Another metaphorical shoe dropped in what promises to be a veritable centipede-level shoe shower as the major league sports leagues finally get what they asked for by greedily getting into bed with online gambling interests. Let’s’ count those shoes, shall we?

In this 2023 post, I wrote in part,

The theory is that players make so much money that they won’t be tempted to engage in the addictive activity their own teams are promoting with the general public. It is a stupid, naive and ignorant theory. Rich gamblers don’t gamble for the money. Athletes, moreover, are not generally known for their intellectual acumen, ability to resist temptation, or skill at navigating mixed and contradictory messages.

Sports leagues can’t have it both ways. They can’t make millions off of gambling, and simultaneously insist that players gambling threatens the integrity of the game. If the team owners really cared about the integrity of the game and wanted to avoid the betting and game-fixing scandals that surely are coming (baseball will have a team in Las Vegas next year, and Moe Green is licking his metaphorical chops), it would stick to the policy that sports and gambling is a volatile mixture that must be avoided.

This will not end well. You can bet on it.

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I’m having trouble waking up this morning sufficiently to write a full post, so I’m going to break form and just issue some random observations:

One reason I suspended the tradition here of giving out year-end ethics awards was that “Most Unethical Profession” never changed. It was always a tie between educators and journalists, and both their race to the bottom.. In the post-debacle analyses of Zohran Mandani’s election as mayor, two themes keep surfacing. One is that young college-educated voters strongly favored Mamdani while young non-college grads did not. “It’s almost as if going to college now makes people stupid,” a guest on Fox News said this morning. Yes, graduating from college without learning that communism never works and gets people killed is evidence of a failed educational system. President Trump’s efforts to force universities to eschew progressive indoctrination for actual education is one of the most important and crucial aspects of his Presidency. Regarding our “enemy of the people” news media, Prof. Glenn Reynolds wrote today of Mamdani, “He’s an ignorant, angry leftist, who believes what ignorant, angry leftists always believe. The press should have been pointing this out all along. I mean, the leftist press, but they don’t do this kind of thing to leftists.” Bingo! The biased and unethical educators are making our rising generations stupid and ignorant, and our biased and unethical news media is aiding and abetting by refusing to enlighten them.

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I sure wish Curmie, the erudite, once open-minded progressive-ish columnist here would shake off his Trump Derangement and return to offer EA readers perspective on issues like the one above. He would be welcomed with open arms. I continue to be amazed at the stuff he posts on social media. Curmie is trapped in the same state of mind as Jimmy Kimmel’s wife (pity her!) who says that she can’t abide being around family members who voted for President Trump.

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1. Sydney Sweeney has been the source of dubious controversies several times this year, most notably when her ad for a jeans company played with the double entendre evident in saying she had great “genes.” Since she’s white and stacked, see that means she’s a white supremacist, or something. The silver see-though dress she wore on a recent “red carpet” launched a different controversy, though also one involving her extreme feminist charms. Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, hardly one to hide her own curves, declared,

“So she was on the red carpet last night and she decided to show off her number one asset, which, contrary to the American Eagle jeans ad, is not really her jeans, it’s her enormous breasts, which are spectacular. No one would take that away from her. But, controversial opinion, I object to this. I disapprove of the dress she wore because it’s completely see-through. You can see her entire nipples. She reminded me of Kim Kardashian, who overshares and then takes away the thing that is the sexiest, which is every guy’s hope to be the one who actually sees them for real, and leaving little to the imagination.” 

Gee, you can be more articulate than that, Megyn. Let me try to help out. It’s not a flattering look at all, and just coarsens the culture, potentially corrupting young women in the process. The grotesque display reduces a woman, a human being, to just a pair of mammary glands. It’s not just degrading to Sweeney, who has presumably consented to being so dehumanized, it degrades women in general and men who are frozen in the headlights. My verdict is that this is “Ick” more than ethics, but it’s a close call.

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Never mind the political significance of last night’s pretty much nationwide Democratic Party sweep of the major state and local elections: The password is “ethics,” as they used to whisper on Allen Ludden’s classic TV game show. So let’s look at the ethics…

Observations:

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“[H]e’s just a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.”

—-Former Speaker of the House, current House member and Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi, describing Donald Trump and doing her part to amplify hateful partisan rhetoric and point the public toward from political violence.

Pelosi was even challenged on the assertion that the President of the United States is “the worst thing on earth”during her interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson last night. “You think he’s the worst thing on the face of the Earth?” Michaelson asked incredulously. Worse than war, cancer, child rape, ebola, cannibalism, terrorism, “Fear Factor,” pineapple on pizza and Sydney Sweeney?

“I do, yeah, I do,” Pelosi, who is a disgrace, responded, doubling down. “Because he’s the President of the United States, and he does not honor the Constitution of the United States. In fact, he’s turned the Supreme Court into a rogue court. He’s abolished the House of Representatives. He’s chilled the press.” 

Why, says Nancy, the President has chilled the press so much that CNN broadcasts disgusting and denigrating hyperbole by his political foes! (Did you know that Donald Trump lies all the time?)

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“I don’t want to start turning people off to films and to art that could change consciousness or change the world because they don’t like my political opinions,” she added. “I want to protect my craft so that you can still get lost in what I’m doing. And if I can’t say something that’s going to speak to some kind of peace or lowering the temperature or some sort of solution, I don’t want to be a part of the problem. I don’t want to make the problem worse.” 

—-Actress Jennifer Lawrence, finally, in her maturity, figuring out that it’s not part of an artist’s job to be public pundit, and that abusing celebrity in that fashion risks undermining that artist’s professional mission.

Lawrence prefaced her remarks by saying on The New York Times’  The Interview podcast,“During the first Trump administration, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.”

And, may I add, as it would be expecting a lot for a Hollywood star to mention this, her opinions regarding politics and social issues deserve no more attention that that of the local barfly, and conceivably less.

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Among the furious “It isn’t what it is” gaslighting that the Mad Left routinely engages in—“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”; “Nah, Biden wasn’t suffering from dementia in the White House, he was sharp as a tack!”; “Nah, Kamala Harris wasn’t a DEI nominee!”; “Nah, there’s no such thing as the Antifa!” and so on, and so on—the Trump Deranged refuse to admit that there is an embedded progressive “Deep State” (and often not so deep) that set out to sabotage Trump in his first term and to do everything possible to prevent his re-election in 2020.

One of many metaphorical smoking guns regarding the efforts of the Deep State was the organized effort by U.S. intelligence officials to make certain that the evidence of Biden family influence peddling on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was discredited and avoided by the Axis media prior to the 2020 election. Shortly after The New York Post’s broke the story in October 2020 51 then current and former intelligence officials signed an open letter challenging the authenticity of the laptop.

Though they had no direct knowledge of the situation, the 51 abused their positions, authority and intelligence credentials to undermine The Post’s reporting weeks before the 2020 election. Politico’s headline was typical of how the letter was interpreted by the news media and the public :“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Twitter banned the Post’s story from its platform. During the second 2020 presidential debate held on October 22, 2020, Joe Biden repeated the narrative, saying, “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan!” (Fact check? Of course not.) Biden later repeated the claim in a “60 Minutes” interview held on October 25, 2020. No fact check then, either. Mission accomplished! The letter did its job (it worked) and Biden was elected.

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