1 Shut up or be funny. For some reason, the fact that Monday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers’ included a gratuitous and facile lecture by the host about gun control legislation was plastered all over the progressive news media as if he had begun speaking in tongues or channeling the ghost of Emily Dickinson. I hate to be a spoil sport, but who cares what Seth Myers thinks about gun control? He’s a comedian and a comedy writer, and has been nothing but since college. Again, he has no brief to lecture anyone on that topic: he has his job to be funny, and the show he hosts is, theoretically at least, a comedy show. Did Julia Child ever lecture her PBS audience about U.S. nuclear policy while explaining how to cook an omelette? No. Did Walter Cronkite ever break into knock-knock jokes during The CBS Evening News? Never. Did Andy Williams ever pause in the middle of “Moon River” to deliver his analysis of a Presidential campaign? Absolutely not.
Myers has a right to his opinion, as sophomoric and echo chamber-nourished as it may be (he was pimping for “common sense gun laws,” which is what people say when they have no idea what laws will stop the criminal use of guns, but want us to “do something”), but it is arrogant and presumptuous to perform a bait and switch on his audience, which doesn’t come to his show for public policy wisdom. If they do, he has an ethical obligation to make it clear that they shouldn’t. As far as I can tell, Myers knows zilch about law, guns, government, or the Constitution, yet he presumes to use a vehicle awarded to him only because of an alleged gift for topical humor (personally, I don’t see it) for political advocacy.
Be funny, get educated, run for office, or shut up, Seth. And incidentally, there are not mass shootings “three or four times a week” and never have been. In a single atypical week, there were two mass shootings, and no Constitutional gun laws are likely to have stopped either of them.
2. Why wouldn’t this criminal act not be a) stopped by police and b) the object of arrests and prosecutions? About 200 Black Lives Matters protesters marched to a Wegman’s in Rochester, New York, prompting it to lock down with an estimated 100 customers still inside the building. They were able to escape pretty quickly (it is still false imprisonment, a felony), and the store closed down. What was the anti-white racist activist’s group justification this time? After all, Wegman’s is a grocery store. It was the one-year anniversary of the death of Daniel Prud, the 41-year-old black man who died in police custody after being placed in a “spit mask.”
BLM is looking for another artificial example of police brutality and racism since there aren’t enough legitimate ones to serve their purpose and to excuse “mostly peaceful” riots. Prude is even a lamer excuse to cry racism than the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Mike Brown or George Floyd, but as we have learned, Facts Don’t Matter. Rochester police physically restrained Prud on March 23, 2020 because he was walking and ranting naked in the city’s streets after taking PCP. Any white citizen doing the same would be treated similarly as a danger to himself and others. Prud began spitting at officers while resisting arrest, so they put a spit hood over his head after he began spitting. While Prude was face down on the pavement, he stopped breathing. PCP will do that. A grand jury refused to charge the officers, and if Prude had been white, nobody would have blinked an eye.
BLM deserves sympathy, perhaps, but no respect. It is a hate organization built on false narratives and lies.
3. Can someone please explain what I’m missing, because I’m clearly missing something.
Police in New Lenox, an unincorporated village southwest of Chicago, arrested and charged Justyn Giarraputo, an idiot, with a hate crime after he allegedly made a Nazi salute and shouted “White power!” several times at a family in a Walgreen’s parking lot.
Was the First Amendment amended with a jackass exception? Did a SCOTUS ruling come down that I overlooked? Last I checked, making a Nazi salute in public was protected speech, though unquestionably rude. It might even be “fighting words,” but a hate crime? The same is true of shouting “white power.” The First Amendment protects it. At least, I thought so….
4. Res Ipsa Loquitur. Two Democratic Senators have demanded a ban on the appointments of whites, however qualified and regardless of their views, to Joe Biden’s Cabinet. Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), issued statements to that effect yesterday.
Duckworth told reporters, “I am a ‘no’ vote, on the floor, on all non-diversity nominees… I will vote for racial minorities and LGBTQ but anybody else, I’m not voting for.” Hirono, my personal choice as the winner in the closely contested “Dumbest Senator of Either Party” race, said, “We would like to have a commitment from the White House that there be more diversity representation in the Cabinet and in senior White House positions and until that happens I will be joining her in voting on non-diversity nominees.”
It took a pandemic, a cheating news media and lot of lies to put the Democrats in power despite their loony and anti-democratic conduct since 2016, so apparently they think ratcheting up the crazy will work again. Good plan!
Ethics Alarms 
Julia Child would undoubtedly be more qualified than Mr Meyers. After all, she worked for the OSS and received a medal for her work. (She also developed a recipe for shark repellant — and probably one for shark, as well).
I did not know that!
Wasn’t her husband in the foreign service? She probably had a pretty good grasp on international relations
jvb
I checked the stories. Why is Wegman’s under protest? According to what I read, Prud died in police custody and wasn’t on Wegman property. Is that only a tangential connection to the incident? Seems like they just wanted to protest a local store. Right? Just “tearing shit down” because it represents the oppressive capitalist system?
jvb
Not that it is particularly significant, but, before I retired in 2014, I worked across the street at Harris, specifically on Falcon tactical radios
https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/falcon-radio-product-line
Just glad I moved away from Rochester after retirement.
I don’t think there’s any connection, it’s just mob mentality at work. Most likely they were marching along, and someone stopped to shout at the shoppers coming and going at the Wegman’s, and the mob psychology kicked in and it escalated quickly. The complete lack of any kind of law enforcement response to this virtually guarantees it will happen again, likely with escalating violence.
Look…. I get that every now and again, there’s a grandstanding Republican…. But do Democrats specifically seek out less intelligent people for their representatives?
