This is the weirdest Veterans Day since the Vietnam era, and maybe ever. A major political party has just taken over Congress while decrying the use of military personnel for security and the national interest. Indeed, strong constituencies on both sides of the political divide are embracing the well-disproved notion that wars must never be fought at all.
A similar mindset immeasurably aided the rise of Hitler after the horrors of The Great War. It led the U.S. into abandoning South Vietnam before the mission was accomplished, and failing to complete the objectives in both Iraq wars and Afghanistan. That irrational and ahistorical position threatens to let Iran continue as the regional terrorism machine it has been for decades and the existential threat it aspires to be against Israel and the United States. It is why the nation foolishly no longer requires a period of military service for its citizens, and why recruitment has become increasingly difficult for our Armed Serviced.
The day before this Veterans Day, a lame duck Republican Congressman who has opposed the elected President of the United States from the beginning filed a contrived impeachment resolution against the Secretary of War for following the chain of command and doing his job. (More on this unethical debacle later today, I hope.) It appears that Democrats, progressives and the Trump Deranged will greet veterans today with, “Thank you for your service, you foolish tools of war criminals!”
Nice. I know I’m being repetitious, but these are the people most voters endorsed last week because hamburger is too expensive. (cont.)
The New York Times has a provocative article (the issue isn’t political—yet, but just wait a few minutes) about how giant silly roadside attractions like the Paul Bunyan featured prominently in “Fargo” or Tyra the Tyrannosaurus (above), an 86 feet tall T-Rex that looms over Drumheller in Alberta, Canada are increasingly expensive to maintain. I was surprised how many of these frivolous things there are: an estimated 10,000 of them worldwide, mostly in the United States, Canada and Australia. The bulk of the U.S.’s roadside novelties sprung up in the mid-20th century as Ike’s interstate highway system took hold, more people bought cars, and family road trips became a summer vacation staple.
But now the aging structures are facing extinction. Lucy the Elephant (above) in Margate City, N.J. (I’ve visited Lucy!) was built in 1881 and has been designated historic, so a recent makeover that cost $2.4 million was deemed appropriate. But Tyra is coming down in 2029. The world’s largest hockey stick in Duncan, British Columbia, was dismantled in 2024 after 36 years after the community decided there were more practical uses for the $1.5 million it would cost to replace the crumbling wooden structure.
I loved crazy silly things growing up; heck, I still do because I’ve never grown up. Then they were just awe-inspiring and fun; now they are cultural touch-points and a source of whimsy as well as reminders of more innocent and emotionally healthy times.
The recent advances of the far left in the U.S. have some hidden tendrils. Socialist and Communist countries don’t have giant beavers, squirrels, the world’s largest cowboy boots, Vikings, or the likes of Willie the Walleye. Too frivolous. Think of all the hungry children who could be fed, all the homeless who could be clothed…and so on…with the money it costs for construction and maintenance. There’s no practical argument against that position, except that the spirit of a nation is important too, just impossible to quantify. Whimsy, imagination, the pure joy of a child seeing something memorable—these have value too, don’t they?
Nonetheless, I can’t foresee whimsy surviving in a nation that believes in income distribution and clinically obese government. The issue raised by the Times is political, and nostalgia is considered inherently racist and reactionary by our rising (and indoctrinated) generations.
[For the pop culture history challenged, that was the title card for Johnny Carson’s first TV show, a sort-of quiz show that was really just a set-up for Johnny to ad lib and be clever. If you don’t know who Johnny Carson was, shame on you.]
Nancie Givens, former executive director of the Arkansas Office of Professional Programs, was arrested and charged with 65 felony counts of tampering with public records. An investigation “uncovered extensive irregularities involving Arkansas Bar Examination scores spanning from July 2020 through July 2025.” Prosecutor Will Jones said in a release,
“As Prosecuting Attorney, I recognize the responsibility Ms. Givens was entrusted with to safeguard the accuracy of bar examination results and preserve the records supporting them,” Jones said in the release. “The charges concern how she handled those specific duties, including the alteration of exam results and the destruction of supporting records.”
The investigation is ongoing. It isn’t clear how or why Givens altered those bar exam results. Here she is…
(Yikes)
You can read the details as we have them so far here. My rule is never to trust anyone who spells “Nancy” as “Nancie,” but that’s just me.
