Last night a client visiting D.C. took me to dinner at a local upscale restaurant. It was a nostalgic and bittersweet evening in addition to being, you know, yummy. (Stone crabs!) My late wife Grace loved going out to eat at a great restaurant, dressing up, feeling like this was an event and not just a meal. Since she died, my business crashed and my finances went to hell, I haven’t had a single meal at such an establishment. Oh, I’ve had some meals at decent places with excellent food, but the staffs are casual and a lot of diners—even me— are in jeans. That’s fine; it doesn’t interfere with the social experience or my enjoyment of the meal. And yet…

The Ruth’s Chris restaurant chain recently posted about the steakhouse’s dress code, reminding patrons that the desired atmosphere is “business casual” and “proper attire” is mandatory. Guests are to remove hats when entering, and if you have a baseball cap on, you will be stuck at the bar or the lounge.The main dining room will be off-limits. Dining rooms will not allow “gym wear, pool attire, tank tops, clothing with offensive graphics or language, revealing clothing, or exposed undergarments.”

Well, good. Civility, etiquette and respect for others are always victims of entropy, as air travel and theater-going have proven. Ruth’s Chris wants to hold the line, and that takes courage and a sense of responsibility. Being with other diners who care how they present to everyone around them is part of the positive experience of dining out at an excellent restaurant.

The slobs, as well the progressives, socialists, working class heroes and aspiring termites in the foundation of society, of course, do not agree. One critic on social media wrote, “Ruth’s Chris isn’t fine dining, it’s like one step up from Outback. This is going to make a lot of people not go.” I agree the restaurant is not The Prime Rib, but it’s about five steps up from Outback or Applebee’s. What’s the matter with classing up the joint a bit? The whole idea of maintaining levels of personal deportment is that it makes everyone feel better and behave better.

Thne some marketing whiz at Chili’s (which I would place a notch below Applebees’, but it’s close) saw an opportunity to virtue-signal man-on-the-street virtues. “The only dress code at Chili’s is that you have to be dressed,” it tweeted, setting off a tweet war.

Victory Girls, the right-ish blog, notes that “a general disdain about dressing for the occasion is a bit more indicative of an illness our culture cannot afford to ignore” and quoted writer Robert Heinlein, who once observed,

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

Bingo.

Oh perfect.

Unfortunately I don’t have a YouTube clip of someone singing, “Our laws are in the very best of hands.” This is indefensible.

An Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Rudy Renfer, was caught red-handed submitting a court filing containing fabricated quotes, misstated case law, and even fake regulatory language. Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II issued an order after being alerted to made-up quotations and misstatements of case holdings in the government’s submissions. The court said it had uncovered multiple defective cites to case law and at least two invented quotations attributed to the Code of Federal Regulations: these were not mere typos.

Renfer told the court he had accidentally filed an unfinalized draft. Judge Robert Numbers, however, said both the accuracy of the brief and the Renfer’s excuse were dubious. The issue became whether a government lawyer could be trusted to explain how his brief was prepared.

Judge Numbers ordered senior leaders from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the E.D.N.C. to appear at a show cause hearing, warning that the office itself could be sanctioned unless it could prove this was a single breakdown, not the result of chronic supervision failures.

Of course it was the result of supervision failures, because the Justice Department is incompetently run, has hired too many inexperienced lawyers, and obviously isn’t training the legal staff properly, including in the matter of legal ethics.

At the show‑cause hearing, Renfer told Judge Numbers that after feeling like he had botched a draft, he “felt panicked” and had an AI bot rewrite the brief, then filed it “believing he had reviewed it.”

Give me a break. How do you “believe you had reviewed” a court document when you haven’t? I can’t even make that claim when I post a typo-filled essay on Ethics Alarms. The peril of not sufficiently reviewing something you submit to a court under the implied guarantee that it is truthful and accurate is Professionalism 101, and doing so when you have used artificial intelligence to generate content is a clear ethics violation.

