lost interest in examining the report further, and lost any confidence in the people who prepared it. Maybe it’s a hangover from listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for four years and Donald Trump for a decade, but if someone can’t communicate clearly, I can’t have confidence that they are thinking clearly either.
Ugh. I won’t call it an ethics train wreck, because this is really another subset of the nation’s victim-mongering/tribal/white male vilification problem as well as the already running “DEI Ethics Train Wreck” and the “Trans Activism Ethics Train Wreck.”
Of course we have to have a Women’s History Museum. There are four historically “marginalized” groups, and women are the largest and longest suffering of them all. D.C. already has huge museum dedicated to African Americans, and there is a Smithsonian museum called the National Museum of the American Indian. Women have every right to feel snubbed in the current obsession with group identification. You know an LGBTQ+ museum on the Mall will be next: how could it not be?
Conservatives who argue, as one did in the comments to a recent online item about the museum, “[The museum] continues to foment the balkanization of America. The accomplishments of women are just that: accomplishments. Their fruits are enjoyed by all, not just by those of the gender/race/religion, etc of the person who made the accomplishment” are trying to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped and won the Kentucky Derby. This is “National Women’s Month.” The Democrats had a national convention celebrating “The Year of the Woman” (with Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker, but never mind…). Half of the arguments for voting for Hillary and Kamala was their lady-parts. We’re stuck with U.S. women seeing themselves as a special, separate, aggrieved and superior group for the foreseeable future, probably forever.
But there is a problem: the party that at least pretends to be the “party of women” can’t figure out what a woman is. This week House Democrats blocked legislation to establish the “Women’s History Museum” because of an amendment attached by Republicans stating, “The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States.”
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has authored a new book on a hot topic, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI. Breitbart is one the Ethics Alarms blacklist, thanks to multiple misleading and biased articles, a few of which led me into wrongly sourced posts. However, on the principle that the messenger should not automatically cause one to disregard the message, I was intrigued by the book’s claim that AI programs alleging that they are politically neutral are actually biased heavily against conservatives.
From a confirmation bias perspective, I would be shocked—not “shocked—shocked!” but genuinely shocked— if that were not the case, since AIs are informed by mass media and the output of other heavily biased institutions, including Big Tech members of the Axis of Unethical Conduct like Google and Meta. “Code Red” states that Hall, using Google Gemini Pro’s “deep research” setting, asked, “Based on your hate speech policies, assess the statements of the current 100 U.S. Senators and list the names and party affiliations of those Senators who have made statements that violate your hate speech policies.”
I hearby withdraw my sympathy for Megyn Kelly when Trump, after she ambushed him in the first GOP candidates debate in 2015 by calling him a misogynist, implied that she was addled because she was having her period. That was vulgar and literally below the belt, but Megyn just burrowed under Trump by calling pundit Mark Levin, a smarter, more credentialed lawyer than Kelly, a “micropenis.”
Nice.
Kelly’s excuse was that Levin has savaged her for her obnoxious, ignorant, borderline anti-Semitic claim that the U.S. is fighting for Jews rather than Americans by attacking Iran. “He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible,” Kelly tweeted. “Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.” Kelly went to law school and that is the best she can do in a policy debate? “Oh yeah? Well you have a little dick!”
To her probable horror, Megyn was quickly defended by certifiable Dunning-Krueger victim and vulgarian Margery Taylor Greene, who wrote, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult, and I don’t care if it’s vulgar,” Greene wrote in her own post on X. “And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”
I stopped listening to Levin because of his habit of using sophomoric insults and name-calling to appeal to his lower IQ listeners (How many times can anyone find “New York Slimes” funny?), but his expressed contempt for Greene has been, if anything, understated.
After getting support from the likes of Greene, Megyn must be looking back on her life to assess where she took the wrong turn that brought her to such a desperate state.
“The other piece of this that I found really disturbing in the messaging around the war recently…is some of the language in the description of their opponent. “Sort of the way they seem to create this image of the Iranians and all of their sort of proxies or allies, the sort of imagery that they conjure up,. And I think that it takes a certain amount of arrogance and I’m also going to say it, a bit of racism, to constantly talk about people like they are savages. That is a word that we have heard Hegseth use.”
