I rate this episode as pure King’s Pass misconduct by both organizations and professional tennis.
Jannik Sinner, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, just got a three-month ban for testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid last March. He says he “accepted” the short ban, and why wouldn’t he? It means he won’t miss any Grand Slam tournaments. The French Open, the season’s next major, starts May 25 and the ban ends May 4. This is like baseball banning a starting pitcher for throwing a doctored ball for three games so he doesn’t miss any starts.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency had decided earlier not to suspend Sinner by buying his excuse for why he tested positive: the clostebol in his doping sample was due, see, to the player getting a massage from a trainer who had used the substance to help a wound on his finger heal quicker. Never mind that virtually every athlete caught using steroids has claimed “accidental” contamination. It is why baseball went to a strict liability system after its steroid scandal.
Ah, but professional tennis is more dependent on its big stars than baseball for its gate income and TV ratings, so suspending the #1 ranked player in the world has unpleasant ripple effects.
This convenient resolution of Sinner’s violation, however, is also causing some rippling. After the settlement was announced, three-time major champion Stan Wawrinkaposted on X: “I don’t believe in a clean sport anymore …” # 8 ranked Daniil Medvedev, said, alluding to double standards (Ya think?), “I hope everyone can discuss with WADA and defend themselves like Jannik Sinner from now on.”
Let me briefly re-state my unalterable position that it was unethical, disrespectful and foolish for the U.S. to reduce George Washington’s birthday (Feb. 22) to a catch-all excuse for a long weekend. I wrote at length about this here, three years ago. An excerpt:
“How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday….. The only thing most children are taught about him, other than his many “firsts,” is that he was a slaveholder, which had no impact on the development of the nation he helped create at all. It has been crafted into a weapon to use against our nation, but that isn’t George’s doing: by the end of his life, he had come to realize how wrong slavery was, and unlike Thomas Jefferson, did something about it, freeing his slaves in his will. George Washington earned his own national holiday. Give him his birthday back, and move President’s Day to some other random Monday.”
I have also come to believe that Abraham Lincoln deserves a national holiday as well. Abe would have had one if his birthday wasn’t so close to both George’s and Valentine’s Day. I’d give Abe his day on the anniversary of his Gettysburg Address, but November 19 is too close to Thanksgiving. April 14th? That’s Abe’s assassination, which would be a ghoulish way to honor him. The best date, I think, would fall on March 4, when Lincoln was sworn in as President. We would have no United States of America as we know it without either George or Abe. Let’s show a little respect.
—“Hollywood in Toto” blogger Christian Toto as tonight’s much hyped “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” looms.
My sock drawer organization is in true crisis, so I had programmed my schedule to handle that task tonight long before I knew of the special. Otherwise, I would have certainly wa…oh, who am I kidding? No I wouldn’t have watched the show if my Roku was malfunctioning and the only alternatives were re-runs of “Rosanne” and “Hart to Hart.” As Toto correctly explains, the show betrayed its mission, its origins, its original fans (like me), the culture, and the tradition of political humor, satire and comedy itself.
Toto points out that “Saturday Night Live” had the power, influence and ability to be at the forefront of a counter-culture revolution. In doing so, it would have been a national unifying force, holding the excesses—and it has been almost all excesses—of the extreme progressive capture of the Democratic Party to the public ridicule and derisive finger-pointing it deserved and needed. James Carville recently ranted that “It’s like, there’s a plant somewhere in quote–progressive—unquote America, that just to seize how many jackass, stupid things that they can embrace. It’s stunningly stupid.”
A good friend who is a legal, ethics and theatrical colleague of long standing was discussing his skepticism about Elon Musk’s DOGE mission. He reminded me that in 1982, my musical political and legal satire performing group “The Music Lobby” was hired to handle the entertainment for a Washington trade association’s convention during the 1982 mid-term campaign, when Ronald Reagan was urging voters to “stay the course” as he tried to reign in spending.
The opening number I wrote was a parody of the Four Aces’ most famous hit (I love the Four Aces), “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” from the sappy William Holden-Jennifer Jones movie of the same name. My friend, who is one of the rare vocalists who can approach that group’s astounding tenor ( the great Al Alberts) in range and blast, was part of the quartet that night (as was I), and we killed.
He told me today that it wouldn’t take much to update my lyrics to the present day. It didn’t. So here is the 2025 version of “Love is a Cut in Spending Thing.” Play the video above and sing along. And repeat…
Love is a cut in spending thing! The elusive rose that voters chose Donald Trump to bring…
It’s the engine of destruction Of waste, fraud and corruption To give back the economy its zing!