At just 14 years old, Jorgia Walls showed what determination looks like. After all seven of her teammates quit, she took the mat as a one-girl cheer squad and went on to take 1st place. pic.twitter.com/M6aLZJy7ni
— CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews) November 5, 2026
This is an “Awww!” story that rings some ethics alarms. Heartwarming but stupid. Kindness and courage marred by toxic empathy and a rejection of merit for “feelz.” I’m interested in where you come out on the The Sentimental Cheer-Off Affair.
14-year-old Jorgia Walls from Lawrenceville, Georgia, an eighth-grader, found herself the only remaining member of her cheerleading team for the Peachtree Ridge Youth Athletic Association. It was an eight-girl squad in early summer but had dwindled to just Jorgia by September. Ethics Alarm #1: That’s a teeny bit suspicious, don’t you think? It sounds like mutant of two Kirsten Dunst movies, “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and “Bring It On.” The AOL story casually says the strange exodus resulted from “the summer heat in Georgia” and “family factors.” Seven cheerleaders quitting the same squad? What a coinkydink…
Walls refused the options of joining the seventh-grade team or quitting the eighth grade squad herself, but instead decided (with the complicity of the cheerleading squad’s coach) to keep cheering on the eighth-grade football team all by herself. THIS reminds me of a memorable Monty Python segment where space aliens (who look like giant puddings) turn all of Earth’s tennis players into non-playing Scotsmen so the aliens can win Wimbledon. The sole un-transformed human tennis pro has to play himself by running around to both sides of the net. A single cheerleader is almost as silly but not as funny. (cont.)
Where’s that woodchipper? I’m thinking about sending a copy of “The New Face of Child Labor?” in The Harvard Gazette to child actor advocate Paul Petersen, but I’m afraid the essay will send him to a woodchipper too.
Leah Plunkett, the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, is the author of the book “Sharenthood” (What a cute title! Yecchh!) warning of the risks of parents sharing their children’s lives online. She’s also the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Child Digital Entertainers Act drafting committee. Hillary Robinson, an associate professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University School of Law, is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation research project on the digital platform economy. Both have suddenly had a “Eureka!” moment and want to let the world know that putting one’s kids’ images and activities online for all to see forever might not be responsible parenting.
Ya think? Ethics Alarms has been beating that particular metaphorical drum repeatedly over more than a decade.* A recent post (2024) on the topic is here. This is the Harvard Gazette today (in part) reporting on this sudden discovery as if the perpetual motion machine had finally been invented, beginning like this:
“A mother posts her toddler’s first steps on Instagram. Children gather around the kitchen counter to help their father make sourdough bread in a YouTube video. On TikTok, a young gymnast performs a backflip atop a balance beam. These intimate snapshots of family life may look spontaneous and wholesome, but they are also often the raw material of a $30 billion (or more) influencer industry — one in which children’s lives are packaged, promoted, and monetized, often by their own parents. When does sharing family life online become child labor — and what protections do children have when it does?”
My answers of long-standing: 1) Immediately, and 2) Ethics literacy, if the parents have any, and most don’t.
But those aren’t the two experts’ answers. They muse “whether a child being paid to play with a toy on camera should be regulated like manual labor in a factory,” pose “the alarming parallels between influencer culture and the adult entertainment industry,” and ponder “the real-world harms that can result when images and video of children are posted online — either by themselves or by adults.” Then—and here’s the path progressives follow as surely as night follows day, the two professors wonder “what what policymakers can do today to better protect kids.” They ask, “Does the platform economy upend one of contract law’s most basic assumptions? Traditionally, mutual assent precedes production. Online, however, people may create the product, generate its value, and expose themselves to its risks long before any contract — or meaningful consent — exists.”
Ugh. I answered those questions 16 years ago when PBS was peddling the child exploitation and abuse “reality show” “Kate and Jon plus 8.” That show’s EA dossier is here. The current social media abuse of children is the same social contagion, just on a different platform and a far more widespread infection. I was substantially guided in my posts by the genuine expert on the subject of show biz child labor exploitation Paul Petersen, my friend who was a famous child star himself.
The degree to which progressive and Democrat hysterics have decided that Hollywood sex symbol Sydney Sweeney is evil.,.EVIL! has truly exposed the festering insanity of the Left. Now the comely and curvy actress, who has nothing to fear at this stage of her career, can happily troll these fools while making the whole liberal end of the ideological spectrum reveal how completely its occupants will reverse its stereotypical endorsement of all things sexual if it can be weaponized against the Right.
