November 4 is lively ethics date in addition to the aforementioned robbery of King Tut’s tomb. There have been two notable assassinations on this date that have current news resonance: Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, and in 1928, gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was instrumental in fixing the 1919 World Series. (If the Arizona Diamondbacks has won the World Series just completed, I would have suspected a fix, especially with baseball sullying itself with a full embrace of online gambling last season.) Just to show how fast cultural and ethical winds can shift, it was on this date in 2008 that Proposition 8 was passed in California, banning same-sex marriage. Today I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin Newsome sign a bill making it a felony to say anything negative about same-sex marriages. The Iran hostage crisis began in 1979: yes, it’s true, Democrats: once the Iranians were the bad guys. In 1956, the USSR under Khrushchev sent in the tanks and crushed the flickering of democracy in Hungary. The late Diane Feinstein was elected California Senator for the first time, highlighting the Democrats’ incredibly cynical “Year of the Woman,” during which misogynist and serial sexual harasser Bill Clinton was held up by the party as a paragon of virtue. And in 2008, of course, Barack Obama was elected, proving that the United States was not the racist nation his administration and its supporters helped convince black citizens that it was over the next eight years.

Boy, this really has been a terrible date for ethics.

Let’s hope today doesn’t add to the list…

1. Could this be it? Is this the tipping point? In Dighton, Mass, (This Massachusetts boy never heard of it!), a female high school field hockey player was badly injured and sent to the hospital after a fierce shot by “a male player” hit her in the face. Whether the player on the other team “identified” as female or was just a male playing a female sport because Massachusetts’ way to avoid controversies is to just eliminate gender separations in all sports is unclear so far. It shouldn’t make any difference.

In the ridiculously woke Bay State, the incident is being treated like a live hand-grenade, but it is still setting off ethics alarms. Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said in a letter to families that “[w]hile I understand that the MIAA has guidelines in place for co-ed participation under section 43 of their handbook, this incident dramatically magnifies the concerns of many about player safety,” Runey wrote. Gee, ya think?

2. See? Baseball makes you smart! (As opposed to football, which gives you dementia…) The latest issue of the Baseball Research Journal (the fruit of a generous gift from my friend Bob Kenney) had a feature article on the burning topic of why Ty Cobb was named “Tyrus.” My first reaction was, “Wow, they are really digging deep for topics at SABR,” but, as is often the case, research on a seemingly trivial topic yielded wide-ranging and valuable information. Cobb believed that his first name was original and the invention of his father, a history professor, whom the baseball great thought bestowed on his son the name to honor the city of Tyre’s courageous resistance to Alexander the Great, who eventually destroyed it. This, in turn, would indicate that all subsequent Tyruses were named after Ty Cobb. In the course of debunking that story, historian William H. Cobb discovered and reveals,

• The Norse god of war, Tyr, which Ty was not named after, was also the god of law and honor, with the power to devise unsolvable puzzles, and dedicated to using his many powers for diplomacy and peace.
• The theory that Cobb, a Georgia native, was named for Tyre because Confederates and Lost Cause celebrators equated Sherman’s destruction of Atlanta with Alexander’s conquest of Tyre, doesn’t wash because Cobb’s father and ancestors were mostly abolitionists who supported the Union. This also helps dispel that still widely believed libel that Ty Cobb was a virulent racist. (This and other slurs on Cobb’s character were unethically injected into popular myth by a habitual lying sportswriter named Al Stump.)
• The Bible mentions Tyre and the alternate name Tyrus frequently, leading to the author’s hypothesis that Ty was given a Biblical name, not an uncommon practice at the time.  This comes complete with a fascinating account of Tyre and its history in the Bible and the Crusades.
• Finally, author Cobb shows that “Tyrus” was not as uncommon as player Cobb (and historian Cobb) thought it was. He found records of 27 soldiers in the Civil War named Tyrus, and 70 such soldiers in The Great War, who would have been contemporaries of Ty Cobb and thus not named after him.

3. Again, public art ethics: For some reason the now worldwide “Great Stupid” has spawned an outbreak of hideous, outrageously expensive public art in 2023. Surely you recall this monstrosity unveiled in Boston…

discussed here, and this thing in Central Park,

discussed here. Now, thanks to a tip from Curmie, we have this to ponder, in Vienna, Austria.

Called “the ugliest fountain in the world,” coming in at a cost of $2 million, was recently unveiled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its Hochquellen-Leitung — the pipeline that brings water into the city.

4. “Round and round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows…” I wonder how much permanent damage the scholarly Left’s enthusiastic embrace of anti-Semitism and terrorism will inflict on public support of their institutions and delusions? Will the wokified, ignorant and gullible just shrug it all off in the end, and continue to support the ideology that 1) spawned them and 2) they implant in students? I don’t know. In California, where, as you’d suspect, Hamas fans and those who see no reason why Israel shouldn’t just allow itself to be wiped from the map flourish like illegal immigrants, Jay Sures, a regent at the University of California, had the courage to speak out about a letter signed by UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. Here is the letter:

Yes, suggesting that beheading babies and raping women isn’t justified makes Palestinian and their ilk feel “unsafe.”

Sures wrote,

Bravo.