The headline is obviously false. Everyone knows Biden is going to pardon Hunter.
Month: November 2024
Comment of the Day: “Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign”
The various issues being discussed around Jaguar’s weird, woke-pandering, car-less video ad have been covered twice at Ethics Alarms, initially here. The always trenchant EA comment whiz Mrs. Q issued this emphatic Comment of the Day explaining “What’s going on here?” from her perspective, and as ever, she doesn’t mince words. Here its is, on the post, “Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign”….
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“Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…“
Recently, it was mentioned on this blog that furries were accepted by the “LGBTQ community.” First off there is no such thing as community here. Most gays can’t stand bisexuals and most trans don’t like gays. But let’s get to the real shit here.
The people who always have and always will sign off on supposed “edgy” lifestyles and content like this has always been what my wife and I refer to as the elite, bored, rich, and white. Ever heard of the term “academic lesbian?” Learn about it and the picture starts to become clear.
Ethics Villain: Ryan Borgwardt
In “Double Jeopardy,” a 1999 thriller co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd plays a woman whose apparently loving husband fakes his own death while on a romantic yachting trip with her, leaving behind manufactured evidence that gets Ashley convicted of murdering him. To be fair, Wisconsin resident Ryan Borgwardt wasn’t quite that diabolical. He just faked his death while pretending to be on kayaking fishing trip and fled the country. Then again, Ashley Judd’s husband only inflicted his plot on his wife and a single child, while Borgwalt has three kids.
On August 12, Watertown, Wisconsin’s big news was the disappearance of devoted family man, Borgwardt, 44. An emergency search found his capsized kayak on Green Lake and his vehicle and trailer parked nearby. A local fishermen found Ryan’s fishing rod and a tacklebox containing his wallet and other belongings. Such a tragedy!
But Borgwalt was not as clever as the husband in “Double Jeopardy,” however, so an investigation eventually uncovered evidence that he was alive and had crossed into Canada. Border authorities confirmed that they had checked his passport a day after his “drowning.” After that, Borgwardt’s elaborate plot to abandon his family, apparently to begin a new life with another woman (this was also the motive of Ashley’s evil spouse), began to come into focus.
Ethics Quiz: The Wrong Snack
This is an ethics quiz in which I am curious whether my certainty regarding the answer might be mistaken. It’s also a pretty silly tale.
A Calhoun City (Mississippi)High School teacher, whose name was not released by the Calhoun County School District, thought she was giving her students beef jerky as part of a class birthday celebration, but in fact the snacks were “Beggin’ Strips” or some similar form of dog treat. At least eight children took at least one bite of the stuff, according to Dr. Lisa Langford, the district superintendent. One child reported an upset stomach; the district alerted the affected children’s parents and had the school nurse check with the Poison Center.
The teacher was summarily dismissed.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Was that a fair response by the school?
A Show Of Hands, Now: Who’s Shocked That A “Technology Misinformation” Expert Used A.I. Generated Fake Information?
geewhatasurprise. But as Mastercard would say, this story is priceless.
Professor Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, and his faculty biography states that he is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology.” Apparently he knows the subject very well: Hancock submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology in support of a candidate (or to discredit one) in an election. Republican state Rep. Mary Franson is challenging the law in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment (which, of course, it is). But Democrats don’t like the First Amendment. Surely you know that by now.
But I digress…
Unethical Cartoon of the Month
This is one of the times I miss our once-frequent cartoonist commenters, the apparently retired King Kool and the now completely Trump Deranged Ampersand. What a snotty, insulting, arrogant and stupid cartoon that is. I’m not sure where it cane from: my guess would be The New Yorker.
Just because the unethical assertion that voting for Donald Trump (or against the spectacularly awful Kamala Harris, the totalitarianism, censorship and anti-Semitism-supporting party she represented or the incompetent Biden administration) means you are deplorable, “garbage,” a racist, a sexist or a fascist comes in a cartoon doesn’t mitigate the vile nature of the statement. I’m sure the cartoon will be defended by the claim that it is mocking people like the speaker in the drawing.
Sure.
Whoa! “The View” Has Had To Issue 36 “Legal Notes” So Far This Year
The imposition of “legal notes” on “The View’s” panel of bigots, incompetents, liars and fools received a lot of attention last week because there were four of them, as ABC’s lawyers were quick to force clarifications on potentially defamatory statements by Sunny Hostin and the rest of the coven. Because I don’t watch the show ( because anyone who does is risking permanent brain damage or a stroke), I assumed this was a new development. The indispensable Axis media watchdog Media Research Center, which monitors this leftist clown act so I don’t have to, reports that in fact Whoopi’s gang has had to read 36 such disclaimers so far in 2024.
