Yikes.
Possible responses:
What was your reaction?
The conservative news media and punditry sites are exploding with criticism of the New York Times for publishing the op-ed on December 24 written by Yahya Sarraj, mayor of Gaza City. Sarraj was appointed mayor by Hamas, the terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza for more than a decade. The piece is self-evident proaganda that seeks to create outrage and sympathy for Gaza in the wake of Israel’s retaliation for the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7 and its invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas-backed mayor writes in part…
“The Israelis have also pulverized something else: Gaza City’s cultural riches and municipal institutions. The unrelenting destruction of Gaza — its iconic symbols, its beautiful seafront, its libraries and archives and whatever economic prosperity it had — has broken my heart….Why did the Israeli tanks destroy so many trees, electricity poles, cars and water mains? Why would Israel hit a U.N. school? The obliteration of our way of life in Gaza is indescribable. I still feel I am in a nightmare because I can’t imagine how any sane person could engage in such a horrific campaign of destruction and death….The Gaza Zoo has been destroyed with many of its animals killed or starved to death, including wolves, hyenas, birds and rare foxes. Other casualties include the city’s main public library, the Children’s Happiness Center, the municipal building and its archive, and the seventh-century Great Omari Mosque. Israeli forces have also damaged or destroyed streets, squares, mosques, churches and parks.”
The clear and obvious answer to “why?” would seem to be “Because your government started a war, and this is what happens to places that start wars by massacring civilians, raping women, beheading babies and taking hostages.”
A New Hampshire law protecting the integrity of elections is being challenged in court by Democrats and the Biden administration as a threat to voting rights. The reality is that the law is a threat to Democratic tactics used to win elections illicitly. The fact that the lawsuit exists is more evidence that speculation about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is far from “baseless.”
Senate Bill 418, signed into law by NH. GOP Governor Chris Sununu last year, requires those who register to vote on Election Day without photo ID to send in verifying documentation to the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Such voters submit an “affidavit ballot” on Election Day, which will be excluded from the final vote count unless the citizen complies with an identity-verification process within seven days of the election. If such a voter misses the seven-day deadline, his or her vote will not be counted under the law, and the Secretary of State would be required to turn over the voter’s name to the state attorney general’s office for possible criminal investigation.
One of the main occupational hazards of being an ethicist and writing this blog is that my ethics Spidey-sense can’t be turned off. This is why anything from TV commercials to an old re-run of “Three’s Company” to a kid leaving an e-scooter by the side of the road can trigger an ethical analysis. This is not a fun way to go through life, but “this is the life I have chosen.”
It may be that the passage in the Georgetown Law Center alumni magazine started my head clanging like the crocodile’s in “Peter Pan” when the alarm clock he swallowed goes off wouldn’t have bothered me if I had I not just reviewed all the unethical quotes of 2023 an hour before reading “AI and the Law” in the Fall 2023 issue (which just arrived last week, a full season late). I don’t think so, however. Here it is:
“Students might well use the [AI]technology to cheat, but at this point stopping them is difficult….And in any case, students have always cheated; in a way, AI may even help level the playing field. ‘AI puts kids who don’t have Uncle Alito to call for help with their take-home exam on an equal footing with those who do,’ says [Prof. Frances] DeLaurentis.”
...Trump might blow the race to Joe
By acting crazily.
Christmas Eve found Donald
Roasting no chestnut
Trump’s deranged for Christmas
He’s in a nasty rut!
Here is what the man who wants to be trusted to hold the most powerful job on earth sends out to the public…
—Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus, a Harvard Law grad, in an opinion piece titled, “Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign.”
Marcus, who has one of the thickest and damning dossiers of any pundit on Ethics Alarms, usually strikes me as a dim and predictable partisan analyst, but this is disgusting even by her bottom-of-the barrel standards.
You see what she’s doing there? She agrees with the conservatives who have called for Harvard president Claudine Gay to be fired or resign, but while in Marcus’s case, the conclusion is honorable, considered, rational and pure, conservatives who reached the exact same conclusion did so because of bias and bigotry.
The entire text of “A Christmas Carol” is and has been for a long time listed under Inspirations on the Ethics Alarms homepage. If you haven’t read it (preferably out loud, to your family) recently, I urge you to do so. It is wonderful, and still, after all the movies and TV specials and songs and rival Christmas-themed stories, the best of the genre. It is also delightful literature, and, because I am an incurable romantic, a sap, and a Christmas addict, the story and Dickens’ telling of it gets to me every time.
I just realized that the last time I directed a production that wasn’t my own, it was a staged reading of “A Christmas Carol.” I miss directing greatly—no one has been clamoring for my comeback—so it that was my last hurrah, I can live with that. “A Christmas Carol” is, after all, one of the greatest ethics tales of all.
