Things are piling up again on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, so let’s get into it, shall we?
1. Speaking of runways, will you feel better about your family dying in an airplane crash if you know a DEI hire in the control tower was at fault? Sure you will! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is placing a more diverse diverse workforce over the most qualified workforce even as the air traffic control system has been showing alarming holes, problems and failures including staffing shortages, mistakes, technological challenges and close call incidents. The Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated as part of President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy—what matters is how many minorities an agency has, you see, not how well it does its job. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022, and is headed to litigation. “Obviously we are talking about a line of work where merit and the need for skill are a matter of life and death,” Mountain States Legal Foundation General Counsel William Trachman. “No one cares about the race of the air traffic controller guiding in their flight.”
Wanna bet?
2. The ethics foul buried in the misleadingly-titled essay, “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night”: the news media, politicians and educators are trying to terrify children and gullible adults into accepting extreme progressive and Marxist policies. Causing clinical anxiety is just collateral damage to the activists. We’ve seen this before in the ’50s through the 80’s, when the “ban the bomb,” unilateral disarmament, “Better Red than Dead” and “Imagine” crowd was convincing children that they were going to die in order to advance the cause of pacifism.
3. About that “follow the science” stuff…the New York state Supreme Court ordered all New York City employees who were fired for not being vaccinated to be reinstated with back pay. Earlier this year, Mayor Adams promised that his administration would never rehire employees who had been fired over their vaccination status: 1,700 employees had been canned for being unvaccinated under the terms of a vaccine mandate adopted by former Mayor Bill de Blasio. The court ruled last week that “being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19.” To which Bruce Willis replies,
4. On the issue of the U.S. exalting college attendance without its actual educational benefits being apparent (an issue touched on here), see if you can make any sense out of the argument made by Luis Alvarado, Ph.D., the dean of the Fordham Graduate School of Education in “The deep inequity of the anti-college movement.” As I read it, he feels that college is worth the expense, the time, and the relentless exposure to Leftist political indoctrination because a degree helps “marginalized’ groups get white collar jobs, without his ever making a substantive case that college actually educates students. “I and many others know from lived experience that earning a college degree is a right for marginalized students and can break the cycle of poverty,” he insists. “We know that a college degree leads to better health outcomes, a more engaged and responsible citizenry, that we collectively generate more tax revenue, that we become life-long learners, that our families and our communities are transformed, and that we have more control over our careers.” Really? Yeah, we’re sure seeing responsible and engaged young citizens on college campuses now, advocating the erasure of Israel, having learned nothing about the origins and history of the current conflict. Sending kids to college is important to generate more tax revenue? Wow, that’s a new rationalization for me. And I’d like to see the data that shows that those who don’t go to college have less interest in learning. I suspect that college graduates today are less interested than ever before in acquiring new perspectives and a range of knowledge. Meanwhile, the belief that a degree makes you intelligent, competent, wise and trustworthy is a naive and self-serving delusion that I would have hoped a college dean would have rejected.
5. One down, about seven to go...I had hoped that Mike Pence’s decision to drop his absurd campaign for the Presidency was motivated by his belatedly realizing nobody wants to see him in the White House and never did, but no. It’s just that he won’t have enough donations to qualify for the next debate. The ethical thing would be for all of the GOP candidates to drop out except for one, say, Nikki Haley, who might have a chance of defeating Donald Trump in one-on-one showdowns in state primaries. This was essentially the argument made by George Will, here. Will is Trump-Deranged, but he’s not wrong that electing the previous POTUS to another chaotic and divisive term would be almost as disastrous as giving Joe Biden four more years to fall apart in chunks.
6. Racism straight up, Halloween-style: The Netflix horror series “Two Sentence Horror Stories” featured an episode in which a black history professor writing a book about Oregon’s pre-Civil War “Black Exclusion Laws” moves into a house with an evil tree that eats people, and it turns out that he white landlord has been feeding blacks to it because “it really thrives on something in your people’s blood.” (Actually, the tree seems happy to eat her.) After the happy ending in which the professor’s young daughter is rescued from becoming tree-fodder, he tells an elderly black woman, “You know, they are always looking for ways to keep us down (“they” being those evil whites, of course). I should have been surprised at this, but I’m not.” Not surprised that “they” would be cultivating a tree that eats people? Now that’s paranoia.
