The Impeachment Clause in the U.S. Constitution was written by the Founders to create an emergency “Get Rid of a Rogue President (or other high Federal official) Free Card,” to be used in a bid-partisan process featuring due process, hearings and a trial. The Democrats cynically used the process as part of their undemocratic and ruinous campaign to make it impossible for the elected President to govern, because he had committed the unforgivable sin of blocking Hillary Clinton’s rose-strewn path to the White House. Like the fake, Hillary and Obama engineered Russian collusion hoax (and in Trump’s second term, the J-6 kangaroo hearings in the House, both of Trump’s impeachments were contrived, politically motivated, and Constitutionally indefensible. The damage was done, the precedent set. Impeachment is now toothless; the Founders’ metaphorical safety valve is done. What once was framed as cooperative, bi-partisan inquiry to be triggered by genuine abuses of power is now just another toothless and corrupt tool of political warfare. Good job, everybody!
Rep. Thomas Massie(R-KY), on the way out after losing the primary for his seat earlier this year, filed eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this week.
The most famous and, clearly, most amazing Major League Baseball player—also the highest paid, by far—is the LA Dodgers’ two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani. From his days as a Japanese baseball star, Ohtani has been both an all-star level starting pitcher and a superior batter. He insisted on being allowed to continue pitching every five days and being in the lineup the rest of the time as a condition of signing with a U.S. team. In his ten years in the Majors, Ohtani has performed feats unmatched in the history of baseball, including the legendary game in last year’s National League Championship Series in which he pitched six scoreless innings, striking out 10 batters and allowing just a two hits against the Milwaukee Brewers and went 3-for-3 with three home runs at the plate, outhitting the Brewers single-handedly.
Only one player before Ohtani had the ability to do that: Babe Ruth, widely regarded as the greatest baseball player of all. For the Boston Red Sox Babe was a Hall of Fame-caliber pitcher who also appeared to be one of the best hitters in the league until he was sold to the New York Yankees. They made Babe give up pitching on the theory that an everyday superstar at the plate was more valuable than an ace pitcher even in the days when pitchers could start every third day and pitch complete games. The second part of the theory was that no athlete’s body would stand up to the rigors of pitching and being in the line-up every day.
That’s New Zealander Jamie Beaton above, posing for photos during graduation days at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, and King’s College, London. He’s the subject of a profile in the New York Times (gift link), chronicling his status as a “perpetual student.”
“A 5-foot-6 personification of naked ambition whose LinkedIn profile has been the subject of memes and Reddit threads, Beaton has gone to the head of a rarefied class — perpetual students,” the Times relates. “If he continues collecting advanced degrees at such a swift pace, he will surpass Benjamin B. Bolger, who has racked up 16 at age 50. He might even beat Michael Nicholson, an octogenarian forever scholar with more than 30 degrees to his name.”
With me, this resonates exactly like the Guinness Book of Records item about the only man to eat a whole automobile. One of my favorite oddball baseball players and historical figures was Moe Berg, a man who spoke Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, had degrees from Princeton and Columbia (in law), read ten newspapers a day and put all those skills to work playing major league baseball as a third-string catcher, never married, never owned a home, never started a business or earned a regular salary after retiring from the game. Beaton is more productive than that (arguably: Moe was recruited as a spy during World War II), but I still regard spending so much time and money accumulating academic credentials as pathological.
On the other side of the argument, of course, is the refrain of The Animals: “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want!” I endorse such autonomy and eccentricity, but still find the spectacle of someone with obvious ability, talent and work ethic spending so much of it on himself rather than the betterment of society, creation, and leadership as less than admirable.
At my undergraduate school, there were notable permanent students, mostly chubby middle-aged bachelors who arrived as undergrads, proceeded to graduate school, kept adding degrees, chased Masters and PhDs and never left the academic womb. They became “resident advisors” or “resident scholars” in the Harvard House system. They all gave me the impression that if they walked off the campus they would crumble to dust like vampires in sunlight.
I have an unmarried nephew who is 37, unmarried, and has been living in a university town for more than a decade as he pursues an elusive PhD. He does some teaching at the school, but he is, or was, a lively, funny, brilliant young man who had so many options after he graduated from college. As I increasingly regard higher education, in its current state of rot, a blight on American society, the phenomenon of the perpetual student seems increasingly indefensible, or at least tragic.
