Florida lawyer Albert V. Medina, who practices in Boca Raton, had his law license suspended for 10 days, and you’ll never guess why.
Medina shot his brother in the arm while fooling around with a gun, pointing it at his brother and pulling the trigger. The brothers said that they engaged in this “horseplay” frequently: the wounded brother said his sibling had aimed an unloaded pistol at him and pulled the trigger ten times before, as a joke. This time, however, it was loaded.
The brother signed an affidavit affirming that the incident was unintentional, so the criminal case was resolved by Medina’s pleading guilty to the misdemeanor offense of culpable negligence causing injury to another. Medina has been a member of the bar since 2014 with no prior ethics offenses.
I don’t care. The idea of the legal discipline system is to protect the public from lawyers who are demonstrably untrustworthy or unfit to practice law for other reasons. Morons are unfit to practice law, and you can’t fix stupid. What is this guy, eleven years old? Anyone who aims guns at others “as a joke” and pulls the trigger shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects, much less with the legal affairs of members of the public.
Absent a successful brain transplant, Albert V. Medina should have been disbarred.
Funny, I was just thinking about how there hadn’t been a genuine Naked Teacher Principle story in a long time, and POOF!—one magically appears. The last genuine variation of the NTP, as we call it around here for short, was in late December 2023, featuring the Porn Actor University Chancellor. Last year, there was one storie nixed by the NTP qualifications committee of one, the rap-singing teacher, and one really weird story that deserves its own category, The Drag Queen School Principal Principle.
Today’s NTP story, however, is the Real McCoy, as you can probably guess from that photo above of Victoria Triece, 33. Victoria sued Orange County Public Schools for $1 million in 2023 because Sand Lake Elementary would not let her volunteer to assist with her son’s class activities after discovering she had a web presence that was, they thought, inappropriate. Ms. Triece is an Only Fans star, an adult entertainer, and a former cover girl for Playboy and FHM magazine.
In the lawsuit she claimed to be “humiliated'” by the rejection, arguing that her personal life was off limits to be judged by the school administrators. They violated her rights of free speech, free assembly and her right of privacy, she averred, and also subjected her to ‘”sexual cyberharassment” for sharing photos from her OnlyFans site among staff and with media outlets.
See, this is the essence of the Naked Teacher Principle. It isn’t that someone who has exposed (or nearly) their bodacious bod on the web has to be judged unfit or even should be judged unfit to teach impressionable young minds once the photos become public. The NTP just holds that they have no one to blame but themselves if that’s the decision.
Orange County Circuit Judge Brian S. Sandor ultimately ruled that Victoria had no “substantive due process right” to volunteer at the school, so her lawsuit had no valid claims. The judge also wrote that Triece does not have the right to argue with school about being removed, since the volunteer program “does not include any language that confers any right or benefit upon an individual to participate in the program, to remain in the program, or to appeal a removal decision.”
First: I used to post on the Super Bowl ads, as there is usually some ethics-relevant fodder there, but this time I’m only interested in the Nike commercial above, which one of you sent me. Gee, the photography is nice!
The spot begs for the “What’s going on here?” question, to be sure. It is the perfect Rorschach test ad, with so many confirmation bias traps you have to admire the thing just for that. I almost posted it as an Ethics Quiz. Here are some reactions;
1. It is definitely brazen virtue-signaling by Nike, which has been getting hammered for not weighing in on the biological males in women’s sports debate.
2. The equivalent ad would have made more sense in the 1980s, or even earlier. Who needs to be told that women and girls can play sports and excel in 2025?
3. An all-male competition in which a female squad would be sent to the emergency room is a rather strange context for this message.
4. Is this a poke in the eye of excuse-making Democrats, who claim that Kamala Harris’s loss was because voters are biased against women? Or is the ad an exhortation to them to stop bitching and to “just win” by, you know, nominating more qualified female candidates?
Second: Not surprisingly, President Trump showed that he understands the Cognitive Dissonance scale…
“[T]hey contain the true principles of the revolution of 1800. For that was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of ’76 was in its form, not effected indeed by the sword as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform: the suffrage of the people. The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislative, submitted to their election.”
—Retired former President Thomas Jefferson, writing to a friend about his election to the office in 1800.
It would be nice, and perhaps even their salvation, if the Democrats would read our history and heed its lessons. Thomas Jefferson believed that democracies had to have periodic revolutions, and came to understand that such upheavals didn’t have to involve violence to be effective. In 1800, the Federalists had lost their way and breached their own principles: John Adams, of all people, had signed a law allowing the President to prosecute political dissidents. President Adams did: his main targets were anti-Federalist newspaper editors, accusing them of trying to provoke an insurrection.
Jefferson was horrified, and so was much of the public. “A legislature had [passed] the Sedition law; the federal courts had subjected certain individuals to its penalties of fine and imprisonment. On coming into office I released these individuals by the power of pardon committed to Executive discretion, which could never be more properly exercised than where citizens were suffering without the authority of law, or, which was equivalent, under a law unauthorised by the constitution, & therefore null,” he wrote in the same letter.
This is all sounding familiar….