Fighting with passion, guts and will, There is Elon Musk, from dawn to dusk Finding scams to kill…
Once those wasted billions stabbed my heart, But now it wants to sing! For true love’s a cut in spending thing!
State Rep. Anita Somani, (D-Dublin)—that’s her on the left above— has authored a bill, so-sponsored by state Rep. Tristan Rader, (D-Lakewood), nicknamed the “Conception Begins at Erection Act.” It would make it a crime for men to ejaculate without intending to have a baby, with special exemptions for anal and oral sex, gay sex generally, masturbation and donating sperm. “You don’t get pregnant on your own,” the smug OBGYN told reporters. “If you’re going to penalize someone for an unwanted pregnancy, why not penalize the person who is also responsible for the pregnancy?” she said.
Brilliant. Don’t they teach analogies and critical thinking in med school? Apparently there are complete idiots practicing medicine. (We already know there are complete idiots elected to state and national legislatures.)
This woman really thinks her stunt—it’s a fake bill, which is an abuse of the legislative process—is some kind of “gotcha!” Even this fool has to know the bill is unconstitutional as well as unenforceable, but she does not seem to recognize how offensive it is. But, see, she’s making a point! Somani thinks she’s being clever when she is really proving that the entire pro-abortion position relies on deliberately ignoring what abortion is. The bill and her comments also reveal that she is blindingly dumb and apparently proud of it, as well as having the ethical literacy of a sea sponge.
Every day now, we are drowning in Conspiracies. And we always have theories about what really transpired.
From whether there was election fraud in 2020 to thinking you saw the fast food guy dropped your sandwich on the floor, they’re a daily part of life.
But if you ask the kid behind the fast food counter, and he said “Nah bro!” with a smirk, few of us would say “welp, he is the one in the paper hat!”
Yet that is exactly what many do when people wear shiny suits and have makeup and studio lighting, or wear glasses and have “doctor” or an Ivy League school affixed to their name. Those are uniforms – the fast food chain’s paper hat of the modern Oracle we come to for our answers.
Now, we have a POTUS who not just promised but signed Executive Orders demanding the release of some of our favorite Conspiracy Theory subjects: the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK. This same President went on Joe Rogan’s podcast for his last big media appearance before the 2024 Election – a podcast widely known for discussing UFOs, alternate realities, and Bigfoot. So it seems a good time to bring up my position that it is not only in our personal interest, but our ethical duty to be a Conspiracy Theorist.
Let’s review some things we were not only told to accept, but many of us have been threatened with the loss of our jobs if we publicly questioned them:
Epstein Island is a sick right wing fantasy
COVID originated in Bat Soup
That 99 cent masks filter viruses
6 feet safe!
100% safe and effective
That 7-year-olds understand the implications and can consent to having a doctor cut up and rearrange their genitals
Joe Biden was of sound mind
Hunter’s laptop was a fraud
I could go on but I imagine there’s a word limit on this thing (J6, George Floyd, RussiaGate/Steele Dossier, Diddy, Twitter files, and Jussie Smollett – okay I’ll leave it that and let your memories hum… there’s gotta be a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody in there).
The phrase “conspiracy theorist” has been tossed around like hand sanitizer in 2020 – and speaking of COVID, the other popular term flung around is “pseudoscience”.
Mathematician and hyper-rationalist Eric Weinstein refers to this rather brilliantly as “Weaponization of Stigma”. My favorite example of the WoS is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, he proposed that the postpartum infection in new mothers could be drastically reduced by —gasp!— the doctors washing their hands, especially after handling dead bodies.
In his experiments he reduced mortality rates from 18% to 2%, a phenomenal decrease. His reward? Being run out of his profession by other doctors and getting referred to an insane asylum, where he died of septic shock.
His pre-germ theory idea that there were “cadaverous particles” transferring to vulnerable mothers was declared pseudoscience. Never mind his studies, that’s crazy talk! Trust the Science!
This exact concept was also brilliantly dramatized in Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” (I highly recommend Arthur Miller’s wonderful distilled adaptation).. The added element was the local politician being bullied into condemning the scientist because of money, similar to keeping the beaches open in Jaws, but I’m getting away from my point here.
We watched the one of the largest transferals of wealth occur as people living paycheck-to-paycheck and running small businesses got shut down, while pharmaceutical companies and the “approved” big companies made billions.