Sweeney’s unforgivable crime is that she is suspected of being conservative, or something, as a result of her cheeky “good jeans/genes” ad. You know, white supremacy. Only a black bombshell is allowed to make such a commercial or play on words. Sydney refused to apologize, then had the audacity to make a sexually provocative sports commercial that was no more offensive that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues have been since the Sixties.
Now the Political Correctness Furies have descended on Sydney with their talons out again. What did she do this time? In the latest video for her SYRN lingerie line, she was costumed as a character from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (above).
Quick, now: who is that supposed to be?
Social media condemned the portrayal as“disgusting” because the actress was allegedly sexualizing a “beloved child character.” “Is she actually turning Cindy Lou, the [purest] sweetest child into a sex symbol!?!? Fire that creative director and get a brain Sydney Sweeney,” one person wrote. Another asked, “Why is she posing as child characters in a lingerie ad?”
Let me clarify some things that reveal how strained this outrage is…
There are some manifestations of “The Great Stupid” that, sorry not sorry, I refuse to concede even a millimicron of tolerance for. If you think the idiotic notion that only actors of the same race and ethnicity of a character in a movie, TV show or stage play can be ethically cast in the role is high on the Ethics Alarms intolerance list you are right (and you’ve been reading EA for a while), but my disgust for that woke crap is but a mole on a bee’s knees compared to the bonkers assertion that the same limitation applies to the voice actors in cartoons.
Way back in 2017 I wrote several posts about the ejection of Apu, the Indian immigrant “Kwik-E-Mart” owner on “The Simpsons,” from the show’s cast after an outbreak of political correctness outrage over the fact that the character was voiced by versatile non-Indian actor Hank Azaria. Azaria used a comic exaggeration of a stereotype Indian accent.
As I look back and re-read the main article in the group for the first time since I wrote it, I wonder if that kerfuffle wasn’t the true beginning of The Great Stupid, which I generally mark as getting fully underway in 2020.
I’m re-posting the whole piece below (fixed some typos!) because 1) I really like it, 2) I still agree with every word, 3) there has been a new development in the story and 4) this extended episode is really stupid. After the character was banished—Azaria didn’t help by blathering apologies and refusing to voice Apu because to do so would be racist (he’s talented by not very bright)—I never watched “The Simpsons” again, not even in re-runs. As I wrote in “The Problem With Apu?,”
I would love to know why Indian-Americans feel all the other characters in the show can be outrageous stereotypes and extreme caricatures, but Apu is unacceptably offensive and insensitive. This is contrived victimization. One cannot reasonable compare the Indians feasting on bugs and chilled monkey brains in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to Apu because 1) Apu is entirely benign: he is one of the smartest, sanest and nicest characters in “The Simpsons,” and 2) he’s a cartoon. Cartoons are always exaggerated, and if they are not, they aren’t funny. They also aren’t cartoons.
The dilemma this kind of victimization gotcha! creates for writers and artists should be obvious: if all they are going to get is complaints, why have an Indian character at all? Apu was one of the very first characters of Indian descent to be in any TV series. “The Simpsons” deserves credit, not blame. I don’t take offense that the main character in the show, a bald, white guy, is portrayed as an insensitive cretin. His father, Abe, is elderly, and talks like a stereotypical vaudeville old man. His stories wander; he falls asleep mid-sentence. We used to tease my late father, when he got lost in one of his rambling stories, that he was beginning to sound like Abe Simpson. He got it. Lionel Hutz, sadly deceased, was a lawyer who became transfixed when he heard an ambulance siren. Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel is as cruel a caricature of a poor rural hick as one will ever see. (But funny!) Professor Frink, the local scientific genius, has thick glasses and talks like Jerry Lewis. Ned Flanders, an Evangelical Christian, is an absurdly mild-mannered do-gooder. Officer Wiggum, the Chief of Police, is always eating donuts. Mr. Burns, the town tycoon, is a polluting, conniving, murdering, cackling personification of evil. There are two frequently appearing Italian characters: one is a Mafia leader, and the other makes pizza, has a big, curled mustache and talks like Chico Marx.
