morons

On the Ridiculous “No Kings” Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Late first post again today, for a very good reason: I’ve been researching and pondering what to write about the sad, pathetic, useless (well, maybe not useless, as I will elaborate on later) “No Kings” protests today. It even took me a long time to settled on the most direct and simplest of the myriad hilarious memes on the topic, as you can see above. (Powerline has a bumper crop in its weekly conservative meme collection, here.)

I was originally going to feature a depressing photo posted on Facebook this morning by two of my favorite people, both retired lawyers, both learned, accomplished and intelligent, and catastrophically Trump Deranged. It shows them smiling in a gathering mob of D.C. “No Kings” protesters, as they hold one of the vague protest signs printed up with George Soros’s money. Sure, I was going to blur out their faces, but I don’t want them to take my criticism (or diagnosis) personally. It’s not their fault that they have lost their frickin’ minds. They live in a bubble, they have always been Democrats, they subscribe to the Washington Post, but they had no way of predicting that their powers of critical thinking could ever be so eroded by hate, bias, and misinformation.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files….[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s one of the anti-Musk “exhibits” displayed by Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM). Yes, she’s an Incompetent Elected Official. (I can’t wait for her to scream “Those budget figured don’t add up!”) Yes, she’s an embarrassment. Yes, she’s an idiot. [Special thanks to long, LONG-time commenter Neil Dorr, who informed me who the math genius was.]

Before I proceed, HIT IT, L’il Abner and Marryin’ Sam!

Rueful observations…

1 And they wonder why American trust in our government institutions is falling…

2. If Democrats can’t find a legitimate poll to justify their positions, they just make one up. That is proof right there…

3. Even if that chart were not completely incompetent, dishonest and absurd, how is a poll on what DOGE is doing and has done relevant to anything? All it shows is that the public’s inattentive and gullible consumption of partisan propaganda from news organizations causes it to believe one thing or another. A poll has no bearing on whether a government program or action is wise, effective or necessary.

4. Consider how many government employees had to be lazy, ignorant or stupid (or all three) for that chart to get into the hearing and on TV. We begin with the Congresswoman, of course, then all of her staff and the drones who made the chart.

5. As usual, this is one more indictment of the public school system.

6. The Democrats are doing their damnedest to snatch away the GOP’s longtime title as “The Stupid Party.”

7. The social media wags are having a ball with this one. Example: “I agree with that poll 110%!”

8. Democracy Dies in Cretinism.

Naming Ethics: Your Children Can Suffer For Your Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This one will be short, if not sweet.

A Reddit user shared this baby shower announcement on the sub-reddit devoted to terrible baby names, mostly absurd spellings….but this isn’t a spelling problem:

Yes, the parents are morons.

It seems that they didn’t know about the worst nuclear facility disaster in history, which rendered the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl a veritable ghost town in 1986, In some movies, it’s a zombie town. But the parents just thought it was a pretty name. You know, like “Treblinka.” Or “Malmedy.”

It is unknown at this point whether someone will back Mom and Dad into a corner, slap them silly, and tell them that they cannot stick an innocent child with that name, although naming a child “Chernobyl” is perfectly legal. It did prompt some inspired mockery on Reddit, though.

My favorite: “I guess it’s a nuclear family.”

Psst! Sam Jones! The Idea of Being an “Influencer” Is Not To Influence Stupid People To Be Even More Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I can already tell: this is going to be a Great Stupid day.

And what better way to start it off than to visit the idiot above,Samantha Jones, also known as @samstrays on Instagram? For some ridiculous reason, the American has over 92,000 followers on social media platforms, where she purports to be a wildlife and hunting enthusiast. Below Sam is shown in an earlier incident, molesting what looks like a giant echidna, though maybe Sam is only two feet tall.

Her current infamy, however, has resulted from the incident shown in the photo under the headline, when she recently, while visiting Australia, snatched a baby wombat from the side of a road and ran to her car with the creature’s furious mother in desperate pursuit. After the “influencer” posted the sequence, it sparked an international incident.

“I caught a baby wombat!” Jones says to the camera. “OK, momma’s right there and she is pissed,” Jones adds, as the animal’s mother runs towards her. Jones then put the wombat down and drove away. The footage, which she shared on Instagram, sparked immediate fury in Australia.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong called out the ‘ugly American,’ saying, “It looked pretty dreadful, didn’t it…I think everyone who would have seen that would have thought, ‘leave the baby wombat alone. Leave it with its mum.’” An online petition calling for her deportation from Australia started amassing signatures, as home affairs minister Tony Burke announced that the conditions of Jones’ visa were being reviewed. Reportedly, Jones has left the country before she could be kicked out, deleting the offending video in the process. The Australian Wildlife Rescue Agency WIRES has weighed in to state that separating a baby wombat from its mother is a crime.

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, even got involved. “Maybe she might try some other Australian animals,” he said at a press conference, when asked about the incident. “Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there. Take another animal that can actually fight back rather than stealing a baby wombat from its mother. See how you go there.”

Please, God, don’t let President Trump get involved in this and start a wildlife harassment war. Just have a bunch of birds shower this idiot with droppings, like that scene in “High Anxiety,” or something. Maybe have her social media followers bombarded as well.

