This, as some of you might recall, is the logo for the old PBS kids series, the lively cast members of which are now middle-aged and arthritic. I don’t like to think about it…

I just did a dry run of an upcoming Zoom CLE conference, and other than the fact that I look like hell, I was impressed. If there’s any enthusiasm among readers, I am think hard about holding weekly ethics symposium using the technology. I can accommodate up to a hundred participants, and the time is unlimited (though their patience surely will be.) Let me know if you’re interested!

1. I’m used to cynical, but…The Democrats voting to not even debate the GOP Senate police reform bill was so openly partisan. The party didn’t went to pass anything that would give Republicans credit for addressing the police issue, and they are counting on Pelosi’s House Bill to be rejected by the Senate so they can have another election issue to energize their base. Mark Thiessen writes,

“What Democrats should be apologizing for was their shameful vote on the Senate floor Wednesday to kill Scott’s legislation — and with it any chance of passing police reform this year. Democrats knew exactly what they were doing. As Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), one of three members of the Democratic caucus who voted to advance the Scott bill, explained, “voting against it will end the discussion of this subject in the Senate for the foreseeable future, and leave us with nothing to show for all the energy and passion that has brought this issue to the forefront of public consciousness.””

To be fair, this is “do something” legislation that will not significantly reduce incidents of police misconduct toward blacks or whites. Situations like the Atlanta shooting, mysterious shootings like the traffic shot death of 25-year-old Hannah Fizer, who was white, and falsely reported shootings (“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”) will still occur, because of the nature of police work—unless police simply stop policing out of fear. I suspect that’s what will happen, and many more Americans will die under those conditions.

To date, ten unarmed black men have been killed by police this year.

2. Some call them the “1619”riots. This is the woman the New York Times allowed to lead its inflammatory and false slavery project:

On November 21, 1995, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a letter to the editor of the Notre Dame University student newspaper, The Observer,to condemn a November 9, 1995 op-ed. She wrote in part,

“What responsible editor would print an article that applauds and dignifies the white race’s rape, plunder, and genocide of a whole race of people? I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations of every continent of this planet. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture. Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different [than] Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil…Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans….It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn, they looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated. Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people. Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity.”

Bias? Racism? “Hate speech?” People are being fired, “canceled” and shunned in every segment of society for far less bigoted comments that are also older….but those victims of the new “Terror” are all white. The position at Ethics Alarms is that ancient excesses of rhetoric, including offensive jokes, should not be used to discredit anyone, but also that the leaders of the cancel culture should be held to their own rules.

3. He’s not wrong, just inarticulate. President Trump was recently roasted for suggesting that the election was being “rigged.” That’s not quite the word, but the democrats, as they have been since the election, are clearly committed to avoid the vagaries of the American campaign and election system. Joe Biden has been hidden away, only emerging in highly controlled circumstances (Joe can still read a teleprompter) to minimize voter scrutiny; the Democratic convention will be minimized to the point of insignificance, and now, as many predicted, the idea is being floated by Biden mouthpieces that we really don’t need any debates.

Everything will come down to how lazy, gullible, submissive  and apathetic the public is. that’s no way to run a democracy, but if it works, Democrats are apparently all for it. And if it works, the public doesn’t deserve a democracy, and  will have answered Ben Franklin’s ominous answer when asked by a group of citizens what sort of government the delegates had created as Ben exited the Constitutional Convention. He replied,  “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We’ll find out if we can.

4.  Today’s ridiculous “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” note. God, Chris Cuomo is an embarrassment, but apparently not to CNN. This week he shamelessly praised his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), during an interview. One publication called it “a close approximation of a campaign endorsement,” which was unfair. It was a campaign endorsement:

“You stepped up in an unusual way that really was created by a vacuum of power on the federal level, But these unusual times have demonstrated some unusual characteristics in people,.And of course I won’t always be able to keep having you on the show. It will never be seen as fair in people’s eyes, and we both get that, that’s OK, you have plenty of people to talk to. I hope you are able to appreciate what you did in your state and what it means for the rest of the country now and what it will always mean to those who love and care about you the most. I’m wowed by what you did, and more importantly, I’m wowed by how you did it. This was very hard. I know it’s not over. But obviously I love you as a brother, obviously I’ll never be objective, obviously I think you’re the best politician in the country. But I hope you feel good about what you did for your people because I know they appreciate it. Nothing’s perfect, you’ll have your critics. But I’ve never seen anything like what you did and that’s why I’m so happy to have had you on the show. And I hope you know that.”

This goes far beyond  conflict of interest to sycophancy and propaganda.

New York had the most cases and most deaths of any state, and Cuomo’s decision to dump invested seniors in nursing homes comes close to mass negligent homicide.

5. Which George Kirby, I wonder? Nancy Pelosi inadvertently referred to George Floyd as “George Kirby.” I wonder which George Kirby she was thinking of? There is this one, the black comedian- impressionist who had his own TV show  In the 70s and was a regular on the all-impressionists show, “The Kopykats” with Rich Little and others. then he turned into a drug dealer and went to prison for selling heroin to an undercover cop. Mass-incarceration!

Or did she mean the ghostly George Kirby, half of the spectral couple that haunted Cosmo Topper in several Thirties films and a successful TV series? That one, the white guy, was memorably played by Cary Grant, and on the TV series by Robert Sterling.