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.)
Wait, isn’t that Kristi Noem? No, too young; it has to be Pam Bondi, right? No? It can’t be Kimberly Guilfoyle, she’s a brunette. I’ve got it: that’s Katie Zacharia! No?
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of this pattern. The Biden administration may have put a lot of incompetent, unqualified women in various positions based on DEI bias, but hiring women because somebody thinks they are hot and have sexy hair is just as unethical, and arguably even worse.
“MAGA Barbie” is a derisive moniker these days used to describe Indiana Fever WNBA guard Sophie Cunningham, but she’s actually very good at her job (playing women’s pro basketball) as well as her avocation (calling out the racist, anti-white lesbian thugs in her league and reminding the public that biological males have no right to play women’s sports). I think it would be wise to apply expand the employment of the term to professional bimbos like former ESPN reporter and Fox News personality Britt McHenry, who was just fired as a US State Department press adviser.
How hard is it to behave in a dignified, professional fashion when you know you represent the United States and also know that everyone has a camera at the ready to record your behavior in public? Too hard, I guess, for people like McHenry—you know, morons.
McHenry, 40, was hired as the Trump State Department press adviser covering Europe and Africa. Despite the fact that she also was responsible for handling press for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s text message scandal (Heluva job, there, Britt!), she was promoted three days ago to a new job managing External Affairs & Press for Under Secretary Jacob Helberg’s team. Then she did this, according to the New York Post:
It’s one of the oldest and most valid of all ethics warnings. “Don’t make promises you can’t be sure that you can keep.”
In 2015, apparently seeking fast cash, the Milwaukee Brewers , now the 2026 National League Champions, offered a promotion that sold fans a “Timeless Ticket” for $1,000. It would guarantee the purchaser not only admission to any future game,”but the best available seat locations, subject to ticket availability at the time of redemption.” A Timeless Ticket also allowed the holder to buy three additional tickets to the selected game at full retail price.
Well now the Brewers are in the World Series, and it’s time to fulfill that commitment. Many of the “Timeless Ticket” buyers have been waiting to use it for a Brewers World Series if and when one occurred.
TT holder Danny Fochesato is ticked off, and he isn’t alone. He told the Associated Press, “They really touted, ‘Hey, this is going to be the best available seats. You’re getting the priority just behind season ticket holders. Anything the season ticket holders don’t have, you’ll have dibs at it for the World Series.’ That’s kind of the story they sold.” But he was given a choice between nosebleed seats or standing room as his only options for the World Series, and he could not select the specific game he wanted to attend. That wasn’t the deal.
“We subsequently erred in our internal communications on the logistics of fulfilling the requests,” Brewers president of business operations Rick Schlesinger tried to explain. “While we were able to accommodate all with seats, we received feedback from some that they were unhappy with their seat locations. Clearly, even with extraordinary limitations on available seats, we did not live up to the spirit of the program, and we have been working through a resolution.”
No, you didn’t live up to the letter of the program. This was a bait-and-switch.
To attempt to make amends, now the Brewers will allow any fans who accepted the subpar seats through the Timeless Ticket program to keep those seats for the World Series and still use their “Timeless Tickets” for redemption for another game in any future season.
“We regret our mistake and look forward to welcoming them to American Family Field for their World Series experience,” Schlesinger said. Their crummy World Series experience that they paid $1000 bucks for based on the team’s promises.
Not good enough.
The last time the Brewers were in Series was 1982, 44 years ago. The next time the team will be in the Fall Classic may be even a longer wait than that. It will be 55 years from 2015 in 2070, and most of those Timeless Ticket holders will be out of time.
I have been through this kind of scam myself. I purchased a lifetime gym membership and the gym chain was acquired by another gym company a few years later. They honored my lifetime contract for a while, as they were legally obligated to do, then just told me, “You’ve gotten more than your money’s worth, so get lost.” I was in no position to sue them, so I just joined another gym. But those cash-for-benefits-far-in-the-future deals are unethical unless they include iron-clad commitments to compensate the buyer if the fulfillment of the promise becomes impossible.
The Brewers should refund the full amount of the “Timeless Ticket” to any purchaser who prefers money back to another promise from an organization they foolishly trusted in 2015.
In Washington, the ultimate reductio-ad-absurdum scenario occurred in the ongoing woke insanity of allowing male athletes to compete against females once they “identify” as female. At Camus High, boy’s cross-country team member Logan Mihailoff, a junior, finished 76th in a boys’ JV cross-country race on September 15th. So on September 29th the same kid, with no changes in his anatomy or physiology, joined the varsity girls’ team. He had “identified” as female, see. And miracles of miracles, he went from 76th to first in a track meet against Union High!