The first version of the film adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” I saw when I was knee-high to Robert Reich was the version starring Alistair Sim. Many aficionados of “A Christmas Carol” movies think it is still the best, and I won’t argue with them. Because the movie is in black and white and has been superseded by so many other versions, it is hard to find it on TV now except for the streaming services. Even the much inferior version starring Reginald Owen (with the entire Lockhart family, including young pre-“Lassie,” pre-“Lost in Space” June, as the Cratchits) is shown more than the classic Sim film. In these cynical times, the version of “A Christmas Carol” most likely to be available, sort of, is Bill Murray’s “Scooged.” It’s not the worst version—the musical starring Albert Finney wins that booby prize (“Thank you very much! Thank you very much!” Yecchh.)—but cynicism and dark humor really don’t belong in this story
My personal choice for the best adaptation goes to the 1984 George C. Scott version, if you don’t count “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” and you probably shouldn’t, though I love it. The 1984 film has David Warner as Bob; Edward Woodward is the best (and tallest) Ghost of Christmas Present ever; and I think this is the scariest version of Marley.
Here it is…
Dean Martin’s renditions of popular Christmas songs like the one above, along with “Let It Snow,” “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (among others) just make me smile. Dean wasn’t the right singer for the carols, but I’m convinced his recordings and his memory will endure because of the innate sense of fun and irreverence he brought to the lighter ballads. Who fills that niche today? I can’t think of anyone.
Since I mentioned Frank Loesser’s controversial contribution to the popular holiday canon, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” allow me to digress. It seems like the withering away of #MeToo as a result of the revealed hypocrisy of the movement social justice warrior advocates has restored this unfairly maligned song (which won an Academy Award!) to respectability. If so good, and I hope John Legend’s certifiably awful politically correct version (with lines like “It’s your body and your choice!”) is mocked mercilessly forever more. Yesterday, I heard one of the gay male hosts on the Sirius Broadway channel (all the men on that channel appear to be trying to sound as gay as possible) talking about the song, and saying that the context of the lyrics are everything. Then he said that the version he was going to play (from “Glee’) was a perfect example of how the song, in the right context, could be sweet and inoffensive. It was sung by two gay men, not that thee’s anything wrong with that, but as far as I could determine, it was no different in “context” from any version in which a male is desperately trying to talk a woman into a winter sleepover.
1. Speaking of LRTBQ+ matters, this would seem to be a superfluous headline: “Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity.” Gee, ya think? I wonder if feminists will ever have the integrity to support Ethics Heroes like Riley Gaines, the collegiate swimmer who has become a vocal advocate for keeping trans-males out of women’s sports. I didn’t get around to highlighting her testimony in Congress, in which another incompetent member, Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee, accused Gaines of engaging in “transphobic bigotry.” Gaines, who is gutsy and outspoken, returned fire by calling Lee a misogynist, goading Lee into making an ass of herself when she stopped the testimony to demand that Gaines’ insult be stricken from the record. (Statements that are unwelcome to Democrats and progressives are “hate speech,” you see.)
2. Regarding the previous post: my Harvard alumna sister opined that beleaguered president Gay will be able to hold on for enough time that Harvard can credibly claim her withdrawal for “personal reasons” isn’t the result of pressure from the Evil Right. I agreed with her at the time, but now I’m not so sure. The mockery of the school is wide ranging, sharp and effective…
..and the ridicule of Gay herself is apparently irresistible, as with this parody letter of resignation by the plagiarizing scholar:
[Source: Power Line]
It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.
I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.
Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:
Nothing says Christmas like a late 19th century black Deputy Federal Marshal in the Indian Territory. As I watched the Paramount+ video series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.” I was struck by what an inspiring and unifying this remarkable man’s story would be for school children, and wondered not only why it isn’t taught today, but why it wasn’t taught while I was in school. Not only hadn’t I heard of Reeves before last night, I assumed the film was just another race- or gender-flipped Western, like “Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight.” It’s an amazing story, and a true one.
Bass Reeves (1838–1910) was born as a slave in Arkansas, then lived in Lamar and Grayson counties, Texas, where he belonged to Col. George R. Reeves, who later become the Speaker of the House in the Texas legislature. Reeves escaped north into the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where he had dealings with the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes, learning enough of their languages to be useful to him later. He fought with the Union Indian Home Guard Regiments during the Civil War, then settled in Arkansas as a farmer. To make extra money, Reeves served as a guide, scout and tracker for the deputy U.S. marshals who worked in the Indian Territory (like Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit”!) out of “Hanging Judge” Parker’s federal court at Fort Smith. Judge Parker commissioned Reeves as the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River.
He worked for thirty-two years as a deputy marshal in the Indian Territory, arresting an estimated 3,000 lawbreakers and shooting 14 of them dead in self defense. (It helped considerably that he was 6’2,” remarkably strong, and a dead shot with pistol or rifle.) Reeves was never wounded himself, though his hat was shot off a few times (they show this in the series). Reeves demonstrated his integrity when he brought his own son in for murder once a warrant was issued.
Ethics Alarms 