Renfer said the decision to use AI was the worst of his career. Ya think? It isn’t as if these episodes of AI hallucinating cases haven’t been well-publicized, especially in legal publications. I’ve been teaching lawyers about the problem since the summer of 2024! There are websites that track these episodes, but never before has a Justice Department lawyer been so unethical and incompetent as to be caught engaging in such misconduct. Government lawyers are supposed to be governed by higher standards. This was the standard of a desperate DEI-admitted first-year law student.

NYU canceled 13 culture, identity and faith-based graduation ceremonies last week.

This was a sane and necessary move, though NYU’s weenie administrators blamed the decision on the “current political climate” rather than making the important,unequivocal statement that all graduating students are the same in the eyes of the school, and that splitting up graduations by tribes, nationalities, races and sexual orientation is divisive, destructive and irresponsible.

Now student groups are demanding that NYU rescind the order. Good job, NYU! You did this. You indoctrinated them to think this way.

As it stands, there will be a single graduation celebration at the school’s Paulson Center.“There can’t be stoles or alumni speakers, all of these things that would typically be part of a graduation can’t be a part of that end-of-year celebration,” a member of the affected LGBTQ+ Affinity Group. “To me, that’s a pretty startling restriction of student speech.” 

That’s because you haven’t learned what restricting student speech means. Go look up the Supreme Court decisions. Show us the rulings that say a university has to promote the fragmenting of the graduating class in official group, tribe, or religious ceremonies.

Students who don’t want to celebrate their graduation with those evil whites, those bigoted straights, those mean Christians, those genocidal Jews and toxic males have organized an activism group called “Our Stories, Our Stage” to lobby the school to reinstate the events. There is also a petition with garnered 1,400 signatures, claiming that the cancellations are an attempt “to appease the current administration.”

“Whether you’re in your first or last year of your undergraduate or graduate degree, faculty, alumni, or ally, the cancellation of the affinity groups is setting a dangerous precedent for anyone associated with NYU, or other higher educational institutions,” the petition reads. “NYU has now shown it is willing to throw its students under the bus in exchange for money.”

Boy, what a damning, biased, illogical petition. Showing students that the school supports unity, comity and mutual respect among all Americans and human beings is “throw[ing] its students under the bus.”

NYU did not respond to requests for comments. My comment is that this sick and corrosive culture has been allowed to flourish on campuses for decades, and purging it is a massive if not a hopeless task.

A Facebook friend posted the above dishonest, fallacy and false-fact riddled meme as if it was discovered truth. I broke my recent rule of not responding to such garbage by saying, as nicely as I could, “You know, re-posting illogical appeals to emotion like this doesn’t help.” I almost wrote, “I know you’re smarter than this. Why did you post it?” I then listed a few of the logical and factual disconnects in the screed, but didn’t have the energy to be thorough.

I’m hoping one of you does. I think I count 14 factual and logical fallacies, but there may be more. This is how social media makes the public dumber and makes productive discourse impossible.

Another challenge: which is the most ludicrous of those statements? My vote, I think, goes to “If people being executed in the street is fine, it was never about pro-life.” It’s hard to make dumber statement than that.

pic.twitter.com/ZJSvK2lgX0

— mario (@LostSchemes) March 17, 2026

NASCAR announced this week that Truck Series driver Daniel Dye has been suspended indefinitely in response to “homophobic comments” made by Dye on that cretinous live stream above. Dye has also been suspended by his team, Ram Trucks factory partner Kaulig Racing.

Both suspensions are wildly excessive reactions to dumb banter that was not “homophobic” but rather simple, juvenile foolishness. Race car drivers tend not to be deft wits. “He plays for the the team” is at worst Seinfeld-speak for “he’s gay,” and if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then saying someone is gay isn’t homophobic. As for Dye’s pathetic attempt at a “gay voice,” his version isn’t within a mile of a gay voice, and I know gay voices.

