Month: August 2024

The Mystery of the Unqualified Pilot

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but somebody someplace was awfully unethical somewhere.

Passengers on the August 8th Alaska Airlines flight 3492, in the air after taking off from San Francisco bound for Jackson Hole, Wyoming, were stunned to hear their captain announce as the plane was about to land at its destination, “Hey, I’m really sorry folks, but due to me not having the proper qualification to land in Jackson Hole, we need to divert to Salt Lake City, Utah. We’ll keep you posted on the next steps.”

Hey, no problem, it could happen to anyb….WHAT?

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Ethics Quiz: The Border Humanitarian

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

I am having a hard time with this one.

This week the New York Times and other publications gave a hero’s send-off to Eddie Canales, who died on July 30 at the age of 76. No doubt about it, he was a caring, selfless, compassionate man.

Unfortunately, his caring and compassion were applied to assist those seeking to break U.S. law. From the Times obituary:

For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.

Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains. The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”

…Mr. Canales successfully placed more than 170 water stations across seven counties, the outposts recognizable from afar by flags with a red cross flown high….

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it ethical to honor someone for intentionally facilitating the efforts of others to violate U.S. law?

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Comment of the Day: “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I have neglected Comments of the Day of late I know, and I am sorry about that. There have been many excellent comments, and also many I have not had time to read carefully: the responses to the “What do you believe?” post alone generated many strong COTD candidates (and they are still coming in).

I might as well start with a comment I said I would post under the designation three weeks ago, and whiffed: Michael R.’s brief arguing that the Secret Service’s epic botch in Pennsylvania that only avoided getting Donald Trump killed by the intervention of moral luck was no accident.

Is the EA post that inspired Michael moot? After all, Kim Cheatle finally resigned after the indignity of having Congress members of both parties tell her to. However, the information that has been drip, drip, dripping out about the near-assassination has not disproved Michael’s thesis; if anything it bolsters his argument.

Ultimately, the question, as it so frequently does in the Age of the Great Stupid, comes down to Hanlon’s Razor: Is it intentional malice, or is it incompetence? The COTD concludes, “To cling to an incredibly unlikely incompetence argument in light of a much more likely explanation is only required if you don’t want to acknowledge something you are unwilling to accept.”

Maybe, but I will still cling even while admitting that other recent Hanlon’s Razor mysteries that have been popping up (“Did Democrats and the media just miss the fact that Joe Biden was a proto-vegetable because they are lazy, biased and inept, or did they deliberately participate in a conspiracy to deceive the American people ‘to save democracy’?” is one obvious example) demand the malice label.

Here’s Michael R’s Comment on the Day on the post, “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That.”

***

You have to make a lot of hand wringing arguments to state:

(1) They didn’t put snipers on the roof that THEY identified as a threat.

(2) They didn’t secure the building despite the threat of the roof.

(3) They didn’t notice the guy on the roof despite the fact that the crowd had been taking pictures of him for 25+ minutes.

(4) They let a 20 year old kid drive up, unload a ladder, climb onto the roof spread out his blanket, assemble the rifle and take 7 or 8 shots accidentally. That is the most generous assessment. If THEY left the ladder to the roof there for access, it is worse.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 8/10/24: Paul Harvey and Other Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That’s a famous segment from Paul Harvey’s radio show, unearthed by Citizens Free Press. It’s fascinating in retrospect and worthy of reflection no matter what your political orientation may be. I place it in the same category as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Network,” commentaries that seemed dystopian and extreme when they first appeared, but that when viewed now are disquietly familiar. The date makes Harvey’s commentary particularly interesting, for 1964 was the cusp of the Sixties, right before its tornado winds blew traditional values and American respect for its institutions into tiny pieces, never again to be assembled quite as securely again.

Harvey was a proud conservative, of course: many of his beliefs today are considered Cro-Magnon. He was not responsible for the video, which engages in several cheap shots; the gay couple from “Modern Family,” for example, don’t deserve their appearance here: it was a loving same sex marriage between two kind men who were loving parents (and the least strange characters in the show). Nevertheless, Harvey was prescient in many ways, unfortunately for all of us.

1. How do PolitFact’s partisan hacks look at themselves in the mirror? The most biased and dishonest of all the factchecking organizations—and that’s quite a distinction—was at it again this week as it joined the effort to pretend Kamala Harris isn’t what she is.

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Month: IOC President Thomas Bach

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We have said from the very beginning. If someone is presenting us scientifically a solid system how to identify men and women who were the first ones to do it? We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation. We do not like it for nobody. So we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible … is someone saying ‘this is not a woman’ by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign.”

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? This is the caliber of intellect and clarity of thought those leading the Olympic Games are able to display when explanations are in order. No wonder we get…oh, heck, why bother?

For some reason his statement reminded me of “Green Eggs and Ham.” “I do not like you, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.” Personally, I don’t like, or trust, officials who can’t make more sense than this, and more grammatically, behind a microphone.

So Democrats Are Really Trying To Elect A President By Not Letting Voters Know Who She Is and What She Believes. Democracy! Some Observations…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I had already decided to open this Saturday’s Ethics Games with a post on this topic when I read this section in NYT left-wing columnist Nate Cohn’s (gleeful?) column this morning about a Times-Sienna poll that has Kamala Harris suddenly topping Trump in several “battleground states” where he has been leading Biden. Cohn wrote,

…One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.

