apologies

Oh Dear! Patti Lupone Took My Advice and Now Broadway Wants Her “Cancelled”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the silly–but instructive—Broadway feud between diva Patti Lupone and performer Kecia Lewis, who is black, and who has received some accolades herself. Lewis was starring in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical about the life and career of Alicia Keys in a theater that shared a wall with the theater featuring “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and LuPone. The amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” at two points in the musical could be heard by the audience LuPone’s show, so LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at those points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. (The producer of “The Roommate”should have handled that, but Patti has power and influence and has never been shy about using them.) “Hell’s Kitchen” complied. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

But Lewis decided to play the race card, because that’s what so many of the Woke of Color have been taught to do, because it works. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for supposedly engaging in race-based “microagressions.” I wrote in “Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis ‘Oh, Bite Me!’” that I was ” hoping against hope that LuPone, who is the epitome of a diva (as this Ethics Alarms post demonstrates), either issues an emphatic “Bite Me!” to Lewis or ignores her completely as not worthy of attention from Patti’s perch on Broadway Olympus. Lewis is the racist here; she is the one who is stereotyping a white performer as insensitive and dismissive.”

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UPDATE: “Gee What a Surprise. Britney Griner’s Unethical…At Least” Is Based on a Hoax And Is Officially Retracted

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sorry.

The post about Britney Griner being caught betting on her own team’s games was improvidently posted. It was based on an entry on a suspicious website that I should have investigated further than I did.

I’ve been caught before, though not recently. This time it was confirmation bias that got me: I think Griner is a grifter and Ethics Villain, and was obviously (note the title) predisposed to believe the worst. As several commenter have noted, the report I was relying on didn’t make sense, but it was also, as web hoaxes often are, not sufficiently clever to tip me off that it was intended as satire. As Ethics Alarms has stated repeatedly, false stories on teh web should be flagged as such or are unethical. And despicable. I hate them to pieces.

So, here come the apologies: I apologize to Britney, readers here, the WNBA and anyone who was fooled by my carelessness and stupidity. I had an unusually busy morning, was distracted and tired from a bad night, and should have waited until I was in a more competent state of mind.

Let that be a lesson to me. And you. And everyone.

%$!@#$!

I‘m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” “kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

***

Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.

Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”

WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”

Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.

Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.

__________________

Pointer: JutGory

Gee What a Surprise. Britney Griner’s Unethical…At Least

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

This post is officially retracted.

Here.

[From the retraction: “I’m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” ‘“‘kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.'”]

***

Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.

Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”

WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”

Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.

Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.

__________________

Pointer: JutGory

Ethics Observations on a Hollywood Controversy I Could Not Possibly Care Less About

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This story gets a Kaufman, the Ethics Alarms label for a topic that rates George S. Kaufman’s famous assessment of his interest in Fifties crooner Eddie Fisher’s difficulties finding younger women to date. (Eddie, you may recall, was the husband Elizabeth Taylor divorced to hook up with Richard Burton, and who earlier, with Debbie Reynolds, fathered Carrie Fisher.) Kaufman said, when posed with Fisher’s dilemma on a TV panel show,

“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

And yet there have been dozens of news stories and social media posts about the current story, and I feel compelled to comment.

“Emilia Pérez” is a 2024 Spanish-language “French musical crime comedy” about a Mexican cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear so that she may transition into a woman. [Comment: Well, other movies with insane premises have managed to be good…] At the 97th Academy Awards, “Emilia Pérez” will have 13 nominations, including Best Picture. Karla Sophia Gascón, who plays the cartel leader, is the first openly trans woman to be nominated as Best Actress.

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On President Biden’s Unethical Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Barack Obama was the all-time champion of cynical, politically motivated Presidential “apologies.” It’s election time, though: the Democrats are in trouble, and clearly some bright propagandist assisting those faceless apparatchiks pulling poor Joe’s strings suggested that what the hell, it couldn’t hurt to have Biden grovelling to Native Americans right now.

It was a loud and angry grovel: Joe was shouting into the mic for some reason, telling the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona in part,

“The federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened, until today. I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize. I have a solemn responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native people. It’s long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there’s no excuse this apology took 50 years to make….One of the most horrific chapters of the American history. We should be ashamed. The vast majority of Americans don’t know about it.” 

