Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt has a bright future ahead of him, but it is brighter now because his manager, Pat Murphy taught him a lesson about what it means to be a professional in general and a Major League Baseball player in particular.
As you can see in the video, Pratt hit what looked like an easily caught pop-up in the fifth-inning of last night’s game against the New York Mets, so he jogged down the baseline more slowly than Pete Rose used to run to first after a base on balls. The Mets, because they stink this year, managed to mess up the play and the ball dropped in for what would have been a double if the kid had been running hard. Standing on first, he looked surprised to see that Murphy was replacing him with a pinch-runner, pulling him off the field in an old-school public rebuke for unprofessional play.
A Facebook “influencer” whom I had never heard of before somehow invaded my Facebook feed with this:
“All the news channels yesterday were full of tributes to Dolly Parton. Of course, it’s sad that she died and I was aware of many of the wonderful things other than the music and performances she gave us. What surprised me was how refreshing it was to see this in review against the against the constant chronicle of the cruel, corrupt, inane, buffoonish, disgusting lying narcissist who is usually dominating the news.”
I responded that he needs to get help, because being compelled to express hatred for the President of the United States in discussing completely unrelated topics is the definitive symptom of crippling Trump Derangement. I expect his post to attract dozens of “likes” and “loves.”
“[T]he majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
—-Justice Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, again putting into black-and-white her intolerable political bias and lack of judicial decorum in her dissent to the 6-3 majority SCOTUS decision, a 10-page, unsigned opinion staying an injunction by a federal judge against the implementation of President Trump’s executive order imposing restrictions on mail-in voting.
I won’t pretend to know enough about the substantive law underlying the majority decision, and after trying to read Justice Jackson’s seemingly endless dissent, my brain hurts. However, I can say with ethical certainty that a judge who is automatically inclined to ascribe sinister motives to an elected President’s actions should be disqualified from weighing in on any controversy regarding those actions.
I read Trump’s EO regarding mail-in ballots as consistent with his oath of office and the definition of his powers under the Constitution. Mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of Federal elections and therefore the Constitution itself. There are limits to state sovereignty in determining election regulations and procedures, something Justice Jackson refuses to acknowledge. Gee, I wonder why only 23 states have challenged the EO. Which states might they be?
Elsewhere in her “War and Peace”-length dissent, Jackson complains that the claim that mail-in ballots risk election integrity hasn’t been proven. In fact, some courts have taken judicial notice of the fact, and it is a fact and an obvious fact, that mail-in ballots are unacceptably vulnerable to fraud. But I digress. The ethics issue now is that a Supreme Court Justice begins her analysis of an Executive Branch controversy with the biased presumption that the President of the United States is not pursuing what he believes is in the best interests of the nation under the Constitution. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has again demonstrated that she is a dangerous blight on the Court, the Separation of Powers, and the functioning of U.S. constitutional government.
As you must know by now unless you have been in a submerged submarine with a broken communications system like the one in “Crimson Tide,” Dolly Parton died yesterday at 80. Why her death is being described as a shock is a mystery: as my father said when he hit 80, “It’s the Red Zone, son. I can kick off any second from here on!” Nonetheless, the public and official outpouring of grief, love and admiration is unlike anything we’ve seen at least since Princess Diana’s demise in 1997.
The tectonic reaction is certainly not based on Dolly’s singing, acting or song-writing. Personally, I was never a fan; Dolly’s singing voice always sounded to me like someone who has inhaled helium. Her songs were pleasant but unremarkable to my ear. As an actress, I place Dolly Parton in the large category of experienced public performers who can project their own personalities effectively into roles and stories where their personalities seem appropriate, a diverse group that ranges from the late Fred Thompson to the late Bob Newhart to the not-quite-late Ringo Starr.
Clearly, the reason Dolly is being mourned so vigorously is that her public persona was entirely benign, virtuous and lovable, even aggressively so. She literally gave nobody any reason not to like her. In 2020, as the Great Stupid was grabbing American society by the throat, Hollywood producer Rob Long wrote an appreciation of Dolly in “Commentary” exploring her universal popularity. He wrote in part,
Is it stupid woke Halloween controversy season already? Sadly, it is.