Isn’t that wonderful? Cohn clearly thinks so. He also explains that in earlier polls an “anyone but Trump” hypothetical generic candidate beat the former President by 10 points in these same states. Harris now leads Trump by five, meaning only half of the “anyone but Trump” voters have no clue who Kamala Harris is….but hey, that might just be enough! So the Democratic Party, in its fervor to save democracy, are going to try to keep it that way.

Can you guess why Abe is at the top of this post? I bet you can!

I resolved to discuss this early yesterday, when the same Kamala surrogate—I had never seen him before, but he was a youngish black man and appropriately glib—was making the rounds of the news networks (even Fox News) arguing that Harris never has to agree to be interviewed and answer questions without a script or a teleprompter, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. After all, he argued while several talking heads expressed exasperation (notably Harris Faulkner on Fox and S.E. Cupp on CNN), the public doesn’t need spontaneous answers to learn what they need to know. Kamala Harris doesn’t do as well off script (Ya think?), so why should she agree to present herself in less than the best light?

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A “Great Stupid” Court Case SO Stupid That It Makes “The Great Stupid” Look Almost Smart…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That crude, ambiguous drawing above got a first grader—we’re talking six-years-old here—suspended. That’s almost all you have to know for your head to explode if it is properly wired.

The Ethics Villains and Dunces are so thick in this fiasco you could use it to lay bricks. I’m almost embarrassed to tell the story, which I first saw at Reason…

In March of 2021, a first grader referred to as “B.B.” ” drew a picture we are told was intended to show people of different races, representing “three classmates and herself holding hands.” (I’d save the money the family was planning on spending on art school for B.B., if that was their intent.) Above the drawing, B.B. wrote “Black Lives Mater” (Latin!) with the words “any life” stuck in-between the slogan and the jelly beans, or whatever they were. B.B. then gave the drawing to a black classmate, as what B.B. testified was intended as a friendly gesture. But the classmate either ratted out B.B. or the principal was told about it by the teacher, or something (because school administrators don’t have anything better to do than to police the political correctness of kids’ drawings).

The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, admonished B.B., saying that the drawing was “inappropriate.” B.B. was ordered to apologize to her classmate, prohibited from drawing any more pictures in school, and prevented from going to recess for two weeks.

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You Think I’m Too Tough On Ethics Alarms Commenters? Ann Althouse Says, “Hold My Beer!” I Say, “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sorry, this is petty, I know, but I can’t let this pass.

Here’s Althouse today: Presenting “We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers/Questions about unfair advantage won’t just go away.” by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic for discussion, the retired law professor/blogress writes, “Please read the whole thing before commenting and restrict comments to the issue framed in the article, which I am not going to attempt to summarize. If you don’t know what 5ARD is, please don’t comment.”

Then it turned out that the article was behind a paywall, and you have to give The Atlantic a credit card to get your free trial subscription. “Oh, that’s a problem! Sorry,” says Althouse.

This garners (Ann hates the word “garner”) Althouse the second “Bite Me!” award of 2024. Ethics Alarms introduced the “Bite Me!” in 2023. It’s a distinction reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times in the course of 2023, the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”

Ann falls in the second category.

Incompetent Former Elected Official of the Month: Ex-North Dakota State Senator Ray Holmberg (R-Hall of Shame)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Be proud, Republicans!

How do creeps like this get elected? Never mind: the question is futile. “Incompetent” doesn’t quite do Holmberg justice, either.

Ray Holmberg, a powerful GOP state senator served in the North Dakota Senate for 45 years, representing Grand Forks. He resigned in 2022 as a consequence of his interesting and expensive hobby. He admitted in federal court yesterday that he liked to take trips to Europe so he could have sexual relations with children.  “The boys rent at around $60 (sex is extra),” Holmberg wrote in an email to a friend using an alias. Good to know!

Holmberg traveled to Prague 14 times between 2011 and 2021 to purchase sex and other intimate contact with boys under 18. Some of the these trips were paid for with taxpayer money. Now that was just careless: I told you he was incompetent. Holmberge resigned after reaching the pinnacle of his power as North Dakota Senate Appropriations Committee chair because he was the target of a federal investigation into child pornography and traveling for sex with children.

A search of his home under a federal warrant had uncovered incriminating emails. The age of consent in the Czech Republic is 15, but U.S. law forbids travel for sex with adolescents under the age of 18 whether it is legal in the locale or not.  What do you want to bet that U.S. libertarians think Holmberg is a victim of excessive government interference with personal liberties, since he broke no laws in his man-boy sex playground?

When an elected official is discovered to be this despicable, disgraceful and untrustworthy, the party that nominated him should have to suffer some kind of penalty, and a more serious one if it is determined that the party knew or should have known how bad its representative was. (Hi there, George Santos!) Maybe then parties will start taking their responsibilities to the public seriously.

A candidate for high state or national office should have to endure background checks as stringent as those one must undergo for positions requiring national security clearance.

Friday Open Forum on “Un-elected President Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Propitiously enough, August 9 is the anniversary of our first un-elected President of the United States taking office at high noon in 1974. Gerald Ford was never on a Presidential ticket, having been appointed as Vice President upon the resignation of Richard Nixon’s vile VP, Spiro T. Agnew. At least Ford’s ascension came courtesy of a Constitutional amendment: it’s not like he bypassed a democratic nominating process or anything, but who would try something like that?

Let’s see what you can come up with to discuss today….