“The Meat Axe”

I had some amusing bloody meat-axe graphics all ready to go for this post, but it is really about flat learning curves: the Democratic Party’s, the Axis news media’s, and maybe, frighteningly, the public’s.

Yes, once again we have a looming test of just how stupid the public really is. Democrats are betting their very existence on the public being as dumb as a box of Joe Bidens, and the biased, anti-Trump news media, having already been completely exposed as the enemies of the people Donald Trump said they are, have predominantly fallen back to the same tactics that served them so well in Trump 1.0. The unethical “advocacy journalists” are gambling that propaganda will prevail, and that the 2024 election was just a blip because the Democrats ran a babbling fool—but a historic one!—for President.

Trump’s tsunami of executive orders along with the relentless DOGE assault has the Axis searching for a magic bullet or two. They settled on two old unethical stand-bys: ad hominem attacks, aka. “kill the messenger,” and “It’s a constitutional crisis!” Trump being elected at all was a constitutional crisis for the Angry Left, and the phony “He’s breaching traditional democratic norms!” trope was core to both impeachments and the “Trump is Hitler” campaign refrain.

Elon Musk is being vilified by using classic Democrat class warfare tactics: he’s been successful and is rich, so obviously he’s only helping Trump cut spending because he greedy and he’ll make money from it somehow. How dumb does someone have to be to buy that logic? If there is anyone in the world who can be trusted not to be serving his country for the money, it’s Musk. I heard some mouth-foaming contributor on CNN screaming this morning that “Trump is a liar and criminal” and “Musk wasn’t even born here!,” an odd argument from a defender of illegal immigrants.

But the EA “Flat Learning Curve” graphic is up there because I heard Chuck Schumer—is he really an idiot or does he just play one on TV?—say that sure, everyone agrees that there is too much waste in government spending, but “this is a meat-axe!” Yup, it sure is, Chuck, and if you don’t know by now that the only way to seriously address systemic corruption, waste, incompetence, dishonesty and obstruction is with a meat-axe (or blow-torch, or metaphorical nuclear bomb), you’ve never successfully managed anything.

Experienced managers know this, and both Musk and Trump are experienced managers as well as successful ones. Good leaders know it too. Heck, I know it.

What Schumer is really saying is, “We don’t want to solve this problem, we want to look like we want to solve this problem, and we are confident that you out there listening are so uneducated, inexperienced, naive and gullible that you’ll fall for it…again.”

When a system is broken, corrupt and incorrigible, and because of its dysfunction causing constant harm, the technique of carefully trying to extract the jewels buried in the shit pile never works. It takes too long. Every inch of the shit will have advocates claiming that it isn’t really shit. Paring down the bureaucracy gets delegated to the bureaucracy, and improvement is minimal if you are lucky. Most of the time, the inefficiency, waste and corruption just gets worse. Nobody can deny that this is the futile path the United States government has been treading.

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EA Text Box Crash Update!

Breaking: I have heard from WordPress regarding the site malfunction yesterday that made commenting either a chore or impossible. This morning Happiness Engineer Gary P. wrote in an email,

“Hi Jack, thank you for your patience. I really appreciate you reporting this issue. It’s been very helpful! As my colleague mentioned, our team has identified this as a bug and is actively working on a permanent fix. The latest update from our developers is that the comment box should now be working again. I took a look at your site and can see that the text box appears to be functioning normally. I’ve also recorded a short video showing that typing is now possible: https://cloudup.com/c1W5oqw88Qm.

Whenever you have a moment, could you check from your end and let me know if everything is working as expected? Do note that while the text box is working, our developer is still actively looking for a cause for the issue itself, and what’s working now might not be perfect.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions. I’d be happy to help.

Well, Gary had better be happy to help…he’s a Happiness Engineer!