The Federalists, certain that Adams had no chance, nominated an alternative candidate. The campaign of 1800 became one of the ugliest in American history. The desperate Federalists had ministers declaring that electing Jefferson, running under the banner of the Republican-Democrats, was the equivalent of rejecting God, that he was an agent of Satan, and that American society would descend into immoral rot if he were elected. Jefferson only prevailed in a deadlocked House of Representatives because a disaffected Federalist star, Alexander Hamilton, supported his longtime political foe after he concluded that the alternative would be disastrous.
No, I did not have Bobby Kennedy Jr. morphing into Alexander Hamilton on my Bingo card. Maybe Kamala Harris will challenge him to a duel. She owns a gum you know…
As President, Jefferson set about undoing almost everything the Federalists had done. He reduced the size of government, cut spending dramatically, and asserted that the states should have domain over much of what the Federalists had sought to control. The Federalists furiously opposed and attacked him, only succeeding in further estranging the party from the American public. The people honored and respected Jefferson because he kept his promise about using the power of the Presidency to advance individual liberty and state autonomy.
The Federalists never won another Presidential election.
This is perhaps the only downside of my decision years ago that watching the NFL was unethical and complicit with a greed-fueled sport that cripples its participants in exchange for short-term financial rewards. I was completely unaware that since the George Floyd Freakout in 2020, the cynical sports league had included the legend “End Racism” on its fields’ end zones, including in the Super Bowl.
Is there a more perfect example of virtue-signaling than this? That message on a football field does absolutely nothing, accomplishes nothing, changes no behavior or attitudes, and is just a silly “See? We’re cool!” declaration that really signals, “See? We have no shame! We think you’re an idiot!”
There has never been a smidgen of evidence that racism played any part in George Floyd’s death, except from the likes of Black Lives Matter which asserts that because the cop held responsible is white, he must be a racist. The DEI fad arose from the non-race-related death of an overdosing petty perp who happened to be black, and the NFL’s abandonment of its previous end zone slogan is being blamed on—all together now!— President Trump, as he has put that discriminatory and wasteful movement on his hit list. The end zones in today’s game will declare, “Choose Love,” which is just as fatuous but at least appropriate for Valentines Day.
Today I urge readers to join me in boycotting a game that is guaranteed to send some young men, probably many, to a future of being unable to recognize their children before they reach 65.
I sure wish I could call it a blitzkrieg, but, you know, that Hitler stuff..
Lots of people are writing and thinking the same thing, but I’ll state it anyway: the way Trump has begun his second term is politically and strategically masterful, as well as entertaining. It is also unprecedented, with the only remotely similar example in American history being Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as he rushed to get control of both the Great Depression and the cratering moral of the public. No President has moved this quickly and decisively, however, or caught his opposition so flatfooted and impotent.
This is an experienced CEO doing what effective CEOs do best. It took planning, foresight, guts and learning from past mistakes. Here, a substack essay explains how it occurred. The writer doesn’t cite any sources, but it had to be something like what he describes. The critics of Trump who insisted that he was mentally feeble-minded—you know, like all conservatives—and a certain a disaster waiting to happen are being proven so astoundingly wrong that they are reduced to babbling, screaming or saying huminahuminahumina like Ralph Kramden when he was exposed to his wife as a fool.
Here is how you can distinguish the Trump Deranged hacks from the Trump detractors with integrity. The latter will say, “You know, I have to say, I don’t agree with most of what he’s doing, but this is very impressive. I didn’t think he could do it.” Here are the other kind are like Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson in their Times piece called “Falsehoods Fuel the Right-Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D.” [Gift link!] It’s all the logical fallacy known as “The Texas Sharphooter,” as the authors choose misreported and exaggerated examples of USAID waste without acknowledging the damning grants that would be sufficient to justify distrusting the agency even if it had never given a penny to Politico.
The hair-on-fire hysteria of Democratic Party leaders and the Axis media over Trump’s assault on big government and Great Stupid wokism is noted with disgust in this excellent post at “The Hill” by Jonathan Turley.
“Across the internet, politicians and pundits are in a monstrous mood. The same people who spent the last year declaring the imminent death of democracy if Donald Trump were elected are now insisting that the real threat is the monster he has unleashed upon the federal bureaucracy. For Washingtonians, Musk is the bogeyman they have long described to their children around campfires at night: An outsider who comes to town and lays waste to government waste, firing thousands and slashing budgets…
For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents have run on reducing government and making it more efficient. But everyone knew that such campaign pledges would be quickly discarded after each election. What is so terrifying this time is that Musk means it. We know that because he has done it before….
Liberals correctly saw Musk’s defiance as an existential threat. For years, they had exercised virtual total control of social media, legacy media and academia. Opposing views were denounced as dangerous disinformation.
The key to their system was that you maintain orthodoxy by coercing people into silence. During the COVID pandemic, scientists who challenged the enforced view of masks, COVID-19 origins, and other issues were banned or fired. Others remained silent as they watched colleagues exiled for expressing their opinions.
Musk had to be destroyed, or others might start to believe that they could also defy the groupthink.”