The school later took legal action against a father who held up a protest sign against this obvious cheat that was enabled by the woke lunatics in charge of overseeing athletics at the school, and they took legal action against him. He chanted, “Keep boys out of girls’ sports,” and now is banned from campus for a year. OutKick reporter Matt Calkins interviewed parents at Camas High and tried to interview an assistant cross-country coach. “Nobody wants to talk to you,” the coach said. “I’m trying to be nice.” The logical and ethical contrast between the parents trying to protest their daughters’ rights to compete in a fair contest and the woke defenders of an indefensible policy was striking.
“We’re about as liberal as it gets,”said parent Kent Lake. “I just don’t agree with that [boys competing against girls]. I mean, if they find your body in 300 years, what are they going to say you were? Look, you can live any way you want. You got my blessing. But I mean come on, in competitions? It’s like stock car racing. It’s gotta be even, and it’s gotta be fair.”
Not especially articulate, but still clear enough. “When I first heard about this story, I was like, ‘Is this real? That can’t be real’,” said a mother of a cross country runner, who requested anonymity because she was probably was afraid that the woke mob would storm her house with torches and pitchforks. “We have daughters, and it’s robbing them of an opportunity to compete.”
Follow-up question, ma’am? Why do you live in this crazy state?
On the pro-letting boys magically turn themselves into girls so they can win races, games and scholarships side—you know, morons—Outkick got responses like “There are more important things in sports than that” from one experienced progressive rationalizer. (I have heard and read that dodge regarding everything from open borders to DEI discrimination.) There is, in fact, no good defense of what the blurry kid above did. Can you guess which one is the boy?
After the September 29th travesty, a dozen female cross-country runners on the Camas High School team refused to compete against the cheat on October 13. About half of the girls competing in last week’s race walked off the field in protest while the newly minted “Miss” Mihailoff took of with the remaining of female runners. (And what brainwashed woke weenies those girls are on the way to becoming!) The 11 protesting female students slowly walked past the starting line with their arms linked and left the field.
There is hope.
Listen to this babbling idiot, the head of the state’s school system, try to defend the school policy:
OH MY GOD. The head of Washington's public school system just said it's NOT unfair for the Camas girls to have to race against a boy because "their brains aren't fully developed." HUH? This is the same guy who thinks kids should be able to chop their genitals off. SCREW YOU CHRIS… pic.twitter.com/joCpppEuBk
Yikes. He also is employing the apparent desperation fall-back position of the pro-trans cheating cabal as Initiative 638 comes up for a vote on November 3. It would keep cheating males like Logan Mihailoff out of the women’s competitions in K-12 sports, so opponents say it will require “invasive” checks. No, it wouldn’t. If the dude didn’t decide he was a she until after puberty, then he’s out. Too bad abut that “inclusivity” thingy, but there’s always the chess team. Also being a member of the boys team two weeks earlier is also a big clue. No ‘nads checks required.
How can Americans vote for these people? I don’t get it.
Noren, an ESPN employee for two decades, revealed in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that her resignation in 2023 was provoked by the network’s decision to launch its own branded sports gambling app, ESPN Bet. Noren said that she knew first hand the dangers of gambling, and had good reason to believe encouraging or enabling it, and certainly profiting by it, was unconscionable.
“My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas,” she said. “It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.”
Her grandfather and father, as well as her brother “were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction,” Noren told the publication. “I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.”
So when ESPN decided to embrace legalized sports gambling in’23, “I was out,” she says. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
Noren also accused the network of suppressing stories critical of the gambling industry.“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories were greenlit,” she told the Review. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”
There was even an interactive primer on point spreads, totals, and parlays for new bettors with animations that were “pretty much made for kids.” “What bothered me most was a seeming disregard for the dangers and not thinking about the ramifications of ESPN normalizing gambling for an audience that looks to ESPN as sort of their sports guide, essentially—not looking down the road at the parallels between gambling and other addictive things in our country that have been normalized, such as opioids and cigarettes, that ended up becoming major public health crises.”
Brava, though Noren’s resignation was until now only a personal statement with no broader impact on society or this expanding ethics problem, which EA has been discussing for many years. ESPN Bet is dead, lasting only through last year, but that’s just moral luck. Noren was right: her employer willing to get “blood on its hands” in exchange for money in its metaphorical pockets, so the ethical course was to refuse to be a part of a corrupt organization and its culture.
What are desperately needed now are executives, broadcasters, celebrities and athletes who are willing to take similar stands against teams and sponsors. A politician or two would be nice too.
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:
This issue, which I feel strongly about and have so written, more than once, reared its ugly metaphorical head again this week.
The San Diego Padres were added to the National League in 1969. The team has been in two World Series, losing both quickly; the last time was in 1996. They have only made the National League Championship Series three times. The team closed the season hot, and faced the best team in baseball, at least based on their record, the Milwaukee Brewers, with high hopes. Among the team’s many stars (more, in fact, then Milwaukee) is Mason Miller, by consensus the best 9th inning relief pitcher (aka “closer”) in the game.