—MSNOW hostess Antonia Hylton, during Saturday’s broadcast of “The Weekend: Primetime.”
Apparently all you have to do to justify being made a co-host of a show on MSNOW is to demonstrate enmity to one’s own country’s leaders and support for its enemies. Oh, before I forget, “enemy” is the proper term for a nation your country is currently at war with, not “opponent.”
Furthermore, calling Iran’s leaders “savages” is not racism but a fair and accurate diagnosis. Savage as a noun means one who is vicious and uncivilized. Iran is currently a brutal, murderous and ruthless regime that murdered many thousands of its own citizens for daring to protest their harsh treatment from their government. Since the Islamic takeover in 1979, 258 Americans were killed in a suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and a truck bombing in the same city in 1983. The Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah killed 19 U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia at the Khobar Towers in 1996. It is estimated that Iranian proxies have killed nearly 700 Americans between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 50 Americans were killed by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists during the attack on Israel that took place October 7, 2023, and that attack was as savage as one could be even if one ignores American casualties and only focuses on the Israeli civilians killed, raped and taken as hostages
I would put up “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands” again (from the excellent musical “Li’l Abner,” which probably will never be produced anywhere ever again), but even I’m getting sick of it, it’s been appropriate so often lately. Thus this time I’m only posting images of the two latest examples of what terrible role models and representatives we have in Congress, Rep. Omar and Rep. Mace.
After President Donald Trump announced the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei following U.S.-Israeli strikes on the country, Mace posted a Fox News graphic of Khamenei with the legend, “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei Confirmed Dead.” She added “My heart goes out to Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib tonight. Sending them thoughts and prayers.”
Omar, whose instincts for dignified comportment were on vivid display last week at the State of the Union affair, responded, “I hope you aren’t drunk and took your staff’s advice. Rashida and I don’t know this man and feel confident he didn’t care about us. Please restrain from drinking too much as you have been warned from your staff and stay off social media when you are drunk. I pray in his holy month you find peace and respect for your self.”
Mace, who denies accusations that she has a drinking problem, tweeted back, “So tell me, what was it like being married to your brother?” Later Mace wrote, “Ilhan Omar didn’t care that over 1,000 Jews were slaughtered on a Jewish holiday. Maybe sit this one out terrorist lover.”
To her credit, Omar did not respond, “OK, Nazi bitch! You want a piece of me? Bring it on! After I whip your flabby ass, you’ll be the one wearing a burka!”
For some reason, a grocery store sale led me to purchase an absurd number of Ritz cracker boxes in late 2023. Those crackers lasted until just a few weeks ago, so I only had to buy another box last week. I knew immediately that the new box was smaller and lighter than the ones I had been staring at for over two years.
Sure enough, Nabisco replaced cracker packs with smaller packs in 2024 resulting in about 30% fewer crackers by weight while keeping the same price. But that’s not what most annoyed me. The crackers themselves are noticeably smaller, and also thinner. I’ve been eating Ritz crackers, the favored crackers in the Marshall family, most of my life. I knew their size like I know my nose. I can’t find a good photo that demonstrates the difference, but it is dramatic.
That means, of course, that the “ORIGINAL” label on the front of the box is a lie, and false advertising. The weight is on the box as required, and if an alert consumer is paying attention, he or she knows that the price is the same for fewer crackers. But there is no way the smaller Ritz can accurately be called the “original” version.
Who knows what other hidden surprises will be in store for cracker aficionados in the years ahead?
Stratton is seeking retiring Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) seat, with the state’s primary taking place on March 7. This is impressive in one respect: she is actually giving voters a chance to replace the objectively awful Durbin with someone even worse. the At least Polling averages from Decision Desk HQ show Stratton trailing behind Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) with 18.5 percent compared to Krishnamoorthi’s 30.5 percent. So I guess Stratton decided that the best way to make up ground is to energize the Trump Deranged vote and say “fuck.”
Right on cue, later last week there was another foiled assassination attempt on the President whom Democrats call racist, a dictator, Hitler and a fascist, all provocation for the weak of mind and ethics to view as justification to murder our nation’s leader. As a Fox News history-reading reporter noted, they want Donald Trump assassinated just like Benjamin Harrison.
