I’ll post that clip of the wonderful John Belushi at his inspired best every year, if I can remember to to.
Stupid drugs…
But I digress….fascinate me!
Month: March 2024
Yet Another Amazing Story From “The Great Stupid”: The Fat-Shamed Pig!
We began this day with head-exploding stories from the Weird, Woke and Wonderful, so we might as well end with another. This one is genuinely funny; indeed it made me laugh out loud twice, something I haven’t been able to do for four weeks. Thank you, silly, humorless hyper-sensitive people!
As a special bonus, it involves a baseball team, and today is MLB’s Opening Day!
The St. Paul Saints announced the name for the baby pig that will deliver baseballs and provide refreshments for umpires during the first half of the 2024 season. This is a tradition for the minor league team, which has had many baseball pigs as mascots over thirty years. The Saints recently began using two pigs per season,because they grow so fast. This time, the fan submission included f a masterpiece of topical swine-naming: “Ozempig.” Here’s the announcement:
A Nelson For the “Get Trump!” Mob and a Lesson in Consequentialism
I was teaching another legal ethics course today and had occasion to muse about what a foolish ethical system consequentialism is, as I have periodically discussed on EA. The short version is that deciding whether an action was right or wrong, ethical or unethical depending on what the eventual results flowing from it are is both foolish and illogical: an action can only be judged based on what is known at the time the action is taken. What occurs as a result of the action is vulnerable to chaos: once those metaphorical billions of billiard balls start rolling around on the theoretical infinite pool table, anything can happen and frequently does. People habitually say that a decision was “a mistake” or “wrong” when it was neither, just because the results of the decision were the opposite of what was intended.
Think of “The Simpsons'” master of mockery Nelson Muntz above as the spokesperson of the cosmos, and as Donald Trump as his unwitting agent. The previous, pre-Musk proprietors of Twitter, full allies that they were in the coordinated (and unethical) effort by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to bring Donald Trump to ruin for all time, kicked him off the ubiquitous social media platform for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, a plausible but unprovable thesis. (I quit Twitter in protest, as the move was totalitarian, reflecting the totalitarian drift of the entire political left—which has continued.) The Trump Haters and Trump Deranged cheered. Trump, given no outlet for his annoying but often effective outbursts, juvenile jibes, rants and trolling orgies, responded by setting up his own pseudo-Twitter platform, Truth Social. It was and is cheesy, but it did its main job, which was to provide the ex-President with a web platform from which he could not be censored or silenced.
It’s Not Nice to Make My Head Explode First Thing in the Morning….
Here’s the Great Stupid attack I woke up to:
- That idiocy above, with our useless and silly Secretary of Education saying the underpasses built too low for vehicles like trucks and buses to get through were obviously designed to keep buses carrying black students to the beach from getting through.
- The ADL declaring that the term “100%” is racist:
- From the Washington Free Beacon: “The United States’ top intelligence agency wants to ban its spies from using “biased language,” including the terms “radical Islamists” and “jihadist,” saying these words “are hurtful to Muslim-Americans and detrimentally impact our efforts as they bolster extremist rhetoric,” according to a language guide published internally. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which is responsible for handling the country’s spy apparatus, seeks to ban a range of common terms because it says they offend Muslims and foment racism against employees. In addition to terms describing Islamic terrorists, ODNI instructs employees to avoid phrases such as “blacklisted,” “cakewalk,” “brown bag,” “grandfathered,” and “sanity check.”
Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Human Skin-Bound Book
As if it doesn’t have enough to worry about, Harvard University announced yesterday that its copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls” had been stripped of the very feature that made it unusual enough to be worth collecting. The book (above) had been bound in human skin, just like the book in “The Evil Dead” movies. Its first owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a French doctor, had inserted in the volume a handwritten note saying that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” The alumnus who gave the book to Harvard in 1934, the American diplomat (and the famous hat family heir) John B. Stetson, had informed the Houghton Library (Harvard’s rare book collection), that Bouland had taken the skin from an unknown woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital.
Harvard removed the binding and said it would be exploring options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.” “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” the university’s statement read.
Incidentally, the word for binding books in human skin is anthropodermic bibliopegy.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was this really ethically necessary?