Target removed a Halloween clown costume from its website and presumably its stores after social media mobs claimed that it was racist, evoking blackface and minstrel shows. As we know, companies are infamous weenies any time the race card is played against them, and virtually always grovel an apology. Thus Target sobbed on social media this week,
“An apology from us: We removed an offensive Halloween costume that should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer for sale. As a company, we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and we are looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”
I am strongly inclined to view this as another “Gotcha!” exercise from the race-obsessed. Talk about a case of “If you hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog” ! Let’s see: what aspect of the costume evokes blackface or minstrelsy? Did blackface performer swear orange costumes like that? Noooo. Did they wear black gloves on their hands? No! Did they wear little clown hats? Ruffles around their necks like Bozo? Also no. So what exactly creates the “minstrel show” vibe?It’s the fact that Target hired a black kid to model the costume! Put a white child in that thing and it looks like what it is: a clown costume.
Let me get this straight: Admirably, Target doesn’t see racist images at every turn, and hired a black model, when it should have hired a white model because the black kid made race-obsessed victim-mongers think of blackface. That wasn’t blackface, that was a child’s black face!
Is it the smile that’s the problem? You know, evoking this…
…? Again, it’s the actual black face wearing that smile that triggered the easily race-triggered. As for the smile , which the race-hustler think deliberately evokes “Mr. Bones” above, it is a creepy, killer clown smile, as worn by the murderous clown in Season 4 of “American Horror Story”…
Does that character evoke blackface and minstrel shows?
We are never going to get out from under the iron boot of race hustlers until companies and celebrities stop capitulating to race-baiting like this. On the other side of this ugly coin, what realistic, sound business options did Target have? Well, it could have asked whether its critics want the company to discriminate against black models. It could have educated the public and its customers about what is and isn’t blackface and minstrel imagery. It could have put a warning in the constume’s package, “Do not buy if your kid is black. The Woke and wonderful will think he’s in blackface.”
Or is this another example of the ditty, “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong”? If standing on principle loses a company sales and public support, is it ethical?
Your Ethics Alarms Early Halloween Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was Target right to apologize and pull the offending costume?
In Allegheny County Pennsylvania, the murder trial of SafonGump ( I swear that’s his real name) ended in a mistrial last week because a juror smoked or vaped marijuana in the jury room during a lunch break and the judge was unable to determine who.
Here I must interject my obligatory “I told you so!” note regarding my long-time insistence that legalizing pot after indoctrinating the public with the false message that it was harmless would prove to be a cultural and societal disaster undermining health, children’s socialization, the family, the economy, the workplace and more. All is unfolding as I foresaw, and it wasn’t all that difficult a prediction to reach either.
The selection of 12 jurors and two alternates had been completed and the jury empaneled as the prosecution called its first two witnesses. The judge adjourned the trial for lunch, but when court staff arrived at the jury room to release the jurors, the smell of marijuana was unmistakable. Smoking and vaping are not allowed in the Allegheny County Courthouse, and worse, all of the jurors had answered the question on their questionnaires about whether they were taking any medications that could impact your ability to sit on the jury had checked “no.”
The judge called each juror into his chambers and asked if he or she had been toking. He even summoned an additional criminal defense attorney to sit in to ensure that the jurors’ Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination would be protected. That was unnecessary, because it had been agreed that no charges would be filed against the pot-puffing juror: everybody just wanted to ensure the integrity of the trial. The defense attorney, however, sounds like a woke, drug-loving jerk. “You have all of these privacy issues you have to worry about,” he told reporters.“The last thing we want to do is embarrass someone.”
I have three substantial posts to get up already this morning, but the swirl of billable time and EA time had me a bit scattered. Here are a few flickers from the neurons that are early risers:
For some reason, traffic here was way up all day yesterday, and I have no clue why or whether a particular topic was driving it. Theories welcome.
On the other hand, as Captain Hook never would say, I find the lack of interest in this post puzzling. 1) Arbitration is routine in so many disputes now, and the system, and the arbitrators, are untrustworthy. Attention should be paid, and 2) the arbitrator’s decision at the heart of the essay is particularly indefensible, blocking a major newspaper from firing a partisan, racist hack who lied in a social media post because—lying and being a racist (anti-white, of course) is not sufficient cause to fire an opinion columnist?