Guest Post: An Open Letter To My Progressive Friends…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

by Arthur in Maine

To my progressive friends (and I am proud to have many) who have been posting memes about boycotting on 2/28, I have a suggestion: Stop.

I mean it. Just stop. You’re revealing nothing other than your own ignorance of how money and commerce work. At best, you’re preaching to your own choir and changing no minds. You’re advocating tactics fifty years past their sell-by dates. I know this, because fifty years ago, I was a left-wing activist. We used the same tactics. They made us feel good. They didn’t work then, and they won’t work now.

More to the point, this boycott gag has been tried numerous times since and nothing ever happened. The companies you’re “boycotting” know they’ll get your money anyway, as soon as you need a tank of gas or a basket of cheap groceries. They don’t care when you buy. February 28, March 3, hey – it all fits neatly in the quarterly projections. First quarter, y’all. At minimum, time these things to the last week of a reporting quarter – that might make a minimal dent. Timing it this way is sheer ignorance.

You don’t like Trump? Fine, I get it. I don’t like him either. But consider that a plurality of the country thought that the agenda the Democrats advanced in the last four years is nuts, and voted accordingly. Consider that a plurality of the country rejected the previous administration and its patch job when it was clear that said admin was led by a puppet, and offered up a another puppet to replace him. From my perspective, a plurality of the country said “we may not like Trump, but he’s still better than what we’ve been offered.”

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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.

A “Ripley” For These Morons, A Life Competence Fail Defying Belief…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

23-year-old Ashton Jonathan Mann was arrested on one count of second-degree felony manslaughter and one third-degree felony charge related to firearms for for shooting his friend dead n the early hours of February 2nd. You see, Mann’s friend had boasted that he could dodge bullets. So Mann got a a gun, and with his friend’s assent, decided to test his claim. They thought they had unloaded it—see, the idea was that the guy who could dodge bullets would move before the trigger was pulled. But they missed one bullet that was still in the chamber.

It turned out that he couldn’t dodge a bullet after all. Told ya!

First responders were called to a home in Kearns, Utah to find a young man with a gunshot wound to the chest lying on the floor. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. The shooter waived his Miranda rights and told police that they decided to embark on this experiments after smoking pot for about eight hours. Marijuana is, of course, completely harmless and a benign recreational drug. For example, it facilitates the recreational activity, “Dodge that Bullet!”

As you know, everything remind me of something, and this story reminded me of the strange death of novelist William Burroughs’ wife.

Social Media Doesn’t Make College Kids Act Like Morons—Being Morons Make College Kids Act Like Morons

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

(I’m always happy when I can justify posting a Charles Addams cartoon.)

I’m sure this discouraging episode will somehow make it into the dispute over whether TikTok, which apparently gathers data from millions of Americans to put in the clutches of China’s Dark Masters, should be banned or not. The incident isn’t about TikTok, however.

Apparently there is now a viral TikTok-promoted fad in which people lure suspected sexual predators to some location, lie in wait for them, and either call the police or, for even more fun, beat them up. The “game” is modeled after an unethical vigilante TV reality show on ABC that lasted three seasons; I wrote several posts about it on Ethics Alarms’ now unavailable predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Starring “Dateline” reporter Chris Hanson, the show that aired from 2004-2007 would use the internet and phone calls to lure someone seeking underage sexual companionship to a hidden camera ambush. The entertainment came from watching Hanson walk out from behind a bush and make the sick bastard huminahumina his way into coast-to-coast humiliation. The pre-crime predators who were thus “caught” almost never were convicted of anything.

In Worcester, Massachusetts (that’s pronounced “Wuster,” you Bay State ignoramuses!) students at Assumption University came to the wrong assumption that the “To Catch a Predator” game was a good use of their time. Easton Randall, Kevin Carroll, Isabella Trudeau, Kelsy Brainard, and Joaqin Smith, all 18, decided that a “creepy guy” was a sexual predator, so a female student used dating site Tinder to lure him to where he would think was a meeting place for a hook-up with a 17-year old girl. They had enlisted about 30 other students to lie in wait with them, and the mob chased and assaulted him as the stunt was recorded. Oh, the views it would attract! Randall told police that the idea was to emulate “the Chris Hansen videos where you catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,” but the incident “got out of hand and went bad.”

Ya think?

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Pop Ethics Quiz! What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

…other than “You are an ignorant moron!”?

Ethics Quiz: Dead Influencers

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

How unethical is Nelson Muntz here?

Oscar Wilde, mocking Charles’ Dicken’s “The Old Curiosity Shop,”quipped that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” This was my immediate thought when I read about the drowning deaths of Aline Tamara Moreira de Amorim and Beatriz Tavares da Silva Faria, both Brazilian social media “influencers.”

Sailing in a small vessel in dangerous waters off the coast of San Paulo, the two women, guests at a yacht party, refused to put on life jackets as directed because, the captain said, “They were taking selfies.” Indeed it has been confirmed that at least one of the women shared photos of herself on social media while out at sea. At least one of the women also didn’t know how to swim. “They said that life jackets would get in the way of their tanning,” the captain added.

On the their way back to land from the yacht in a smaller vessel, a large wave washed over the boat. All of the seven passengers survived except the well-tanned influencers.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

At what point, if ever, does one’s reckless and stupid conduct forfeit the privilege of sympathy when it kills you?

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