Jan McGee was the principal at Burns Science and Technology Charter School in Oak Hill, Florida. Everything at the school of about 1,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade was going swimmingly until Jan ended up in a long-running online friendship with Elon Musk, or so she thought.
I know how exciting it can be suddenly having a famous celebrity billionaire contacting you and emerging as your pal: I once was emailed by this cool Nigerian prince.
—Emily Kohrs, the foreperson of the Atlanta grand jury that investigated Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims for the past eight months.
Kohrs was asked, “What did you personally want to hear from the former President?” by her MSNBC inteviewer, as Kohrs supported subpoenaing Trump for alleged crimes. Giggling , that was her reply.
And she didn’t even realize how ludicrous the answer made her, the inquiry and our justice system appear. You can see the video here. I’ll be on the nearest bridge, pinning a note to my Red Sox warm-up jacket and preparing to leap to my death.
Thrilled with her proverbial 15 minutes of fame, this juvenile fool—who, I will repeat just to maybe get some company on that lonely bridge—personally supported subpoenaing a former President of the United States as part of an investigation into potential criminal wrongdoing because she thought it would be “really cool” to get to swear him in—has been giving babbling, borderline illegal interviews to CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, teasing reporters by almost breaching grand jury confidentiality, and maybe doing so. “Why this person is talking on TV, I do not understand,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “She’s clearly enjoying herself. Is this responsible?”
…unless, of course, we should have compassion and empathy for unapologetic, self-destructive idiots like Anaya Peterson.
Peterson is a mother of five and—KABOOM!—a law student, but nonetheless thought it would be a good idea to get her eyes tattooed. After all, Australian model Amber Luke tattooed her eyes a vivid blue and only went blind for three weeks! That was good enough for Peterson, whose seven-year-old daughter cautioned her that the procedure was too risky. “What if you go blind?” the kid asked? Oh pshaw, Mom answered; adults know best.
Now it looks as if Mother may go blind after all. “I don’t have 20/20 vision anymore. From a distance, I can’t see features on faces,” Peterson told the media. “If I didn’t have my eyeballs tattooed, I wouldn’t be having this problem. Even today I woke up with more floaters in my eyes. And that is dangerous.” Continue reading
I watched the 1998 film “A Simple Plan” again last night, and as usual with movies I see several times, I noticed some details and themes that eluded me in previous viewing. This is an ethics film, and one that would support a seminar, yet virtually none of the reviews of “A Simple Plan” mention ethics at all. That is to be expected, since ethics isn’t on Hollywood’s radar or that of 99% of the participants in the film industry, including reviewers. Checking the archives, I discovered that I mentioned the movie in an ethical context three times, but never seriously examined the film itself.
“A Simple Plan,” based on a novel by the same name, stars Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton as the very different Mitchell bothers in rural Minnesota, Hank (Paxton) and Jacob (Thornton) who, along with Jacob’s friend Lou discover a crashed private plane in a snowy field. Along with the dead pilot, the wreck contains over $4 million in cash.
The simple plan of the title is the three men’s decision to take the money, hold on to it until the plane is discovered, and then divide it up afterwards if nobody is looking for the cash. Hank, the only one of the three with firing neurons, initially wants to report the crash and the cash, obviously the legal, safe and ethical course, but allows his genial but dim-witted brother and his habitually drunk friend convince him to try the “plan.”
This illustrates at least nine vital ethics lessons right up front:
More than a decade ago, while I was the artistic director for a Northern Virginia professional theater I had co-founded, I offered the greater D.C. theater association a draft ethics code that I had developed after I realizes that the ethics alarms of the typical area theater professional were approximately the same as those of the average drug cartel boss. The response was telling: I received a formal thank-you, but was told that the theater community had no interest in ethics, and had done just fine without any code.
This attitude is not unique to Washington D.C. and environs, or regional theater. Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.
From the world of professional performing, for example, we have this controversy, arising from the announcement that actor James Franco (far left), a Portugese-Swedish-Jewish American, has been cast as Fidel Castro in a film project, and celebrated Hispanic actor John Lequizamo (on the right) was outraged over the casting choice. “How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” Leguizamo wrote. “No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement which would b wrong!”
As you can see, the actor was so upset that he lost the ability to communicate in coherent English.
A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should referred to “involuntary relocation” in second grade social studies sessions.