I could go on and on, literally, because there are over a hundred such characters, all of them stereotyped and extreme, all of them effective comic devices. I wish there was a Greek-American character on “The Simpsons.” He would be a restaurant owner, and have curly hair, a big laugh, and olive skin. He would regard anyone who wasn’t Greek as a lower species, speak a weird hybrid of English and Greek around family, listen to balalaika music, and tend to hug people so hard they passed out. My relatives would see the humor in the exaggerations, and I would not issue a screed titled “The Problem with Stavros”…
The New York Times announced that Sunil Malhotra, an actor of “South Asian descent,” will now perform Apu in a non-funny accent. Apu returns in this year’s Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Malhotra did a fatuous Variety interview in which described “his doubts about voicing Apu,” saying that he had walked away from offers to voice other South Asian characters in the past when he felt they were caricatures. Uh, Sunil? Apu is still a cartoon. Cartoons are caricatures by definition. How is it more respectful to smart Indian-American characters to have them voiced by morons?
“It had been eight years since Apu had spoken on the show, and it got me thinking: Did the writers’ room look different now?” Malhotra said to Variety. “Could they bring him back in a way that acknowledged and apologized for past mistakes? Could I make the character my own, and reclaim him in some way?”
Ugh. As Rhett tells Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The wild—and increasingly weaponized—hypocrisy among alleged feminists is not to be borne, and I’m happy to flag it as the unethical—but woke!—cultural poison that it is.
Perpetually unfunny comic Shane Gillis was back for the third (or is it fourth?) time as a host of the now totally ideologically-captured Saturday Night Live last week. During his rambling monologue to begin the show, Gillis said, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe it.” Gillis then went on to describe the ubiquitous tight short-shorts that dominate young women’s attire at the gym as featuring “wrinkles [that] go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole,” adding, “You’re not allowed to look… because they are filming. I’m in the background of about 10 TikToks right now.”
The Hollywood Left’s explosion of fury, which sure sounds like mandatory feminist outrage from beta males to me, focuses on Gillis’s use of the word “whores”—I even saw it censored on Axis news sources as “wh*res.” Not to go back into the misty past, but as I will always remind readers here, Bill Maher called conservative women like Sarah Palin and others “cunts” and “twats” on his HBO show with nary a peep from feminists. Today, over a decade later, the same people who laughed at Bill’s hilarious misogyny want to cancel Gillis. Here’s Forbes virtue-signaling to the mob:
Devoted fans of the long-time TV game show “Wheel of Fortune “—“You know, morons!”— are enraged, as least based on the uproar on social media, because the puzzle board above foiled a competitor in the “bonus round,” costing him a car.
David Shepard of Atlanta, Georgia, was the unfortunate contestant. The pop culture media seems to think it’s relevant that he’s a cancer survivor. It isn’t. If the puzzle was unfair, then it was just as unfair whether he was cancer survivor, Sydney Sweeney, a convicted felon or Eric Swalwell. The amplified fury is another example of “toxic empathy,” as well as ethics ignorance.
But back to the issue at hand:
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is that puzzle unfair?
I can’t tell you the answer, because if you know it on your own, it will probably influence your answer to the quiz. According to TV Insider, fans of the show are screaming that “nobody uses that word” and that it was part of a conspiracy to avoid giving away a $50,000 Audi. I didn’t solve the puzzle in the time allowed ( I tried before my coffee) but I certainly know the word. “Have you ever heard that phrase? Let us know in the comments,” asks TV Insider.
Take me now, Lord.
And it’s a word, not a “phrase.”
On the side of the protesters as much as I can stand to be, that puzzle reminds me of the gag in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” where the mystical keeper of “The Bridge of Death” asks three easy questions of one of King Arthur’s Knights (“What is your name? What is your quest? What’s your favorite color?”) then replaces the color question with “What is the capital of Assyria?” for Sir Robin (who is magically flung into the gorge) and “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” for King Arthur.
Nonetheless, it is a real word, and the show never promised that its puzzles could all be solved by people who never progressed beyond Junior Scrabble…
Post Script:According to the AI bot I just asked, the average airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow is about 24 miles per hour, or 11 meters per second. Of course, that answer could be completely made up, and I don’t care enough to check.
Sweeney, the shapely and bold young actress who already angered the Left with her jeans/genes ad that supposedly dog whistled white supremacy, is now getting attacked by the Mad Left for the video above. She’s objectifying female athletes, you see. Or something. Because women athletes have never used sexual attractiveness to promote themselves and their sports…
Hey, how did pro-golfer Paige Spiranac get in there? Away with you, Devil Woman!