Really…. Hirono and Duckworth make the news at least once a quarter each for something mind numbingly stupid. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer either are senile or put on airs like they are, despite my belief that you don’t get to that level of leadership by collecting bottlecaps. Maxime Waters is a loon, and despite Greene saying that she believes the election was stolen, she’ll never quite get to Hank “Guam might tip over if we build a base on it” Johnson or Trayon “Jews control the weather” White levels of insanity.
How does this keep happening? At some point, one might wonder if this is something the party controls for, and not against.
Agreed, H.T., but Biden has just put V.P. Kamala Harris on the border crisis. She laughed about not having visited the border in a few years but she will get right on it, after she sets DiSantis to rights in Florida.
jvb
Nevermind that…. She gave an interview to The Breakfast Club in 2013 saying that she smoked marijuana, I think the quote was something like “I did smoke it, and I did inhale” while doing her manic cackle, probably because she was thinking of the thousand of young Californians she put in jail on pot charges. Now the White House is saying, without an iota of awareness, that people that smoke pot are not suited to work in the administration.
Well when the hell is Harris getting her walking papers?
Answer: They’re probably on Joe’s desk, but he forgot about them, I have no idea how I wrote a comment about the senility, real or affected, of the Democratic party without talking about the prop from Weekend at Bernie’s currently attempting to reverse mortgage the White House.
[T]he prop from Weekend at Bernie’s currently attempting to reverse mortgage the White House.
Wish I’d thought of that description of our first sitting animatronic President. Whew.
I was thinking of comparing him to a slinky, but at least the slinky can do stairs.
I know.. I know… Ask me how I really feel about Biden.
The thing is… I get why Trump lost; he is, was, and will always be his own worst enemy. But how the actual hell does the DNC look at Joe Biden, who has been in congress 20% of the existence of the united states, and is obviously starting to suffer from cognitive decline, because he is 78 and say: “Yeah! That’s our guy! 8 Years of him!”
“But how the actual hell does the DNC look at Joe Biden,… and say: “Yeah! That’s our guy! 8 Years of him!”
They don’t; they say “That’s our puppet!”.
Jack, just curious have you had a chance to see the new community cards being voted on for future Monopoly editions?
HIlarious. They’re making a game based on amassing as much real estate as possible in order to be the most wealthy capitalist able to pass muster with Commies? Shouldn’t the game be re-named “Nationalizing the Real Estate Industry” or “Redistributing Stolen Wealth” or “Dismantling Systemic Racism” or “Setting up a Commune”? Incredibly idiotic. Doesn’t anyone know what the game involves?
Apparently this is true. The mind boggles:
https://www.monopolycommunitychest.com/en-US
jvb
A lot of them don’t even make sense. Why would I get paid to volunteer? Why am I being penalized for not shopping local? Normally shopping local means paying more money. Also, why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t I reject both?
Oh, I don’t know. Because being Woke means never having to say your positions are logical?
jvb
Actually I take that back. I forced myself to go through all of them. I thought all but one did not make sense. The only one that I thought that fit was the one having students use rooms costing you money (the hotel/house tax card).
They make the money in the game seem like Karma points, not a transaction for good and services.
But of course, the object of the game, you know, winning it, is to become a MONOPOLIST! You acquire unimproved real estate, the best available, improve it with housing, and then get to charge the other people playing the game RENT so you become fabulously wealthy. You know, like Trump! Like real estate developers. You exploit people who can’t afford to own their own homes! This is the context in which they are worrying about “the community?” The God damned “community” is there to be abused by the property owners. These woke Commies want to play Monopoly? Do they know what the word means? Shouldn’t the game be CANCELLED? It’s the height of counter revolutionary and reactionary. Why doesn’t Hasbro just relaunch Monopoly as Public Housing?
1. There’s no such thing as entertainment anymore, only propaganda. Even Goebbels recognized that people needed light entertainment sometimes and you had to lay off the Wagner and the Military Epics once in a while. I hate that I have had to make the Nazis sound more reasonable than leftist America twice today.
2. These anniversaries are just excuses to hold temporary insurrections with media complicity because they don’t realize that their heads will be on the chopping block eventually when their revolutionary fervor proves to be insufficient.
3. “The First Amendment protects it. At least, I thought so….” The First Amendment still protects it. You just need this jerk to sue for a violation of his civil rights, get it all the way to the SCOTUS and hope to God Chief Roberts sides with his conservative colleagues against the liberal voting bloc.
4. Stuff like this is what causes reactionary groups to become emboldened and turns off reasonable conservatives. You want the conspiracy theories to keep flowing, Biden? Listen to quacks like these.
#1:The phrase “Stay in your lane” must surely have been coined for leftists opining on firearms issues…..but seems useful when subjected to the opinions of “celebrities” in general.
1. I’m pretty sure it’s been posted here, but it bears repeating: Two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the US are suicides, so the use of a firearm, regardless of type, is pretty much irrelevant. Of the remaining that actually involved gun violence, a vast majority took place in five cities: (if I recall correctly) Baltimore, D.C., Detroit, Chicago…and the other escapes me. Mass shootings and gun violence in general are made into front-page, 24-hour news for a singular reason: to bring about the destruction of the 2nd Amendment and deny law-abiding gun owners their right to carry.
You are precisely correct, Jack. It is an atypical week when there is a mass shooting on even one day. But Seth Meyers gets to be an idiot about the subject every day of the week.
That hardly seems fair…
When thugs are threatening Seth Meyers on some dark night far from help, he’ll be begging for good guys like me to defend him with a gun.
This is a response.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2018/02/16/comment-of-the-day-morning-ethics-warm-up-2-15-18-money-massacres-mudd-and-more/