The recent discussion on the uselessness, and hence unethical nature, of advocating the impossible sent me back to Immanuel Kant. All Kant did was think and write: in 1795 he decided to muse about how there could be an end to war. Kant was not one to accept “Do something!”; he would always try to figure out what would or might accomplish the desired result. Of course, being a philosopher, he left it to others to execute his plan for the betterment of humanity.
His essay “Toward Perpetual Peace” proposes structural and moral conditions necessary if war is going to be eliminated from civilization. Kant, not being deluded, did not believe peace natural to humanity, rather he argued that peace must be carefully constructed through a clear legal framework. His six Preliminary Articles (immediate steps to prevent conflict) and three Definitive Articles (the long-term foundations required for permanent peace) were the magic formula.
The Six Preliminary Articles (Immediate Steps)
These are immediate prohibitions of legal, financial, and military conditions that make future wars inevitable.
1. No flawed peace treaties. No treaty of peace is valid if it is signed with a secret reservation or loophole that could restart a war in the future. A treaty must represent a genuine end to hostilities, not just a temporary truce.
2. Don’t treat states like property: An independent state must never be acquired by another through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift, because a state is a society of human beings with its own right to self-determination.
3. No standing armies, because, Kant argued, keeping standing armies threatens neighboring states and ensures a never-ending arms race, making pre-emptive wars more likely.
4. Governments must not create national debts to fund military buildup or foreign intervention.
5. No forcible interference in other nations, because violating a nation’s sovereignty is an offense against the independence of all peoples.
6. “Dishonorable tactics” during war must be banned. Atrocities that destroy the underlying trust required for future peace.
The conservative news and investigative reporting site saved me a post by highlighting how the increasingly despicable New York Times is soft-peddling or ignoring the most revolting proclivities of radical Democratic candidates for Congress while routinely publishing essays like this one…
The now appropriately infamous Graham Platner, regarding whom the Times’s opinion columnist assured readers that the guy with the Nazi tattoo was “no Nazi.”
Francesca Hong, who lost the primary for Governor of Wisconsin and who wanted to ban Thanksgiving. “Views of the holiday have grown more complex,” the Times said, insisting that the reaction to her insane tweet was “emblematic of a broader reckoning among many Americans with the country’s checkered history.”
Adam Hamawy, running for the House in New Jersey, complained about his GOP “opponents” constantly raising his connection to the Blind Sheikh, the radical Islamic cleric who inspired the 1993 World Trade Center attack and was convicted for plotting to bomb other targets in New York City. “Republicans pounce!”
Yes, the Times even stoops to white-washing Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan US Senate candidate. When it interviewed the candidate in August, the Times asked him questions like “Can I ask you about young people? How have progressives from New York City to Ann Arbor succeeded in inspiring volunteerism?” They also called his anti-Semitic campaign surrogate Hasan Piker a “provocative streamer and critic of Israel.” Piker has written that the U.S. “deserved” the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that Mao was “one of the great leaders of this world,” and that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”
There are more, but that’s evidence enough of how low the Times is stopping to flip Congress.
Sweeney, the shapely and bold young actress who already angered the Left with her jeans/genes ad that supposedly dog whistled white supremacy, is now getting attacked by the Mad Left for the video above. She’s objectifying female athletes, you see. Or something. Because women athletes have never used sexual attractiveness to promote themselves and their sports…
Hey, how did pro-golfer Paige Spiranac get in there? Away with you, Devil Woman!
I was going to write about another one of the aspiring Incompetent Elected Officials (probably this idiot) but decided that a current incompetent in the House needs another call out. Yes, it’s Nancy Mace. Again.
Mace, in an interview with TMZ, called for Lindsay Clancy not only to be executed but publicly executed.
Incidentally, it’s also incompetent to agree to be interviewed by TMZ.
“Her children are dead, she should be dead too,” said Mace, a 48-year-old mother of two who was not in the courtroom and has no business shooting off her mouth about a criminal trial in which the accused is supposed to be fairly tried without public figures trying to sway the jury pools and render a verdict without evidence. “She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a public execution.” She also said Clancy “deserves nothing less.”