We watched thousands of medical professionals lose their voices if not their jobs. We watched the science be “settled,” one censored account after another. All the while telling us we were crazy for questioning things… this is the definition of gaslighting.
Now since the Truth is never sharper than when it’s embedded in good comedy, I’d like to share this brilliant bit by Ron Funches:
The key section:
“How do you not believe in conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in ANY conspiracy theories? You just think the government is batting 1.000 and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.”
A social media jokester used AI to create the “painting” on the left, and implied on “X” that it was an eerie premonition of the Trump administration, writing “This 1721 painting by Deitz Nuützen predicted the Trump-Elon-RFK McDonalds dinner.”
How dumb and gullible would someone have to be not to instantly realize that this was a gag? If the whole thing weren’t enough, there’s the name of the artist, “Deitz Nuützen,” as in “Deez Nutz,” web slang for testicles. Never mind, though. The Axis media is so wary of anything that might enhance the image of Trump and his team that even an obvious silly joke had to be factchecked.
Wait, this is the nation we are terrified it snatching U.S. influence abroad?
Once again, a Chinese zoo,the Zibo City amusement park in Shandong province this time, has been exposed as trying to deceive visitors by disguising a common animal as a more exotic one. China’s state-run Global Times confirmed that the zoo had painted donkeys with black and white stripes to make them appear to be zebras…and the disguise was not very well executed either, as the photo above suggests. After initially denying what was laughably obvious, the zoo’s representatives said that the paint job was a “marketing strategy,” and that the park’s “owner did it just for fun.”
This is a habit of Chinese zoos; it isn’t just this one. Two week ago, the Qinhu Bay Forest Animal Kingdom had to admit that what they were exhibiting as a tiger cub was really a painted Chow Chow.
Democrats are apparently seeking the youth vote by talking like vulgar teenagers. Hey, it might work!
I noted that Anderson Cooper, without any serious objection from his employers, CNN, called guest Chris Sununu a “dick” on live TV. Now Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Ca.) has escalated by calling Elon Musk a “dick” during a House hearing on DOGE, aka. the Department of Government Efficiency. Then he went on CNN to smugly defend his uncivil conduct with a string of rationalizations. (Incidentally: talk about “punchable faces!”)
During the hearing, Garcia noted that the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had displayed Hunter Biden’s “dick pics” at a July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing: “I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well.”
Garcia showed a photo of Musk in a tuxedo. Musk is a dick, get it? Then he launched into the current ad hominem talking points the Axis is using to denigrate Trump’s waste, fraud and abuse delegate.
This Comment of the Day from the stellar Harkins household—this is from Ryan Harkins–was just posted three days ago and it seems like eons. It responds to another one of my arguments that sufficient demonstrations of stupidity by lawyers even outside the practice of law should be grounds for disbarment—a suspension isn’t enough, because such a lawyer will not become smarter after a professional “time out.” I think the first time I suggested this reform to legal discipline was when “The View’s” token lawyer, racist Sunny Hostin, suggested that eclipses and earthquakes were caused by climate change. It upsets me just think about the fact that this idiot has a law degree.
A basic and important rule of gun safety, perhaps the preeminent rule, is that you should never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Playing around with a gun in the fashion that Medina did shows a disturbing lack of gun safety in particular, but of the principal normalization of deviance in particular.
To delve into a little bit of brain science, in following the cognitive-emotive-behavioral model, we start with a desire. Perhaps in Medina’s case, it was simply to have fun. But how would he possibly conclude pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun is fun?
There are a large variety of ways we can try to satisfy our desires. In the case of hunger, we could seek satiation from a myriad of venues. In the case seeking stress relief, we could seek out a movie, a game, exercise, or any of a host of other options. But there are options we can choose from that are unhealthy, dangerous, or even illegal. When presented with all these options, our brains experience a byplay between thought and feeling. Does this option satisfy? The emotions clamor for a particular avenue, and cognition weighs the risks and benefits. If I eat a salad, I might not feel satiated, but if I eat a Hardee’s Monster Burger, I’ll be consuming far too many calories. But the salad may not be very tasty, and the Monster Burger is delicious. Whichever way I choose, my brain will record the success or failure of the endeavor, and the next time I am hungry, I will have a precedent to fall back on. They byplay between cognition and emotion in subsequent encounters proceeds much more quickly. The Monster Burger was indeed delicious, filled me up, and I didn’t seem to suffer any negative consequences. So the next time, my brain is patterned to lean toward the Monster Burger because of the positive experience.
Ethics Alarms 