Bite me. Biden probably didn’t know about it until he was told that he was making the speech. This was his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation in his four-year term. Gee, what a coinkydink that it came right before an election! He should be ashamed to engage in such obvious pandering, but the shame threshold of his party is at an all-time high right now. Have you noticed?

Let’s look at everything wrong with this “apology”:

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Just To Be Clear: RayGun’s Apology Isn’t an Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It isn’t even a non-apology apology.

Littlemore than two weeks ago, both Curmie and I wrote about the ridiculous “RayGun,” aka. Rachel Gunn, who made a travesty of the Olympics breakdancing event (which was arguably a travesty from its inception anyway) and who may have rigged the Oceana competition to represent Australia in order to get a free trip to Paris in exchange for making an ass of herself.

Now, apparently sensing that her metaphorical 15 minutes of infamy was expiring, she’s in the news again for issuing what the ethically-inert news media is terming an “apology.” In an interview with the Australian current affairs show “The Project” the 37-year-old university lecturer said this week that she is “very sorry for the backlash that the [break-dancing] community has experienced” following her performance.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

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Ethics Quiz: That Apple IPad Pro Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Filmmakers, musicians, writers and other artists began whining about that ad above for the Apple iPad Pro from almost the second it was released. As Sonny and Cher warble one of their lesser efforts, “All I Ever Need is You,” a hydraulic press crushes musical instruments, cameras, a framed picture, paint cans, record albums and other stuff in a colorful explosion of chaos.

“The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley,” tweeted actor Hugh Grant. “Who needs human life and everything that makes it worth living? Dive into this digital simulacrum and give us your soul. Sincerely, Apple,” added “Men in Black” screenwriter Ed Solomon. There were lots more metaphorical squeals of indignation and alarm on social media, as
“creative people” accused Apple of gloating over how Big Tech is co-opting the traditional tools of art and on the verge of eliminating the human creativity with artificial intelligence.

So, naturally, as is the norm these days, Apple “assumed the position” and groveled an apology. Pledging that Apple would never run the ad on TV again, Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, said, “Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world.” The statement continued, “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Seriously?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Oh, lots of things: Is there anything unethical about that ad? Do its critics have a legitimate point? Should Apple have caved to their complaints? Was that apology sincere?

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Ethics Quiz: The Star’s Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Last month, actress Susan Sarandon became a deserving casualty of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck after she spoke at at a pro-Palestinian rally and said that American Jews feeling threatened by the pro-Hamas protesters, demonstrators and rioters (like the Cornell students who had to hide in their dorms)were “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” This epically stupid comment got her dropped by United Talent Agency, whose management is Jewish. As I noted here, “the agency concluded, probably accurately, that Sarandon’s comments diminished her value to them, and perhaps having a pro-terrorism client might deter more rational artists from seeking their aid.”

Apparently Sarandon, who has progressed through her romantic lead stage into and out of her mother role stage and now is getting grandmother parts isn’t quite ready to hang up her acting spurs, and decided that she had made a potential career-ending mistake that needed fixing. So she has now issued this apology:

Your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of December is…

Is her apology sincere, trustworthy, and sufficient?

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“When Is The Best Apology The Worst Apology?”….The Trilogy! Plus An Addition To The Apology Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Unbelievable! Never did I suspect, when I wrote the post about the ridiculous, racist, vicious terrorism-supporting professor Mika Tosca, that her insultingly insincere and dishonest apology would become the model for Jew-haters now crawling out of the ooze of 2023 corrupt progressivism. And yet…here we are! This morning I posted about Beverly Hills doctor Andrew Thierry, who posted on on Instagram that “Zionists are gynocidal, demonic, greedy, pedophilic retards,” and then expected us to believe that his words were misunderstood, and he was sorry for that. Now we learn that, to channel the doomed character Randy in the “Scream” films, that we aren’t merely dealing with an ethics horror sequel, but a trilogy. For Cornell University history professor Russell Rickford, who said that he was ”exhilerated” over Hamas killing babies, children and civilians in its October 6 sneak terrorist attack and taking hostages too, is now trying to apologize…because he senses that his job might be in jeopardy. So he’s lying.

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