When someone has affected an ostentatiously stereotypically gay manner of communicating, they should be no more immune from impressions or parody than Jack Nicholson (whom Tom Cruise imitates in “A Few Good Men”), James Cagney (Frank Gorshin’s specialty) John Wayne or Johnny Carson (both mastered by Rich Little). For that matter, those political correctness warriors who are offended by various riffs on foreign accents, the realm of Sasha Baron Cohen and Danny Kaye, among others, can bite me.

I have no clue how David Malukas really sounds, but if you want to know what a “gay voice” is like, here’s Sirius/XM’s Seth Rudetsky talking the way he does on his various shows, doing his best to make sure no “cis” males come within ten miles of a musical theater production. Seth is a (talented) performer, and he can “butch up” when he chooses, but here is how he normally talks—his insufferable interviewer finally lets him get a word in edgewise about two and half minutes into the video:

Seth makes Nathan Lane in “The Bird Cage” seem like Hulk Hogan.

…specially regarding so-called “Islamophobia” and the Iran War?

But they aren’t, are they?

Here is Melanie Phillips on Sky News:

By purest coincidence, the latest post from “Holly Mathnerd,” an eccentric but often perceptive substacker, raised the exact issue I was attempting to get at in yesterday’s ethics quiz. Apparently not too successfully: a lot of commenters seem to think that wasting money in the eyes of others is indistinguishable from wasting life, which is the primary issue I was trying to raise.

I realized a bit late in the erratic discussion that my ethics alarms triggered by a woman spending 70 days counting out loud are the same ones that ring over Americans taking themselves out of productive and collaborative society by using “recreational” drugs. If you live in a society, you have an obligation to participate in it, and as helpfully and productively as possible. Making oneself stupid by self-medicating isn’t doing that, and neither is counting out loud for 70 days.

Holly focused on the wasting life problem. She writes,

“Memento mori,” the Stoics taught us. Remember that you are going to die.

The idea is that keeping death in your peripheral vision — not obsessing over it, just refusing to pretend it isn’t there — the pretense most of us perform constantly and effortlessly — makes you live better. More deliberately. With less of your finite time squandered on things that don’t matter.”

Of course, the next challenge is how one defines “don’t matter.” If it matters to you, doesn’t that mean it “matters”? Or is there a useful, objective definition of “matters” that can distinguish between wasting life and truly using a life to its fullest extent? “Life is a banquet,” Auntie Mame memorably says in the novel, play, musical, movie and movie musical, “and most poor bastards are starving to death!” Her point was that there is no excuse for wasting a life.

Isn’t that a life competence lesson? Isn’t life competence an ethical value?

As many predicted and others dreaded, the Academy Awards last night did it: they anointed the pro-domestic terrorism, anti-American, Hollywood woke fever dream “One Battle After Another” with the Best Movie award. Starring the usual far-left suspects Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film is deliberately offensive to anyone who wasn’t convinced that Kamala Harris was a wonderful Presidential candidate; I made the mistake of starting to watch it and “walked out” (that is, changed channels to a “Chicago Med” re-run) after about 20 excruciating minutes. “The Critical Drinker’s” review above registered as fair and accurate based on what I saw: a well-acted, well-produced piece of political propaganda.

You know, like “Triumph of the Will.”

The fact that it was nominated told me what the annual awards broadcast would be like and that Hollywood is determined to alienate at least half the country. Good plan. If I had been producing the show, I would have told all participants that political grandstanding was strictly forbidden and that anyone who started blathering about Trump, trans activism, I.C.E. or “illegal wars” would have a trap door open under them like they used to have on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

But no, there were the predictable rants by narrow-view artists trying to suck up to future employers in their bubble. Even Conan O’Brien succumbed to the suck-up vibe, though he was obviously chosen as M.C. because he harkens back to the days when late night hosts mocked all parties and not just Republicans, and the producers wanted to trick Americans tired of being called racists and fascists into tuning in. And a trick it was.