Few days in American history set the trillions of marbles on the boundary-less billiard table rolling quite as wildly as this one, in 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon could start a chain reaction resulting in a rainstorm in Central Park, imagine what might be different today if the motorcade had taken a different route that sunny day in Dallas. The answer: anything and everything. It’s very likely that there would be no Ethics Alarms, for example, to pick a tiny example at random.
1. Continuing on that theme…a new study from the WeCount coalition, a pro-abortion organization, estimates that the number of abortions nationwide fell by 10,000 in the first two months following the Dobbs decision. According to The New York Times,WeCount found that 22,000 fewer induced abortions were performed in states with pro-life laws in July and August, compared with the baseline beginning in April, before Dobbs. In states where abortion-on-demand remained legal, abortions increased by roughly 12,000, leading to a net decline of 10,000. There were just under 7,400 fewer abortions in August than in June. Extrapolating that figure over 12 months, you nearly 90,000 fewer abortions per year.
What changes in our world, our lives and our future might those 90,000 human beings cause? A President could be among them, or several. A presidential assassin. The next Ted Bundy, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Thomas Edison, Tom Brady, Bobby Orr, Paul McCartney, Bill Russell or Martin Luther King. We don’t know, and will never know. [Pointer: The Federalist]
2. All those illegal immigrants streaming across our officially “secure borders” also set the marbles rolling, and that’s due to pure incompetence and irresponsible government. For today’s unethical gaslighting of the month, here’s Sen. Chuck Schumer explaining why we need illegal immigrants:
“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way that we’re gonna have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants — the Dreamers and all of them. ‘Cause our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers, but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here.”
How much deception, bad reasoning and circular logic can a single demagogue inject into the public consciousness in a single paragraph? 1) The issue isn’t immigrants, its illegal immigrants, which open border flacks don’t have the honestly to even acknowledge exist—they just somehow don’t have “documents.” 2) Raising legal immigration levels and screening for the kinds of immigrants who would enhance American society is a great idea, but only feasible if we plug the permanent leak at the Southern border that lets in criminals, drug-pushers, potential terrorists and people with no intention of adopting U.S. values along with the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. 3) How many of them are likely to be skilled tradespeople and manufacturing workers, or even agricultural workers, since the illegals overwhelmingly come from cities?
And if the good Senator is worried about the population, why hasn’t he welcomed Dobbs?
3. How to be an egomaniac, a fool and mentally declining formerly admired law professor. Laurence Tribe tweeted, “I noticed my number of followers drop for the first time in a couple weeks right after Trump‘s return was announced. My advice: If you’re following me, don’t depart Twitter, thus diminishing my reach; just don’t pay attention to Trump!” Yeah, it figures: anyone with values are so muddled that they follow Tribe, whose entire brain jumped the shark about 5 years ago, would decide to quit Twitter because it decided that censoring a former U.S. President was indefensible. Tribe really thinks his deranged and frequently unethical positions are important, thus proving that given sufficient age and arrogance, even law professors are not immune from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
4. That Trump puppet Supreme Court is at it again! The Supreme Court today denied Donald Trump’s efforts to block the release of his tax records to a congressional committee that has sought the information for years. The SCOTUS order indicates no dissents from the action. Democrats and the media doubtlessly consider the Court momentarily legitimate; it’s only when a decision doesn’t support their agenda that it is one more enemy of democracy.
5. No, you biased hack, remarkable people (in a good way) never throw Molotov cocktails into police cars. Not even once. Sentencing disbarred lawyer Urooj Rahman, who was one of two lawyers who threw bombs during a “mostly peaceful protest” in New York, to 15 months in prison, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan of the Eastern District of New York said, “You’re a remarkable person who did a terrible thing one night.” So admirable was she that her sentence is far less severe than many of the non-bomb-throwing protesters being punished for their involvement in the January 6 2021 Capitol riot. Her lawyers had argued for time served only, saying that Rahman’s commitment to social justice and her empathy for others proved that throwing a Molotov cocktail was a “marked deviation from her otherwise exemplary life.” Meanwhile, the increasingly absurd ABA Journal described the rioting that featured the bomb-throwing lawyers as a “racial justice demonstrations.” Those “demonstrations” included many injuries, looting, arrests, and officers attacked with thrown bottle and rocks. And Molotov cocktails, of course.
6. Is CBS trying to look ridiculous? First, it virtue-signaled to the Left by announcing that it would no longer post on Twitter because Elon Musk was allowing bad people to tweet again—you know, the kind of people President Biden says are a clear and present danger—and then came crawling back to the platform in less than 48 hours. Then yesterday it breathlessly announced that it had determined that it had confirmed the authenticity of data from Hunter Biden’s former laptop, an impressive 769 days after participating in the mainstream media/Big Tech/social media alliance to bury the story long enough to ensure Joe Biden’s election. The New York Post, who broke the story first, earned the right to mock The Big Eye.
Ethics Alarms 
Awww Jack… “Booby” Orr???
With the start that the Bruins are off to?
(grin)
His friends called him “Booby.” Fixed. I am awash with shame.
Related to #1: NPR did a report this morning claiming doctors are “afraid” to perform medical procedures that “might” run a foul of the law. One example, meant to drum up righteous rage, was a women who suffered a miscarriage, but hadn’t yet delivered the fetal remains. She went to her doctor, and they said nothing could be done without *firm* evidence the child died. An ultrasound had shown the fetus had no heartbeat, but the doctors didn’t think this was enough, so the doctors sent her home.