Since anyone likely to be persuaded—or even entertained—by this bottom of the unflushed toilet bowl political offal, it’s unlikely that any of them will be bothered by the candidate lying to their faces in the ad, smirkingly saying. “They said it, I didn’t!” That’s deceit, and deceit is lying. This miserable excuse for a public servant is openly lying in her campaign ad, and thinks it’s funny.
I’m so old I remember when the Democratic Party and its zombie media accused Sarah Palin of causing Rep. Giffords to be shot because Palin put her face in cross-hairs on a campaign map to indicate that the Arizona Democrat could be defeated. In addition to their other anti-virtues, Democrats are hypocrites on a level previously unapproached by mortal man or woman. As in 2024, they deserve to lose in the mid-terms, and if Republicans can’t accomplish that against such a vile, destructive, divisive and ugly party, they should just give up and start pottery barns or something. Maryland. Oregon. California. Minnesota. Illinois.
I finally watched the critically praised Netflex series “Death By Lightning” last night. Friends, knowing my obsession with Presidential history, had urged me to watch it. I had hesitated because I dreaded exactly what I witnessed last night. The limited series, based on Candice Millard’s best-selling history “Destiny of the Republic,” managed to both make me angry and break my heart.
Putting on my director’s hat and my film critic hat (kind of like Chester A. Arthur in the series wearing three hats on top of another during a drunken spree—one of many made-up scenes that completely misrepresented our 21st President), I’ll grant that the series was entertaining—especially so if one knows nothing about the events it alleges to portray—and well-acted by a strong cast. I also give it credit for portraying relatively accurately one of my favorite moments in U.S. political history. James Garfield, a brilliant but obscure Ohio Representative, was asked to deliver the Presidential nomination speech for fellow Ohioan Senator John Sherman, General Sherman’s brother, at the 1880 GOP National Convention. Garfield’s speech was so passionate, eloquent and inspiring that when he concluded, “therefore, I nominate the next President of the United States…” a couple of delegates shouted out, “Garfield!” before he could get out “John Sherman of Ohio!” Garfield was stunned, and as the convention descended into a deadlock, objected strenuously while over 35 ballots, rogue delegates began consolidating their support behind him until finally, on the 36th ballot, he was nominated against his will.
That does not, however, make up for the series’ worst omission and distortion of history.
I have posted several times here the remarkable, uplifting, ethically-enlightening story of Julia Sand, most recently on this past Presidents Day. She was the crippled spinster who wrote private letters to Vice-President Chester A. Arthur, then hiding in seclusion as President Garfield was being butchered by his doctors after being shot by lunatic Charles Guiteau. Her letters told Arthur that he could not only do the looming job he felt unfit for, but also that he had the inner resources to do it well.
She told the terrified political hack that he could muster the courage and character to do what so many other great figures in history have done when fate thrust them into a position where they were challenged to rise above their previous conduct and priorities. Arthur did in fact meet that challenge when President Garfield died, earning recognition as the “accidental” President who most surpassed public expectations.
I love the story, and I regard Julia Sand as the perfect example of how seemingly powerless, ordinary people can make a difference in our society, government and culture. Maybe she is the best example. Few could be more irrelevant to national affairs in the 1880s than an unmarried, middle-aged woman confined to a wheelchair. Yet Julia Sand probably changed history with her wit, commons sense, writing ability, wisdom and audacity. As an ethicist, I saw the story of Sand and Arthur, which I had never had encountered even in Arthur’s biography, the most important event related in “Destiny of the Republic.”
Yet “Death by Lightning” not only cut Julia out of the story, it gave her words to the dying Garfield and his wife, neither of whom spoke to Chester A. Arthur after Garfield was shot. I can only describe the snub as cruel. Here, at last, was the opportunity to let the public know about the amazing Julia Sand, and instead “Death by Lightning” uses her story to enhance the character of Garfield’s wife, Lucretia.
Lucretia was one of our most literate and influential First Ladies and deserves attention, but not at the cost of erasing Julia Sand.
Ethics Alarms 