I’m so sorry this happened yesterday. It obviously frustrated a lot of you and wasted your valuable time, as it did mine. If its any consolation, I deal with WordPress bugs constantly. I can no longer comment directly as a host on my own posts for example: I have to log in as a commenter. When I’m in the favored “Paragraph” block, I can’t post pictures or quotes. When I’m in the “classic “mode links don’t work. Recently, whole sentences just disappear while I’m finishing them. But that’s my problem. You shouldn’t have to deal with any posting issues. Again, I am sorry.

Special thanks are due to Diego Garcia and Alicia who blew the whistle on this right away via email.

Maybe I’ll be able to get some paying work done today, after I finish shoveling snow…

Guest Post: ‘We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Car’s Extended Warranty…’

by WallPhone

[From your host: This is an epic post about something I know absolutely nothing about, except that I received the calls and marketing materials Wall Phone is writing about—JM]

***

“Well, not that. Actually, I have been trying to reach you about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, TCPA for short. If you’re reading this, someone connected to your company, someone who cares about your company, and someone who cares about their career and livelihood, has been told that your company is violating at least one provision of this Federal law.

“If you don’t listen to them, it would be prudent of them to begin looking for another job. They shouldn’t want to go down with your ship. If they need to maintain some kind of licensure, they also don’t want to lose their credentials for whatever wrongdoing was going on that got them in contact with the person who gave them this webpage.

Have you ever wondered why those auto warranty calls stopped? It’s because the government has fined the people connected to that advertising campaign more than six and a half million dollars. The fine came with a lifetime ban on any form of telemarketing. What would happen to your company if this kind of fine and ban were to be imposed on you?

“But we don’t make outgoing calls, let alone robocalls!”

And yet you have appeared to have done so. What you thought was a prospective customer told you about this page because they want you to stop harassing them.

“But our company is not harassing them!”

And yet you have appeared to be doing so. And worse, much worse, you appear to have been doing this for years.

“Years?”

Yes.

“But we only recently adopted this marketing partner/strategy!”

And you had better stop. Yesterday. Hopefully your contract has some sort of an enforceable indemnification clause that MIGHT protect you, but it probably won’t. If your marketing agreement does have such a clause, its actual purpose is to pacify any possible reservations at the signing stage of your marketing agreement with them, not the actual true purpose of these contractual things–to avoid the creation of moral hazard.

“Moral hazard” is explained below if you’re not familiar with that term. It’s high time you were.

The reason this indemnification clause on your contract won’t help you is the telemarketing company will be gone when the time comes that you’ll need it. They are betting that by the time it takes for you to figure out that you need to use indemnification, it will be too late. This page is here to help you figure it out sooner, help you recover as much as possible, and make their scam less profitable.

You need to—as soon as possible!—FIRST ask your bank how many of the past payments you made to your marketing partner that you can reverse, THEN ask the marketing partner for refunds. If you think you handling this business with them politely will work, then you have already lost. They will transfer all funds out of their accounts. They will disappear. You’ll lose more than if you IMMEDIATELY reverse as many payments as you can, because they’re not operating in good faith and they’re not intending to refund anything.

You are the victim of a scam. Victim of a crime. It’s literally an organized crime syndicate you are dealing with and they hav done this before, perhaps dozens of times before. They’re counting on you being polite and patient so they have time to disappear, whitewash a new business name on their operations, then start over. They don’t care that they destroyed your agency or business, they have thousands of other prospects they can milk this scam on. They have been doing this for years.

“But why do you want to help my company?”

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Administrative Alert: Are You Having Trouble Posting Comments? [UPDATED!] [AND Updated Again!]

I have now heard from three veteran commenters that they can’t post, and so far, Word Press’s “Happiness engineers” (gag) have no useful answers or advice. If you have found a fix for this problem—nothing has changed from my end—please post it. To those of you who are locked out, I’m sorry, you haven’t been banned, and I’m working on it.

UPDATE: WordPress has replicated the problem and I am informed that an engineer is working to fix it.

5:05 EST Update from Word Press: “We’ve heard back from our team and have confirmed that this is a bug. We have a team actively working to resolve the issue. While I don’t have an exact timeframe, I am hopeful we’ll see a fix soon.”