The personal mission I alluded to on Sunday took up most of the day, caused me to miss two deadlines, aggravated an injury to my ankle and left me exhausted. Never mind. A little dog found her “forever home” (why that cheesy phrase gets me all choked up is a long-running embarrassment, but I can’t help it) and my sibling has been the happiest I have seen since her very first dog perished over a year ago. The Power of the Dog.
On gross baseball nick-names: the Seattle Mariners catcher, Cal Raleigh, is called “The Big Dumper.” The Mariners broadcasters love to use it, presumably because their maturity level is at the approximate level of a 12-years-old. For some reason, Seattle seems to like such snicker-inspiring monikers. The Mariners also originated the nickname for 6’10” Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson: “The Big Unit.” Yes, that meant exactly what you’re thinking. Ew.
This:
True gaslighting, and another fake protest, like the “No Kings” nonsense. Sharpton and his Axis allies don’t want to “protect the vote,” they want to keep elections vulnerable to fraud and fixing.
Can you believe that quote? Astounding, unreal, incredible. (As a side note, what the heck is the New England Journal of Medicine doing publishing an article about a Cambridge University scamster given a position on the faculty based mostly on his color and secondarily on his transparently fantastic biographical claims and stolen scholarship?)
Doll’s statement literally stands for the elimination of integrity, merit, honesty and accountability as core standards of Western civilization, replacing them with…what, exactly? Feelings? Artificial virtue? Group-based advancement?
I suppose this chart…
.
..helps explain how a medical journal author would write such crap, but it doesn’t explain what overdose of cracked ideology, indoctrination, group-think and incipient brain rot was necessary to get us to this point.
As I have already written here a few times, I am sick of the Arday story, but we cannot be sick of what it signifies because it is too important to ignore. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, “One cannot honestly defend Arday either for his deceptions or his apparent suicide. And, in fact, no one really is. What the protesters and petitioners are doing is defending themselves. University administrators, professors, writers, and other liberals are out in the streets screaming at the press for revealing the depths of elite academia’s racism, gullibility, and dishonesty. They’re focusing on the media to take themselves out of the spotlight.”
Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.
The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.
Oh, really?
In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:
Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).
Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.
The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.
To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,
“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”
But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.
I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.
There has been so much weird, impulsive, counter-intuitive and counter-factual support for frauds, knaves and evil-doers on the ideological left that I have had a hard time keeping up with it—or maybe my brain is just rejecting what it regards as bad juju. An astounding number of young Democratic-Socialists lionize Luigi Mangione, who shot an insurance exec in the back in an alley. Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, now the Michigan Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly expressed his approval of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I have several Trump-Deranged friends who would have sent flowers of thanks to any of the recent failed assassins whose target was President Trump. The support for Jason Arday and his sanctification as a victim is also part of the trend.
But this latest example is special. Hundreds of women, dressed in pink, protested last week outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts to show their support for Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse being tried for the murdered her three young children.
The mob wore shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defense now is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Okay. That’s the defense’s job in a case like this, and surely any mother who would murder her own kids, or any children for that matter, has a strong argument that she was legally insane. However, in 1994 when Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, by strapping them in their car seats, and rolling her car into a lake, there was no such public sympathy for her. The defense’s insanity defense was rejected by the jury.
Social media, of course, is part of the difference, and the Clancy episode may stand as a perfect example of how the internet warps values, perception and ethics. The murderous mother’s sympathizers have followed the livestreamed trial daily, often analyzing witness testimony in real time. TikTok has viral videos with legends like “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” often showing the poster holding her own infant. (I would think such videos justify visist from child protective services.) “I Stand With Lindsay” merchandise—shirts, hats, stickers, mugs, socks and bags —-are being sold on line. A GoFundMe established for Clancy’s parents had 31,000 contributions by the end of last week, raising over a million dollars.
This woman murdered her children, remember, and there is evidence that she planned it; she didn’t just “snap.”
So Ethics Alarms has to ask the threshold question to begin an inquiry into so many ethics problems: “What’s going on here?”
Ethics Alarms 