Uh, Nancy? How does a public execution punish the condemned any more than any other execution? A public execution punishes the public and society, by lowering the standards of civilization to those of the 19th Century, or the Middle Ages. “It could be by firearm, it could be electric chair, I don’t really care,” this lunatic ranted. “She’s a serial killer” and such an execution would serve as a “warning to women everywhere — you don’t kill your kids.”
Can we get technical for a minute, not that Mace cares about little details like the law and vocabulary? Killing three people, adult or child, in the same incident is not a serial killing. I also don’t think an obviously disturbed, though not necessarily legally insane, woman is the correct vehicle for the “Don’t kill your kids” message. Now, public executions of serial killers of their unborn babies, women who have multiple abortions, would send that message, but it would be, you know, unconstitutional in multiple ways.
Also, several news sources, like this one, wrote that Clancy “allegedly” killed her three children. No, she did it, guys, there’s no dispute about it. There is no “allegedly.” Oh, and back to TMZ: do you know what that “news for dumb 15-year -olds” outlet took away from Mace’s interview? “Nancy Mace Uses Offensive Slur While Calling For Lindsay Clancy’s Public Execution.” Guess what the “slur” was?
“Retarded.” The Horror.
A Congresswoman calls for public executions, but what was really outrageous is that she used a politically incorrect term to do it.
Maybe Mace is competent enough to be a leader in this increasingly silly and ignorant country.
The whole “Dreamer” thing seemed like classic liberal sentimental hogwash from the start, because it was, ethically, logically and legally. If illegal immigrants could be certain that their young children sneaking across the border when they did would suddenly become “good illegal immigrants” as soon as they approached majority and would be eligible for all sorts of benefits, that was just one more incentive for aliens to break our laws.
You may recall that President Obama issued an unconstitutional Executive Order to coddle the “Dreamers” that was struck down by the Supreme Court. I wrote at the time,
1. Phone Hold Music Ethics. DirecTV, which has bedeviled me, annoyed me and frustrated me for 30 years, had, all during that time, the worst on-hold music in human history. It was a scratchy recording of a high-pitched flute repeating the same unresolved bars over and over again. This selection was particularly crazy-making when DirecTV would, as was their wont, keep me waiting for ten minutes or more after telling me my wait time would be “less than two minutes.” Today I had an occasion to call the service again, and, mirabile dictu, the hold music is now a clear, crisp piano composition by Schubert. Small victories is all I have these days…
[Update: It wasn’t even a small victory! The new music was a tell: I was engaging with a fake DirecTV scammer. Irony: the lousy hold music helped make me check out the caller.]
2. More DirecTV…For weeks I have been getting robo calls from DirecTV telling me to call a phone number. Sometimes I would get ten such calls a day. As a matter of principle, I refuse to continue robocalls or the new AI calls in which a female voice begins with “Hello?” so I hang up, sometimes with a tart, “Bite me!” Finally I decided to call the number I had been getting ordered to call just to complain about being harassed. I then learned from the agent in Bangladesh or somewhere that because I had set some kind of record for legitimate complaints over the past six months (loss of signal, interruption in service, installment of equipment, incompetent agents, etc, etc.) I was receiving a special promotion to keep me from ditching the service like so many other subscribers apparently are. It will save me about 50 bucks a month for two years, so I’m not complaining. At least for now.
[Update: yes, this was a scam. I hate and distrust DirecTV so much that the ridiculously complicated script I was being read and the confusing payment process seemed consistent with my usual interactions.]
In 2023 I presented the Ethics Alarms “Do Something!” Scale, which was subsequently enhanced and expanded with suggestion from AM Golden and Michael West. Right now, in great part because one of our political parties depends on fearmongering as its primary campaign strategy, we have seen an increase in Doomsday scenarios regarding the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, escalating protests, and various well-meaning prescriptions to save humanity, or something. A substack essay by Damien Charlotin has received a great deal of attention: you can read it here. It is thoughtful, erudite, thorough and deluded. The essay is also a typical “expert” reaction to “Do Something!” hysterics.
Ethics Alarms 