The hysterical attacks on Musk are both silly and self-indicting. That TIME cover…
is a good example: for four years the U.S. really did have someone or someones serving as shadow President while Joe Biden leaked IQ points, yet Henry Luce’s fading baby never let their readers in on the secret. President Trump found the perfect individual to delegate one of his most difficult tasks, “draining the swamp,” uncovering the graft and scams, trimming the budget. That’s what successful leaders do: they find the best people to do the hard jobs. I realized how sad and impotent Democrats have become when one of their “leaders” in the anti-Musk rally actually tried to start a “Heigh Heigh Ho Ho, Eon Musk has got to go!” chant. Wow. I almost feel sorry for them.
Almost.
What Americans are witnessing is a transitional, tipping point moment that has rarely been seen in our history. Jackson, perhaps. The two Roosevelts. But it has only been a little more than two weeks! Disney should reprogram its Hall of the Presidents to have all of Trump’s predecessors turn and salute #47. If they weren’t audio-animitons, I bet most of them, may be all, would be thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
[From your host:I’m thrilled that my request for guest ethics commentary on the current upheaval in Washington attracted an entry so quickly, and especially pleased that it arrived from Steve Witherspoon, who has contributed so much here over the years but who has been unjustly neglected in my Comments of the Day choices.]
I consider myself to be a consummate observer. I listen and observe the world around me and openly question why some people make certain choices that seem to me to be completely devoid of critical thinking and logic, delve into how choices can affect their lives and society around them, and how those choices can either damage or support our culture as a whole.
I devoted the theme of my blog (Society’s Building Blocks: Social Commentary Blog – Critically Thinking About Things That Change Our Society) to just such a perspective even though it appears that there’s almost no interest, but I’ll trudge on.
I chose “Debates We MUST Have As A Modern Culture” as the title because in a culture that has freedom of speech as a core foundation, without continuing open, reasonably civil debate regarding things that have changed and are changing in our culture, we tend to flail around with absurd anti-American culture ideals that are dominated by the completely closed minds of freedom suppressing totalitarians. We are then afflicted with cancel culture, speech suppression, and Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI), as well as willful rationalizations for open politically motivated Lawfare.
Let’s face it: when reasonably civil debates are tossed aside as a quaint ideal and people withdraw into their tunnel-visioned cultish cliques, bigotry ensues. Unchallenged, absurd groupthink takes hold and people become so gullible that they’ll believe just about anything they’re told that supports their bias without any critical thinking. They become ideologically-consumed parrots. This isolationist cultish groupthink has the power to completely destroy our culture, and that may be the goal of some of these cultish anti-Americans.
The United States of America is rapidly approaching 250 years old and there have been some turning points in our history that have redefined us and shifted our culture in very good and thoughtful ways. I personally believe that we are at another turning point and we are going to go through another cultural shift; I just don’t know how much of a shift we are going to see. What I do know is that this cultural shift needs to be based on thoughtful and well debated choices that are guided by our Constitution, general law and order, and how we want to present our country to the rest of the world. We need to honor our core foundations as we look to the future.
Let’s bring a little more focus and briefly list some of the current hot political topics that we must openly debate instead of simply tossing them aside as being unconstitutional, racist, genocide, apocalyptic, etc. Immigration law, law enforcement, self protection, firearms, birthright citizenship, when does individual human life begin thus giving that individual constitutional rights, protecting the environment, government overspending, and illegal drugs are just some of these.
We cannot continue to do things in the same way we’ve been doing them if we want any kind of real change.
23-year-old Ashton Jonathan Mann was arrested on one count of second-degree felony manslaughter and one third-degree felony charge related to firearms for for shooting his friend dead n the early hours of February 2nd. You see, Mann’s friend had boasted that he could dodge bullets. So Mann got a a gun, and with his friend’s assent, decided to test his claim. They thought they had unloaded it—see, the idea was that the guy who could dodge bullets would move before the trigger was pulled. But they missed one bullet that was still in the chamber.
It turned out that he couldn’t dodge a bullet after all. Told ya!
First responders were called to a home in Kearns, Utah to find a young man with a gunshot wound to the chest lying on the floor. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. The shooter waived his Miranda rights and told police that they decided to embark on this experiments after smoking pot for about eight hours. Marijuana is, of course, completely harmless and a benign recreational drug. For example, it facilitates the recreational activity, “Dodge that Bullet!”
1. The “Elon Musk wasn’t elected” might be the stupidest rallying cry any party in U.S. political history has ever anchored itself to. I just heard Rep. Maxine Waters, whose corruption and dishonesty know no bounds, shouting about that. Do these people really not understand how their own government works? Are the Democrats trying to win the title of “The Stupid Party” from the GOP? One conservative pundit said he had a three letter rebuttal to the “Elon wasn’t elected” complaint: “EPA.” Or USAID. Or FBI. Is this really the best the Axis has right now? Wow. Also “Good.” Also..
2. Over on Facebook, somebody actually posted this and dozens of once- functioning human beings “liked” it: “Dismantling the government is the first step to fascism and totalitarianism.” There’s a two word rebuttal for this too: “Thomas Jefferson.”
Ethics Alarms 