I started this one at 3:30 AM. 

If you can’t sleep, might as well be thinking about ethics…

1. “I’m smart! I’m not stupid, like everybody says…” While trying to find  the post I linked to yesterday(about corrupt and abusive systems of municipal funding, justice and law enforcement that “are virtual dictated by poverty and demographics that make an ethical system impossible”),, I stumbled upon a post written in August, 2014, titled “Prediction: The Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck.”Five years and three months later, I had no clue as to what that prediction might have been, and was curious to find out what it was. My prediction was this:

At this point, we have no way of knowing what the truth is. Maybe Wilson executed Brown. Maybe he is a racist. Maybe he is a psychopath. And maybe Brown’s conduct justified the use of deadly force by the officer, and the teen was largely responsible for his own demise. Presumably we will eventually know the truth.I confidently predict this, however, based on what occurred in the Martin-Zimmerman case:

IF the evidence supports the conclusion that Brown charged at Wilson, neither the family of the slain teen, nor the African American community in Ferguson, nor the protesters, the race-hustlers, the black and progressive politicians who benefit by preserving racial tension and distrust,  much of the news media and many, many pundits and political bloggers, will change their rhetoric, accusations or the prevailing Ferguson narrative one bit. They need for the narrative as it stands to be true, and want it to be true. Massive confirmation bias will ensure that the death of Mike Brown will be talked about, protested and regarded as an example of racist police oppression of young black men, and the truth, in the end, will be irrelevant.

I hope my prediction is wrong.

And, as we now know, it was not. Several candidates for the Democratic Party’s 2020 nomination for President have referred to Brown’s “murder,” the news media has largely allowed their intentional misrepresentation to go uncondemned.

2. Democracy Dies in Darkness update: Facebook and YouTube have joined the bizarre media censorship conspiracy that is committed to keeping the name of the Ukraine “whistleblower” from as many lazy and inattentive members of the public as possible. This is happening despite the fact that his name has been thoroughly revealed in many forums: he is almost certainly Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst, committed Democrat and consort of Joe Biden, Rep. Schiff, John Brennan and other Impeachment Plan S architects. Ciaramella also was cited in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the now-disproven collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. It included  Ciaramella’s May 2017 email summaries of a meeting between Trump and Russian officials  that were eventually  leaked to a New York Times reporter.

Quite apart from being futile, pointless, and wrong, this desperate effort by Democratic Party and resistance allies—like social media and outlets like The New York Times— to prevent the public from understanding exactly how tainted by bias and conflicts Ciaramella is,  the suppression effort is mind-meltingly stupid. How more vividly could they demonstrate that the impeachment process is rigged, and that public manipulation and deception are  considered key components of its success?

3. The problem with the sensitive, woman-loving  judge. The California Commission on Judicial Performance has decided that Judge John Laettner of Contra Costa County should be removed from the bench for “a significant amount of misconduct” that included inappropriate comments about women’s looks and “engaging with lawyers in a way that is governed by his emotions.”

He is worried about whether lawyers like him, apparently. Laettner would ask one public defender to approach the bench after he ruled against her to see whether she was mad at him. “This is improper because it creates the appearance of impartiality and is inconsistent with his duty to remain neutral as to those appearing before him,” the commission said.

The judge also is addicted to making personal comments to female lawyers and other women. Examples cited:

• Telling one female lawyer: “Sometimes having you in here is like having a teenage daughter—you constantly argue with me and you just keep talk, talk, talking until you get what you want.”

• Winking at the public defender during a hearing and then asking her whether she saw it.

• Telling  a public defender in chambers that she was a “hard one,” and her parents hadn’t spanked her enough. The public defender was transferred after she notified her supervisor about Laettner’s comments.

• Calling a female public defender “his favorite” and “teacher’s pet.”

• Referring to a deputy prosecutor as “beautiful” and saying she was one of his “favorite attorneys.”

• Asking a deputy public defender “what kind of Asian” she was and remarking that he knew Japanese twins in college who were “very beautiful.” Speaking to another lawyer, he referred to the deputy public defender as “the attractive young Asian woman.”

• He kept referring to a court reporter as “very pretty” or “beautiful.” The court reporter testified that she quit working in Laettner’s department because she couldn’t take the unwelcome comments and his “favoritism towards tall, skinny blondes, young females [and] petite Asian women.”

• While presiding over a domestic violence case, he volunteered this: “On a lighter note, I can take judicial notice that women can drive you crazy.”

4. If anyone can explain why ABC would bother with a futile and self-indicting cover-up to benefit certified scum like Jeffrey Epstein, please do. It makes no sense to me, even as I have reached the point that I deem American journalism nearly totally corrupt and untrustworthy.  Ed Driscoll, a conservative blogger whom I regard as generally fair and reliable, has this to report.

A sample,

[B]y 2016, as Katie Pavlich of Townhall and Fox News told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, it isn’t just the Clintons’ connection to Epstein that’s causing the network difficulties in their role as operatives with bylines, but Stephanopoulos as well:

“This all comes down to the Clintons, George Stephanopoulos working at ABC and the circle of connections they have there, and protecting not just the Clintons of course, because that is something they are willing to do for political purposes,” Pavlich continued. “According to ABC’s editorial standards, which we keep hearing about, the standards are necessarily about accusers bringing forward evidence on someone who had already been convicted of similar crimes, but instead to protect political people and friends who are beneficial to them and who have very, very close connections to people in their network who claim to be leading journalists, like George Stephanopoulos.”

As the New York Times reported this past July, “A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise. In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida prison, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal.”