Good Morning!

It’s the last day of the regular season for baseball, or should be: there could be two tie-breakers tomorrow, and they are officially considered part of the season. There were more baseball ethics posts this year than ever before. You can review them here.

1. And now for something completely stupid. I was temped to make this a free-standing post, but it triggered my stupid alarm, and doesn’t deserve it.

In Los Angeles, Boguslaw Matlak  and Laura Quijano decided to stage a “social experiment” to determine whether bystanders would act to protect an  endangered child. As their hidden cameras ran, they stuffed their 3-year-old son Leo into the trunk of their car. In truth, the back of the trunk had been rigged so Leo could climb into the back seat. He was in no danger.

“I was thinking maybe I should do a video to show people that they should do something about it when they see something wrong, to get involved,” Matlak said.  They got involved, all right. Witnesses called the cops, who arrested the couple and took Leo into protective custody.  The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services  placed the child with a relative. For the last three weeks, the couple has been trying to get him back.

“They are hurting my son emotionally at this point,” Quijano told reporters. “He’s not home with his parents who love him very much and what else do they want from us? I just don’t understand at this point.”

The agency recently informed the parents that it would would be returning Leo to their custody. Matlak  now faces one count of misdemeanor child endangerment.

Observations:

• Ethics lesson #1: Don’t use human beings as props.
• Ethics lesson #2: Three-year-olds can’t consent to such treatment.
• Ethics lesson #3: Police have enough to do dealing with real crimes. Staging fake ones to see what will happen should be illegal, if it isn’t already.
• What’s there to complain about? The social experiment was a success!
• Is proof that parents of a small child are idiots sufficient to remove him? No, I suppose not.
• The problem with this episode is that the child, who was innocent of wrong doing, is the primary one being punished.

2. Why are gays such knee-jerk supporters of the Left when so many progressives employ blatant homophobia when it suits their agenda?  Current example: the anti-Kavanaugh mob was incensed that both Kavanaugh and Senator Graham dared to call their disgusting, unethical conduct what it was, so Graham, who is unmarried and has often had his sexual orientation questioned, was roundly mocked for that, in the cheapest and nastiest of cheap shots using homophobia as the weapon of choice.

Saturday Night Live last night used Kate McKinnon to play Graham, using a script that portrayed the Senator as gay. Rosie O’Donnell, who IS gay, called Graham a “closeted idiot,”, tweeting “fuck u u closeted idiot – this is the patriarchy exposed – this is reality deal with it !!#NoKavanaughConfirmation #NotMyPresident.” Here’s Kathy Griffin of the Severed Head:

Oh lookee lookee here. Miss Lindsey Graham doesn’t have the balls to speak up today does she? Look at Miss Lindsey Graham trying to be all tough! What?Does Putin have a picture of Lindsay fucking a donkey? 

The horrible Jimmy Kimmel evoked gay icon Liberace to describe  Graham, saying,

“And once he got some camera time–somebody must have told Lindsey Graham that Donald Trump was watching because he lit up like someone left a thumbtack on Liberace’s piano bench.”

Not to be left out of the hypocritical gay-bashing, HBO host Bill Maher joked that Graham needed the “stabilizing influence of his dead boyfriend,” John McCain.

3. Good! The Senate Judiciary Committee referred the apparent false statements made to committee investigators alleging misconduct by Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the FBI for criminal investigation on Saturday. The letter is here. Perhaps this will inhibit the inevitable efforts by Democrats and “resistance” fanatics to manufacture new accusations and allegations in advance of the one-week deadline for the FBI’s last-ditch investigation of Dr. Ford’s memories.

4. This would be a persuasive argument, if the social media mob wasn’t so hopelessly corrupted on this issue…or if they knew who Harry Truman was. George Mason law professor David Bernstein posted this on Facebook:

I’m imaging that this is the early 1950s. Truman has nominated a liberal Supreme Court justice. A man comes forward and states that he and the nominee attended a Communist Party meeting together in 1917. He names four other people who were there. None of the people recall being there, and the man’s friend since that time says he’s never met the nominee. The nominee, however, was known to dabble in radical politics around that time, behavior that he has not been entirely forthright about it. Any guesses on how progressives of the day would have reacted to the allegations?

5. An ethics note on President Trump’s speech at the U.N. The president is getting some well-earned praise—well, from those capable of praising this President for anything– for asserting U.S. patriotism, sovereignty and independence at the U.N. His delivery of the speech was terrible–amateurish, awkward, monotone, boring. Trump can’t deliver prepared remarks at all. I presume that this is because of inexperience, and because he’s too arrogant to learn how to do it, which would take about a day. Hell, I could improve his speech-delivering skills by 100%: any good speaking coach could. When a President is worse at speaking from a script than Gerald Ford, the worst in my lifetime, it’s inexcusable.

The line in the speech that provoked derisive laughter, his claim that “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” a standard stump speech line these days, was wildly inappropriate, and, to be blunt, stupid. It’s pure boasting, and historically questionable at best. Why is the man compelled to praise himself? I know nobody else will do it, but the habit shows weakness, vanity and poor judgment.