This is also racist, anti-white, hateful propaganda. I won’t be watching any more episodes.
Besides, I need to feed my tree…
2.
Ethics Alarms 
“Causing clinical anxiety is just collateral damage to the activists.”
I made a similar point to a principal I worked with many years ago. He was urging some kind of action for more gun control and said in the course of his argument that school shootings were having an adverse mental impact on students. As a part of my back-and-forth with him, I said that the so-called active shooter drills might be contributing even more to student anxiety and fear. He did not seem to have an answer to that.
First comment on this multi-issue post! See, this is why I don’t do these every day any more…..
Re #6: I hated that episode too, but there were plenty others that were good. There was one particular episode, also featuring racial minorities, that was much more self-reflective, with no “blame whitey” shtick. In “Homecoming”, a man in a Latin American family comes home for a family gathering since his father, a famous horror author is on his last leg. The protagonist is bitter over his father’s abuse, which everyone else turned a blind eye to. Not helping was him being haunted by a monster that only tormented him. Every time he brings either factor up, his brothers and grandmother scoff at him, because in their culture, you don’t criticize your elders, ever. As long as the father brought home the bacon, he could do no wrong. But the monster attacks start up again, initially targeting the protagonist, but then moving on to the brothers. Eventually the protagonist realizes that the monster comes from his own rage, and his brothers realize that he’s not crazy. In the end they confront the grandmother, forcing her to face the fact that her son was no saint, and the final scene shows the monster rising again from grandma’s own rage. Not the most subtle metaphor, but I thought it was a great example of a culture looking inward at it’s own flaws.
I like the series, but I have a strict liability policy with blatant and intentional racism from Hollywood.
Re #4
The dean at Fordham is taking credit for those who sought post secondary training that did not result in a college degree.
I would bet that more apprentices in trades programs would eventually rise to become a business owner and CEO than any typical finance major graduate would become a bank president. More to the point, a person with a valued skill be it a car mechanic, electrician, plumber, welder, etc will have far more stable employment prospects than any general studies, liberal arts or even MBA graduate.
Most college degrees today are used as screening mechanisms for entry level jobs. You can obtain Masters in biotechnology and wind up doing basic bench work for years before any promotion opportunities materialize in Maryland. Just how many Art History graduates are captains or even corporals of industry?
There are some programs of study in some colleges that are rigorous and ultimately provide the graduate a substantially better standard of living but whether or not it makes all graduates more responsible citizens is not just unprovable but highly improbable. I believe their is direct relationship between academic program rigor and graduate quality. Unfortunately, far too many programs lack any real academic rigor which I define as the ability to take a set of disparate facts and then apply them to solve a given issue. I don’t consider memorization of lists, names, dates or extraneous trivia academic rigor.
Responsible citizenry depends on just how much work the graduate is willing to expend to understand the issues of the day and act responsible. If colleges impart some form of indoctrination – right or left- then it is likely that biased entrenched ideas will taken precedence over reasoned thought.
Re #5 Granted Pence’s run was absurd. But Trump shouldn’t be elected because he’s too divisive? He’s divisive because, should he win, the other side will never accept it (again). Maybe he should be reelected explicitly because the other side will never accept him, and they need too be punched in the mouth.
And btw is there, or was there ever, a more absurd candidacy than that of our former fat-thin-fat governor Chris Christy?
Oh, I think Pence is equally absurd, the difference being that CC KNOWS his candidacy is absurd, and is running anyway. It’s denial and ego.
Now what’s REALLY absurd, is Trump saying that Pence should endorse him. Wow.
Well, if not for being Trump’s Vice-President, how many fewer people would have even heard of Mike Pence? I know I wouldn’t have.
So I think there’s some logic behind expecting a modicum of gratitude for the people who helped you to get where you are.
–Dwayne
Re:1 As someone whose child is currently getting a pilot license, hiring based on skin color and lady parts for a job that can actually be harmful to her just pisses me off. How dare they presume. The airport she’s at is short staffed. She’s getting overtime almost every week with her job.
I’m confused as to how this is any better at all than before when hiring was still based on skin color and lack of lady parts.
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which others have decided not to see.” Ayn Rand.