Comment of the Day: “Notes on ‘Misinformation’”
Sarah B. submitted this Comment of the Day over the weekend, and it dovetails neatly with today’s post on the immediate politicizing of the Baltimore bridge disaster. Of course, that most recent incident is but a fractal of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck, which saw both misinformation spread by the news media and our supposedly non-partisan, trustworthy health organizations, agencies and institutions, cripple the economy, damage our children, turn large swathes of the population into fearful, mask-clutching weenies, and damage the integrity of a national election. That’s where Sarah’s cautionary tale begins.
Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Notes on ‘Misinformation’”…
***
My mother, an RN (and massage therapist) became livid at all her TDS suffering friends and patients repeatedly calling Ivermectin a “horse drug”. She went and got documents discussing the usage of Ivermectin in certain patients with various types of issues, and how the drug was routinely used to treat certain infections.
But despite the high usage of the drug on humans in these papers from reputable medical journals dated over decades, she was told that she was too simple to understand that this was misinformation and that Ivermectin was only a conspiracy theorist’s solution. She was told that she needs to check with people with real medical degrees, not just crunchy folks in massage therapy school. Her bachelors in nursing with decades of experience was ignored in this discussion.
My mother’s insistence that people should look at the evidence lost her friends and clients, many of whom no longer contact her at all and haven’t since 2020, despite being friends for decades prior.
Unethical Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden
“They have a point.”
—President Biden responding to pro-Hamas and Palestinians protesters at a campaign event in North Carolina yesterday after they shouted “What about the health care in Gaza?” before being ushered out by security.
This wasn’t Biden’s senility on display. Nor was it one of his lies. That statement demonstrates this President’s complete ethical and moral void as well as his cowardice, the result of which is to render him incapable of analyzing any situation requiring coherent views of history and a commitment to do the right thing regardless of political fallout.
Biden wants to avoid alienating any voter block, This profound lack of integrity prevents him from leading, leaving him only with the task of unprincipled pandering.
The protesters did not “have a point,” any more than protesters shouting “What about health care in Berlin?” during the Allies’ bombing of the city during World War II would have had a point. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” Biden said. Why? The United States is providing weapons for Israel to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, which is supported by a large majority of the population there. Another protester, apparently as clueless as Biden, called out that health centers in Gaza were “being bombed.” Yup, sure are, and that’s because Hamas is hiding in tunnels under such places so that civilians have to die for Hamas to be subjected to the punishment it deserves and dim bulb weaklings like Joe Biden can claim that pro-terrorism, anti-Israel protesters “have a point.”
I have recorded many statements by Donald Trump that I have ruled should, under normal circumstances, disqualify him from office. None are as disqualifying as those four fatuous, offensive words from Biden yesterday.
Somebody Please Sue Scribd, and Other Rueful Observations on the Collapse of American Customer Service
Too late to thank her, my wife’s death has made me realize what a terrible job she had dealing with all the companies, websites and cyber-traps one encounters trying to do business and deal with finances in today’s America. It also has brought into sharper focus what I had been aware of: that since the pandemic lockdown, customer service live and online has deteriorated to an extent that cannot be justified. When the Biden lackeys (like the execrable Paul Krugman) insist that the economy is wonderful and that the public doesn’t realize how great things are, this aspect of the economy should be thrown in their faces. Maybe elites like Krugman never have to go shopping in person or deal with a company’s website. If they did, they would realize that the quality of life has declined precipitously, and that it is fair to blame inflation (from profligate government spending) and excessive minimum wage levels as well as the remaining carnage from the Wuhan pandemic lockdown.
I hate to point a finger at Wells Fargo, as my bank has generally been more helpful over the past month than almost anyone else, but what follows is a prime example….
It’s Come To This: Even the Baltimore Bridge Collapse Is Turning Into An Ethics Train Wreck
The way my mind works, those videos of the container ship sailing out-of-control yesterday morning into Baltimore’s now-destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge immediately reminded me of the scene in “Jurassic Park II: The Lost World” when the cargo ship destroys the pier in San Diego because a Tyrannosaurus had eaten the crew. It does appear that the vessel in Baltimore had a catastrophic mechanical failure and the crew lost control of the ship, but it did get off a distress message soon enough to minimize the fatalities when the wounded bridge collapsed into the river.
Never mind, though: the incident is still rolling, ethics train wreck style, because it is being unethically politicized by both parties, and that’s because everything has to be politicized now.