I supposed it’s nice that conservatives are back to mastering the “it isn’t what it is” trick, this one the variation known as “it wasn’t what it was.” Lately it’s the Left’s cover words that have been most in evidence, like “choice” for abortion, and “gun safety,” when what they mean is “gun ownership restrictions.” Then there is “equity, diversity and inclusion” for “racial preferences” and “restorative justice” which really means “letting criminals get away with slaps on the wrist for serious crimes so they can prey on their communities again but at least there won’t be ‘over-incarceration.'”
All of these (and so many more) used by the Left and Right—never forget “enhanced interrogation” “rendition,” and “detainees” (you know: prisoners without trials forever)— are base deceit designed to deceive—-in other words, lies.
Lying to kids, however, is especially despicable. Slavery was not “involuntary relocation” any more than it was “free room and board” or “Community singing.” Those “educators”( a working group of nine, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) have revealed their absolute lack of fitness for their jobs, for mis-education is the opposite of education. They should apply to be White House press secretaries. Or New York Times op-ed writers. Fire them. Parents? Are you paying attention?
“The board — with unanimous consent — directed the work group to revisit that specific language,” Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education said in a statement. Board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat, said that the proposed wording is not a “fair representation” of the slave trade.
Ya think?
Does this look like “relocation” to you?
__________________
Pointer: Curmie
—Kim Sill, founder of the Shelter Hope Pet Shop in Thousand Oaks, California in her shop’s weekly newsletter.
Pro tip for Kim: if you are going to say something really stupid and offensive in public, at least do it grammatically.
Other than that, this obnoxious, virtue-signalling Constitutional scholar is informing all that she wants to tear down a crucial support-beam in the entire democratic structure of the United States. While discrimination on the basis of political affiliations and viewpoints is not forbidden under civil rights and public accommodation laws, it is a surefire way to guarantee civil unrest and a society that is divided and miserable in which to live. The pet store’s bigotry—and that’s what it is, bigotry—violates the spirit of the First Amendment and the well-established formula for a fair and open society.
But never mind, Kim knows best.
Here is the rest of her screed: Continue reading
Vice-President Kamala Harris, babbling on about something or other.
I had foolishly assumed that nothing this idiot could say at this point would make my head explode, but that quote did it. Her existence as the #2 elected official in the United States is a profound embarrassment to the nation, the public and the democratic system.
That such a clueless dolt was chosen purely because of her gender and race insults that gender and those ethnic communities unintentionally complicit in her creation.
That the news media refused to enlighten the public about just how incompetent she is proves its uselessness.
That Harris and her supporters have the astounding cheek to cry “racism” if criticism is aimed her way, when she routinely insults the public by presuming that first-grade level verbal pablum is good enough to feed them because she doesn’t have the capacity to offer anything better, impugns everyone responsible for her presence in place of someone minimally responsible and trustworthy.
This hilarious story of an epic Ethics Dunce immediately reminded me of the classic Charles Addams cartoon above.
Jumi Bello, 30, was making the finishing touches on her debut novel “The Leaving,” scheduled to be released this summer, but after she disclosed to her publisher that she had expropriated material from other sources, the book was pulled. Bello then wrote a personal essay on the website Literary Hub explaining how her plagiarism came about. The novel was about a young black woman’s unplanned pregnancy. Bello wrote that she had never been pregnant and searched for descriptions of the experience on the web.
“I tell myself I’m just borrowing and changing the language,” Bello wrote in the essay, which was supposed to be a cautionary tale for other writers who might rationalize plagiarism. “I tell myself I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.”
After the essay was published, writers and publications such as Gawker, pointed out that Bello’s essay about plagiarism also had unethically used the writings of others without attribution. Yes, her essay about plagiarism was plagiarized.
Literary Hub removed the essay and said in a statement, “Because of inconsistencies in the story and, crucially, a further incident of plagiarism in the published piece, we decided to pull the essay.” But wait! There’s more! She plagiarized from a website about plagiarism! Jonathan Bailey, who writes the website Plagiarism Today, wrote that Bello’s essay “included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago.”
What an idiot.
And she can quote me.
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Pointer and Facts: New York Times.
I know the maxim is that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but how do you explain this? It appears to be an example of a total fool leading the slightly less foolish.
What’s going on here? Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 