Ethics Quote of the Day: Ann Althouse

“I feel a little sorry for the sector of America that feels that whatever Trump does must be bad.”

–Blogging ex-law prof Ann Althouse, in a post about how the New York Times criticized Trump’s order to get rid of the penny despite “what we’ve known for 40 years we needed to do but we couldn’t do because some people whine about the nostalgic and symbolic value of the Lincoln-stamped copper-plated disc.”

Why “sorry”? My Facebook friends who are doing this are educated, adults, and behaving like spoiled brats while writing social media posts worthy of sixth graders. MSNBC and its various propagandists are actively working to subvert an elected President. One should only have pity if one honestly believes that there is an excuse for someone being brainwashed and deceived by transparent media propaganda. There isn’t.

These people don’t know history, don’t understand the nation or its culture, ape the opinions of others without critical thought, and advocate anti-democratic policies and attitudes. I’m not sorry for them; I’m sorry that they are so gullible, weak-minded, and unable to process information that proves they were wrong, an essential life skill. I’m sorry that our society and civic discourse has been so poisoned by their biases and cognitive deficiencies. They deserve to be discouraged. They deserve to be humiliated. They deserve to be mocked. They have been incompetent, destructive citizens, and harmed their nation by allowing themselves to be ruled by emotion and manipulated by liars and ideologues.

Ethics Quiz: Honoring Roland Bragg

The North Carolina military base long called Fort Bragg was stripped of its familiar name in 2023 and changed to Fort Liberty by the Biden administration. With this Democrats joined forces with and essentially endorsed the statue-topping and historical airbrushing that removed statues, street and school names and other memorials to Americans judged insufficiently dedicated to the woke values that hadn’t surfaced until long after their deaths.

Particularly targeted were Confederate generals and other major figures in the Confederacy. Fort Bragg was named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Of all the Confederates stripped of honors in 2020 as The Great Stupid spread over the land, Bragg’s might have deserved that fate most. Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War, with most of the battles he engaged in, Shiloh, for example, ending in his army’s defeat. He was also unpopular with both the officers and soldiers under his command. Why he had a fort named after him is something of a mystery. Well, maybe not so mysterious: the North Carolina fort was named during the Wilson administration while that President was undoing civil rights advances for blacks.

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A “Nah, There’s No Deep State!” Spectacular: The Hidden JFK Assassination Files

I have spent far too much time over the course of my life reading and thinking about the Lincoln assassination and the various conspiracy theories surrounding it. It was not until 1983 that I found a single source that attempted to explain why there is so much uncertainty surrounding Honest Abe’s death in a book I bought at The Smithsonian, “The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies.” There has always been trivia game of collecting the “amazing” parallels between the Lincoln assassination and the death of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1962, but one parallel is undeniable: government incompetence, inefficiency, bureaucratic stubbornness and deliberate defiance of law created the fertile soil for conspiracy theories to thrive regarding both events.

In part propelled by his “Odd Couple” ally Robert Kennedy, Jr., President Trump has ordered all of the information, papers and materials related to JFK’s assassination released: after all, it’s only been 61 years since Lee Harvey Oswald sent a bullet through his brain. That release still hasn’t happened, and if past experience holds, it won’t this time either.

The FBI just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy’s assassination that were never provided to the Warren Commission or a later board charged with determining once and for all why Kennedy was killed and who was responsible. The records were discovered among the 14,000 pages of documents the FBI found when they undertook to obey Trump’s order, which I’m sure some of my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends will claim is illegal. (If Trump does it and it undermines progressive power, it is illegal by definition.)

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Interestingly, Being an Idiot Does Not, In The Eyes Of The Florida Bar, Make One Unfit To Practice Law

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.

The Nearly Naked Teacher’s Volunteer Principle!

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.”

__________________

Pointer: Old Bill

Six Ethics Notes On An Event I Ignored

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…

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