The Padres lost the first game of the five game series due to a fluke, as described here. They lost Game #2 as well, and faced elimination in Game #3. It was “all hands on deck,” the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand. Nevertheless, before the game, Mason Miller chose to take paternity leave, a privilege the players won in a contract battle with owners in 2011.
My ethics analysis of this conduct begins with “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” The entire season, 162 games, many millions of dollars, millions of fans, a city’s economy and community, players’ careers and income, managers’ and coaches’ jobs, team sponsors and more ride on which teams win in the post-season. My position is that Miller’s decision was selfish, irresponsible and a breach of duty. His team not only needed him, but depended on him. His wife’s pregnancy had had hit no crisis (I checked); she also had other support available. If I were a team mate or the management, I would conclude that Mason Miller could not be trusted. An employee who flees in a crisis is not a desirable employee, especially when the employee is paid $4 million dollars for eight months of service.
Moral Luck Alert! The Padres won the game without Miller, then lost the next one, ending their World Series quest.
Ethics Alarms hosted an intense debate on this exact topic in 2021. I wrote in part,
What would have been a go-ahead 2-run homer by the San Diego Padres’ Ty France in the top of the 9th inning in last night’s Padres-Brewers NLDS series opener was foiled by a cable in the retractable roof stadium at America Field Park. The huge fly ball (49 degree launch angle, the steepest ever recorded there) on the way over the fence in fair territory struck a cable and fell straight down into the waiting outfielder’s glove. By the ground rules in force, the ball was in play and it was an out. One batter later, the Brewers had won 3-2.
Batted balls used to hit parts of the roof a lot in the Ray’s awful park in St. Petersburg before its roof was repaired, but that’s because the beams, cables, catwalks and rails were too low (and too many). This had never happened in Milwaukee’s American Family Field to cost a team a home run before, and the former “Miller Park” opened 26 years ago.
Yet the only time a ball about to be a home run hit the roof happened in the 9th inning of a play-off game, saving the home team from a crushing loss! It could have happened in a mid-May game. It could have happened in the third inning of an 8-2 loss. It could have happened when the Brewers were playing an inter-league game against the Angels. The odds were that if the fluke were going to happen at all to any team, it would have happened TO the Brewers, since its their home field. And heck, the retractable roof could have been open, meaning that there wouldn’t have been anything for France’s ball to hit.
But no. The first and only time, this particular stroke of bad luck (well, good luck for the Brewers) happened on national TV, in a critical game. Meanwhile the Brewers, who had the best record in baseball, are trying to finally get back to the World Series for the first time since 1982.
As I will argue here until the metaphorical cows come home, football is a cultural embarrassment and a societal pathogen. In addition to that “giving players brain damage” thingy, both colleges and the pros allow their players to be felons and thugs if they are good enough. The King’s Pass reigns. Colleges now pay their football players, so they are truly fake students. The game (aka. business) advances the corruption of higher education. We once were told that a benefit of sports was that it conveyed the value of sportsmanship ( as in “ethics”) to rising generations. Riiiight, about that:
Another player, Raleek Brown celebrated a touchdown by rubbing his genitals, sniffing his hand, and pretending to pass out. The Texas running back was not flagged for that disgusting celebration, after all, that was funny!
Steve Sarkisian, the Texas coach, said about the penalty,“We took [Simmons] out. We addressed it, and put him back in. I’m not gonna give the guy the death penalty over an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. We’ve got to fix it, though. That can’t continue as we move forward.”
Why does “that” exist at all, Coach? It’s your job to manage the culture on the team. I guarantee that a Major League Baseball player who mimed urinating on the field would be suspended immediately, and for a very long time, if not released. Why did one of your players think such public vulgarity was appropriate? Yeah, yeah, upbringing, growing up with a bad crowd, Hip-Hop, yada yada. College once was where young idiots were supposed to learn how responsible adults get through life. Notice that the coach was concerned about the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, not the unsportsmanlike conduct.
Two thoughts on the first day of the MLB play-offs:
1. I am officially 12-years-old. (Most of my friends and associates know that, but it continues to amaze me.) Today I have critical client work to do involving huge amounts of money (for them, not me). I have several medical issues I need to attend to ASAP. I’m late getting my invoices out and I’m in cash-flow hell. But all I can think about is the Red Sox-Yankee game tonight. (8 PM, EST. on NBC)
This is the juvenile state of mind that led me to risk my job in 1978, when I walked out of a critical, high-level capital fundraising meeting at Georgetown, with all the brass present, saying, “I’m sorry, but the Red Sox and Yankees are playing a game in Fenway Park in an hour to decide the American League East, and I have to see it. Let me know what you all decide.” (That was the Bucky %$#@ Dent Game.) My wife-to-be Grace was at the meeting and was the only one smiling; everyone else looked like the audience in “The Producers” after “Springtime for Hitler.”