Exhibit A: During his press conference announcing that the federal government will fund the rebuilding of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, President Biden said he had taken commuter rail on the bridge “many many times commuting from the state of Delaware either by train or by car.” Everything is about Joe, you see. The problem with the statement is that there were no rail lines over that bridge.
This would normally be in the “confused old coot whose mind is hovering on the brink of crippling dementia” category and worthy of Julie Principle status. However, this is also quite likely to be another one of Biden’s many deliberate lies, and as long as the Trump Deranged and the Axis of Unethical Conduct continue to claim that Donald Trump is unfit to be President because he lies all the time, Joe doesn’t get a Julie Principle pass. He lies constantly and always has, during his entire career.
I’ll give him his pass when the Washington Post creates a Biden lie database using the same criteria they used for Trump’s database—every exaggeration, hyperbole, joke, misstatement and opinion the Post Democrats disagree with, broken promise, example of deceit and actual, intentional falsehood is a “lie,” and the paper reports on the “lies” from both individuals using exactly the same news judgement and standards.
Exhibit B: Utah Republican Phil Lyman, candidate for governor, tweeted out that the DEI mania was responsible for the Baltimore disaster:
There was no evidence whatsoever that the cargo ship’s problems were caused by the “Didn’t Earn It” fad. I’m having a hard time figuring out how the bridge collapse could possibly be blamed on DEI. In a subsequent post, Lyman added, “DEI=DIE.”
As Marty McFly might say,
Then, when called on this cheap shot idiocy, Lyman blamed the tweets under his name on the anonymous staffers who handle his social media accounts. “I prefer a dignified approach and sometimes the people who handle the social media are more provocative than what I’m comfortable with,” Lyman said. Oh. And why do you allow irresponsible agents to speak for you on social media?
If there are any Utahns out there, do NOT vote for this guy.
Lyman wasn’t the only conservative to make the absurd leap from DEI to the bridge collapse. Former Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini posted a video of the bridge collapsing adding, “DEI did this.”
Exhibits C,D and E:
- Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones suggested said the he suspects the accident was due to a cyber attack , perhaps the beginning of World War III. Who follows that idiot? How does anyone who pays attention to him get through a single day alive, with only a rudimentary brain, like a salamander?
- American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp tweeted “drug-addled” workers and coronavirus lockdowns were to blame.
- Fox Business Host Maria Bartoromo claimed that the bridge disaster was in part caused by the Biden administration’s illegal immigration policies. I would call this the equivalent of the Left blaming the accident on climate change.
Boy, The Great Stupid is strong on Twitter/”X” these days…and Google’s not working! Maybe World War III is starting…
This Program Is So Stupid and Unethical, I Thought It Was Right-Wing Disinformation
Tragically, I was wrong.
Perpetually confused New York Mayor Eric Adams has championed a potentially $53 million pilot program with Mobility Capital Finance to distribute debit cards to illegal immigrants (but it sounds so much better if you call them “migrants”) who are in his “sanctuary city.” The program, yet another zenith for The Great Stupid, kicked off yesterday with 10 families getting the cards; the program will soon expand to 115 families. Families of four will have $350 each week to spend using on their cards on groceries, diapers, drugs, baby formula and other essentials at local businesses. That comes out to roughly $1,440 per month. The cards will go to the families who have received a 28-day voucher to stay at a designated group of hotels. If the program is successful, it will expand to 500 families, with the program’s costs rising to as much as $53 million.
“There is no free money. These are not ATM cards. You can’t take cash out,” Deputy Mayor Fabien Levy said at the news conference.
Oh. Then the program makes perfect sense then.
Politico writes, “They’ve invited the condemnation by right-wing news media as simply another benefit for people who entered the country illegally.” Conservatives pounce. Tell me, PLEASE, what else would you call this but a benefit for people who entered the country illegally?
Someone? Anyone? “Buhler?“
Today the mayor was asked if the debit cards send a “mixed message” to illegals (the questioner said “migrants,” of course). What a stupid question! It’s the clearest of messages: come here illegally and you’ll get free stuff. Oh, though you better not kill or rape anyone…the Gringos don’t like that, for some reason.
The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have barely covered this story—three guesses why. The last Times mention was in this hilariously headlined piece: Why New York’s Plan to Give Migrants Debit Cards Came Under Fire.
Hmmm, I wonder why? It’s a mystery. Those crazy, cruel conservatives don’t like anything.
Ethics Alarms 