She returned later that evening – in an ambulance – for an emergency extraction of the fetal remains. Those cruel Republicans! What horror!
NPR then documented how many doctors are performing C-sections on women who already miscarried (far more dangerous than a less?-surgical dilation and extraction), out of fear of prosecution. What horror! Republicans should be ashamed! ASHAMED!
NPR thinks this is horrifying (and it is), but also that it should shock and persuade reasonable people to change their stance in favor of looser “abortion” restrictions. Abortion, except in the strictest medical-ize, isn’t even involved in the cases!
What this story ought to reveal is the utter corruption and cowardice of the medical abortion establishment.* They claim abortion is essential “medical care”, but are utterly opportunistic about providing it. They then deny actually essential care, or perform absurd alternatives, when the billing codes involved it might invite scrutiny (do to the codes for treating unintended miscarriages overlappings with now-illegal induced abortions).
The absurdity of these is even deeper than I thought, as I think about this. Doctors fear that providing the billing code for a D&E might prompt an investigation into whether the doctor illegally induced the termination of the pregnancy (ie, performed an abortion) prior to performing the D&E to “evacuate” the uterus. Of course, these billing codes were deliberately written to treat abortion as “any other” medical procedure, to avoid thinking about messy ethical implications. They use medical jargon such as “termination” and “evacuate” to further obscure what they’re talking about.
The codes deliberately obscure that a deliberate abortion occured, for “privacy”, etc. The doctors were hiding what they were doing, even while abortion was legal, and are now terrified that this deliberate smoke screen might invite scrutiny. These ethically-inert doctors, purportedly proud to have offered essential abortion “care”, now cower in fear and put their patients in danger to avoid any possibility of prosecution for routine post-miscarriage treatments even the strictest pro-life Catholic Hospital would offer.**
NPR wants people to think abortion must be legal, so that the cowardly practicioners don’t mutilate their patients. This is a ridiculous non-sequitor. It uses these horror stories to try to engender rage at the big meanies who banned abortion, rather than at the doctors refusing to do their job.
*This has been clear to the Pro-Life side of things for quite some time; examples are readily found for those curious
**Catholic medical ethics, though not the primary topic here, allow medical procedures that might or would indirectly result in the death of a fetus if there is a serious and proportional risk to the mother (radiation for cancer, etc). It also allows the removal of a fetus following it’s natural or indirect death. Only deliberately and directly causing the fetal death is prohibited.
Regarding #6, that’s just journalistic integrity.
It took them that long to find confirmation, which is perfectly normal when you are not looking.
-Jut
Or deliberately looking elsewhere so you won’t see what you don’t want to see…
On 1 – I refuse to pay the subscription, so I can’t tell what their methodology is, but I very much doubt that abortions are a flat line and so if they’re simply comparing month to month as apposed to a net change from the same month from the previous year, I think this might not say what we think it does. For instance… The most common birthdays are in November. This is because November is nine months after February, and Valentine’s Day is in February. Following that, you’d expect the most common months for abortion would be March, April and May because most abortions are performed in the first trimester, which means that their baseline would be in the months where you’d expect the high water marks.
On top of that: Abortion has been on the decline for decades. Couple a seasonal cycle with a slowly declining curve, and I’d be willing to bet money that Dobbs didn’t have as much of an impact as is being presented.
Strangely, this is one of those things where both sides of the discourse will fudge the numbers the same way for entirely different reasons: Progressives will say “look at all these women forced to carry to term! What monster does that?” and Conservatives will say “look at all these babies saved from the coathanger crucible! What monster does that?”
Good points. This was a pro-abortion organizations’ calculations. Still, it would be amazing if Dobbs hasn’t allowed a substantial number of children otherwise slated for the biological waste bin to have a shot at life, no? The story sparked a thought exercise I would love to use in an abortion debate: If you knew you would save a human being’s life by enduring additional pain/expense/inconvenience or sacrifice would you?
“If you knew you would save a human being’s life by enduring additional pain/expense/inconvenience or sacrifice would you?”
Depends.
Could that human being’s life be saved by incarcerating them for life instead of executing them after they murdered multiple people? Nope.
Is the human being in question already *entitled* to someone else’s pain/expense/inconvenience based on the someone else’s own decisions…and have those avenues been exhausted? If yes and yes, then the answer is closer to yes for me. If yes and no, then the answer is closer to no for me.
On JFK –
Something has shifted. Literally in two years time. Last year I noticed a general decline in online discussions regarding the assassination. This year? The day squeaked by and *I* didn’t even recall the date until today and took to the airwaves to see what latest angles and theories were being tossed around. Almost complete silence.
Something shifted. Maybe it’s because the generations are passing that cared?
#6
CBS is putting into action another tactic among many that the mainstream left wing media outlets are all doing – trying to orchestrate the collapse of Twitter.
They were 100% certain it would die on it’s own because they’ve stake the hyperbolic claim that the wild west of free speech *cannot* work. Only a community discourse tightly managed by their gatekeepers can ensure society will flourish with good information. Anything else will be absolute devastation.
Only now they are scared. Deep down they know that pure information anarchy is the only way to go for Free Speech. When *ALL* ideas – good, bad, true, false, beautiful and ugly – are bandied about – people actually become more informed and actually tend to make better decisions. They are scared because people will pick a lot of ideas to like that don’t toe the Leftwing narrative line.
So CBS is hoping to be part of the effort to forcibly collapse Twitter so they can then say “See! We told you it wouldn’t work!!!”
They are scare that most people are on to their scam and lies.