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

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“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

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

From the state that gave us Joe Biden we have this proud incompetent, who had been the Democrats’ chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.Why does the U.S. have a dangerous National Debt? People who think like Senator Coons. That is, badly.

During an interview yesterday on CNN, Michael Smerconish asked Coons about the DOGE revelations regarding USAID’s bizarre waste of funds and Trump’s determination to shut the agency down. Here was the Senator’s defense of spending $20 million to have “Sesame Street” broadcast in Iraq:

“This isn‘t just funding a kids’ show for children, millions of children in countries like Iraq,” Coons said. “It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health, helps prevent kids from dying from dysentery and disease and helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS, extremism and terrorism. And to your point, it‘s pennies on the dollar. The U.S. Department of Defense has an annual budget of about $850 billion. USAID was spending about $30 billion. It is a small proportion of our total federal spending. And as [political scientist Joseph Nye] would often say, it‘s not just soft power, it‘s smart power.”

Smart. Wow. I hear Inigo calling…

The former Children’s Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop (SW), is in desperate straits because its HBO gig is over and it is no longer carried by PBS. The ridiculous 20 million taxpayer bucks USAID sends to Iraq of all places—Why not Zimbabwe? Why not Tierra del Fuego? Why not Antarctica?—is classic government waste for objectives that make dim members of the public say, “Awwwww!” It is impossible to ever cut government spending and address the snowballing debt with fools like Coons having any say in our budget and expenditures. It doesn’t help that so many Americans think “It’s Ok to waste X dollars because we waste so much more elsewhere.”

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Thomas Jefferson (1819)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“[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.

Whoa…I’m having an attack of deja vu..

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Now THIS Guy Might Have a Good Reason to Try “The Pazuzu Excuse”…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I couldn’t pass up posting on this story.

As regular EA readers know, individuals, especially celebrities and elected officials, are found guilty here of resorting to the Pazuzu Excuse, named after that potty-mouthed demon who possessed poor Regan (Linda Blair) in “The Exorcist,” when they attempt to avoid accountability for their own words or behavior by saying, usually in a groveled apology, “That wasn’t the real me! I’ve never believed in saying/doing such horrible things!”

The incident of interest occurred on November 21, 2024. As he participated in a tour of the relic of St. Jude’s at the Queen of Apostles parish in Joliet, Illinois, Catholic priest Carlos Martins, the co-host of “The Exorcist Files” podcast, began behaving…. strangely. Father Martins “grabbed the hair” of a 13-year-old girl, placed it “in his mouth” and used it in a “flossing motion,” according to the criminal complaint. Then he sat behind the teenager girl and started “growling.” That’s Father Martins with his friends above.

His conduct prompted the immediate suspension of the tour, and police were summoned. The Diocese of Joliet staff confronted the priest and told him that “he must depart from our parish and out of our Diocese.” “In an abundance of caution, the veneration of the relic and evening mass were canceled,” the diocese said in a release.

That seems prudent.

Martins was processed by the Joliet Police Department, arraigned, and released awaiting his pretrial hearing. The Companions of the Cross, the religious order that Treasures of the Church is affiliates with, said Martins has agreed to withdraw from his pastoral duties in the wake of the allegations against him.

“He remains entitled to due process, as is any accused,” the church said. “The Companions of the Cross look upon allegations of misconduct as an urgent matter that requires serious attention. We pray for all those who are affected by this painful situation.” The Archdiocese of Detroit now lists Father Martins as “Ministry revoked.”

To be fair, Martins’ associates said that he has always been obsessive about flossing. All right, I made that part up. Sorry.

The attorney representing Martins, Marcella Burke, denied the accusations against her client, telling reporters, “Your mothers suck cocks in Hell!” and adding, “Why you do this to me, Dimmy?”

Okay, I was just kidding about those quotes too. What she really said was,”He did not put anyone’s hair in his mouth, let alone ‘floss’ with a student’s hair or ‘growl’ among other completely false and repulsive accusations. This remains a takedown of a good priest and an attempted shakedown of the Church.”

What’s going on here? I have absolutely no idea. I will opine that it must violate some code of ethics for an exorcist to growl at a teenage girl in church.