The ladies of “The View” seem to think this is funny. It’s not. The fact that so much of what they bleat on this daily show, which is, incredibly, categorized as a news program on ABC, has to be corrected in real time lest the network be subject to law suits is indisputable evidence that the cast is incompetent, lazy and vicious, and that ABC is irresponsible to allow them to remain on the air.
Condign justice may be coming Disney’s way: ABC News is being sued by Trump over on-air comments made on “Good Morning America” by co-host (and Clinton-allied hack) George Stephanopoulos when he kept asking Rep. Nancy Mace to comment on how Trump had been “found liable for rape.” Trump was not found liable for rape in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll even after New York stacked the legal deck against him as part of the Democrats’ lawfare strategy. ABC’s lawyers have so far failed to get the lawsuit dismissed and it is entering the deposition phase.
Asks PJ Media columnist Rick Moran regarding “The View” panel, “Is it that they feel so entitled that the truth shouldn’t matter, or are they so stupid they think that just because they believe something, it must be so?”
I’m pretty sure the answer is “Both.”
A Bit More DEI Among Trump’s Cabinet and Agency Picks Would Have Been Ethical
…as in prudent, responsible, respectful, and competent.
President-elect Trump’s best mouthpiece, Rep. Byron Donalds, essentially humina-humina-ed the question on CNN about whether Al Sharpton’s criticism of the nomination and appointments so far emanating from Mar-A Largo was valid. Certainly Sharpton’s rationale isn’t valid: that Trump “owes” black voters more African American cabinet members, but the presence of just a single black nominee among the many selections, that being former NFL player Scott Turner nominated last week be Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is at very least unwise. Turner was part of Trump’s executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council; now he steps into the job held last time by Dr. Ben Carson. No, I don’t think there is any chance Turner will be rejected by the Senate.
It certainly looks like Trump has designated HUD as the slot for tokens: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who revealed himself during the 2016 debates to be an idiot savant, had no qualifications for HUD other than his skin color. Turner is more qualified, but still: if Trump wanted to ensure that the “Trump is racist” trope continues unabated, he could hardly have pursued a course that would have supported it more vividly. There are certainly a lot of nominations and appointments “of color,” but in the United States, for obvious reasons, blacks are in a special category.
Pre-Thanksgiving Ethics Turkey Shoot, 11/24/24
Maybe The Great Stupid is receding at last; there are some faint signs.
Apropos of Thanksgiving, some appear to be having second thoughts about one of the silliest and most unnecessary political correctness outbreaks, the mass fervor to strip athletic teams of nicknames, logos and mascots that evoked Native American culture. If you check back, Ethics Alarms and its predecessor (2004-2009) The Ethics Scoreboard called it: the result of the political correctness excesses would be to virtually erase Native Americans, aka “Indians,” from the nation’s cultural memory. I said this more than once, and that they would come to regret it. Hollywood doesn’t make Westerns much any more, Disney has labeled “Peter Pan” (my favorite of Walt’s animated features) racist because of its portrayal of our North American predecessors, and the Land O’ Lakes girl is gone. Yet now the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is negotiating with the NFL and the Washington “Commanders” (previously the Redskins) to bring back the banned Redskins logo. “We have good discussions with the NFL and with the Commanders,” Montana Senator Steve Daines told FOX News. “There’s good faith in negotiations going forward that’s going to allow this logo to be used again. Perhaps revenues going to a foundation that could help Native Americans in sports and so forth.” So the Washington Commanders, who adopted that boring generic name in 2020 as the Great Stupid was roaring across the land, would bring back this logo
…but without the name (which most fans still use anyway) even though it has nothing to do with “Commanders.” Makes sense to me! No, honestly, it makes no sense at all. That logo was designed by a man named Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, a councilman and chairman of the Blackfeet Nation and president of the National Congress of American Indians. The profile in the center is said to have been modeled on Blackfeet Chief John Two Guns White Calf, and Wetzel intended the art to represent Blackfeet power to “introduce that power into the minds of our nation and world.” Never mind: social justice warriors decided it was racist, even though polls showed that Native Americans mostly found team names and logos associated with their culture innocuous or even complimentary.
And here’s something really stupid: Did you know that the Washington NFL team didn’t even bother to change its team song, “Hail to the Redskins!” despite its stereotypical faux Indian melody and beat? They just changed the lyrics to “Hail to the Commanders,” which adds an extra syllable so the song no longer scans!
On other fronts…
Ethics Verdict: The Trump-Deranged Harris Voters Are The Most Infantile Losers In US. Political History
There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…
Ethics Alarms 