Some Democrats have told colleagues they will storm out of the chamber if and when Trump says specific lines they find objectionable. Some are going to boycott the speech entirely. They are considering using props, like noisemakers, signs (like the “war criminal” sign “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) held up during Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech last year, eggs or empty egg cartons to taunt Trump for not bringing down inflation in less than two months, and so on.
Morons. Of course, Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi set the precedent for such juvenile and divisive tactics when she ostentatiously ripped up the text of Trump’s last State of the Union Speech in 2020. Remember when GOP Representative Joe Wilson was excoriated in the media and by both Republicans and Democrats by shouting “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a joint session of Congress in 2009? Wilson was formally rebuked by the House , which held that by shouting that during the president’s speech the Congressman had committed a “breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House.” The State of the Union is the most notable and in most years the most important joint session of the House and Senate, as well as a traditional demonstration of unity and respect for the U.S.’s government, the Presidency, and it institution. Elected officials deliberately breaching this “democratic norm” and showing such disrespect for a newly elected POTUS in the first address of his first year in office is destabilizing, dangerously divisive, and an unequivocal demonstration that the party will not give the people’s choice a fair chance—just like the last time.
“Finally, hating Trump is merely cheap virtue signaling. It is neither a method nor a plan. But if you feel better about hating Trump than you feel bad about Ukrainians getting killed with no end in sight, then you are morally bankrupt and God forbid you have any say in what happens.”
Last night, probably the smartest and most reliably reasonable of my Trump-Deranged lawyer friends published a much-loved diatribe on Facebook condemning President Trump for the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy last week. He doesn’t post often, but every one recently has been to take issue with a Trump, quote, policy or action. I’ve had to wrestle my metaphorical tongue to the floor every time. It would do no good to rebut him, and all my effort would do would diminish the respect he has for me because, on this topic, his powers of reasoning are gone. If I wanted to start a stampede of unfriending on my Facebook page, I would point him to the superb post by Donald Sensing flagged this morning on Instapundit by Prof. Glenn Reynolds. My friend would never see the post otherwise, since Reynolds’ legendary blog is relentlessly conservative and my friend would sooner draw a pentagram on his kitchen floor than sample anything written there. But Sensing, whose fascinating CV is here and who is better qualified to opine on the Ukraine-Russian conflict than either of us, has provided a superb analysis with clarity and logical force.
“Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised. They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women as leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song ‘Ladies First’ by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers. Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of ‘Black Studies as the Study of the World,’ a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school.”
“In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” the Times quoted Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, as saying in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”
The obvious question is “Why?” Protect the curriculum from straightforward standards that ensure that the average student leaves high school with the core skills necessary for success in work and life? By its very nature, bombarding middle school students with lessons on “matriarchal societies”—an elective college course if there ever was one—is political in both nature and intent.
[This epic post originally appeared as a comment on my post about the now legendary Oval Office confrontation that gave Ukraine president Zelenskyy brownie points with the Trump Deranged while sabotaging his nation’s prospects of getting the U.S. support he desperately needs. Good job! But long-time Ethics Alarms critic, commenter and ethics analyst Michael West’s commentary goes far beyond the margins of that essay, and I decided that rather than a Comment of the Day, it is better suited to be a guest post. And so it is…Oh! I apologize to Michael for the facetious introduction above, but when something gets me thinking about a song, especially and earworm like THAT song, I either get it out of my system or the thing drives me nuts all day.JM]
Before we talk about this topic, I have a problem I’m working through.
I live across the street from a guy who immediately behind his house is a large stock pond that is even higher than his house – the retaining berm is pretty high compared to the foundation of the house, if you can imagine. Well, across the street where we live, is lower.
He’s always been a little concerned about the water pressure against the berm possibly breaching and flooding his house – which, if bad enough could cross the street and affect my house. One day many years ago, when the weather threatened to have a very rainy season, he asked me, since we both have this mutual concern if I could come over and help clear out the relief spill way of the pond. So I brought my shovel, which I’d kept nice and clean, sharp and the wooden handle well oiled. He had his also – a little worse for wear, but whatever, it’s a shovel right?
Well, we cleared the spill way of debris – any serious rain raising the water level would then be free to pour clear of his yard and relieve pressure on the berm. We walked home exhausted from the work, he tossed his shovel in the shed. He’s always been a little brusque and arrogant (I think he thinks a little more of his lifestyle than mine), so I didn’t really think much of it when he only said “Thanks for that”.
When I got home, I spent about an hour cleaning my shovel, hammering out some dings from rocks and running the grinder on it to re-sharpen it. I then applied teak oil (a not inexpensive preservative and moisturizer) on the handle. I put my shovel away.
Later in the season my neighbor saw me doing some landscape work with my shovel to improve the neighborhood. He scoffed saying he didn’t agree with what I was doing and what business of mine was it.
The next year, the as the rainy season approached my neighbor, again concerned about the pond, asked me over again to make sure the spillway was clear for flow, reminding me the pond could just as easily affect me, downhill across the street. My kids enjoyed playing in his backyard with his kids plus it would be neighborly. I brought my shovel and he kind of took some time rummaging through his mess of shed to find his shovel. Looked like it still had the mud from last year.
We went to work. At the end of the day, he tossed his shovel in the shed. I went home and sharpened, cleaned, reshaped and oiled mine – I had work to do over the coming months in other locations. My neighbor always had comments about the work I did and always thought I wasted time keeping my shovel in working condition. He laughed that with my work I didn’t have time for the fun things he could do.
One time, I asked my neighbor if he would be prepared to help my on the other side of my house cut a firebreak because I was concerned about the danger of a wildfire over there. His response was “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m pretty busy over here, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to soon.”
Another season went by, this time rain came on us with little warning and he called me up demanding I get over there and clean out the spillway before disaster befell both of us. On my way with the shovel, he asked me to try to get most of the work done as his shovel was too rusty and dinged up – the wooden handle was dry rotted a likely to snap. He said he’d always intended on taking care of his shovel but that he just didn’t have time for it with all the fun things he was doing.
As the rain poured down, I went to the top of the berm only to discover the pond was dry – bone dry – as in, it probably didn’t have any water in it for a year or two. There was zero chance this pond was going to breach and threaten our yards unless a true deluge happened.
I walked home with my shovel to the great anger of my neighbor who said he might lose all respect for me if I didn’t pitch in. He told me I would have no standing in the community if I didn’t help him and that all the respect I’d earned as a hard worker around the neighborhood would be for nothing. He told me we had an understanding and that I owed him and that if something happened to my yard, he would certainly be there for me.
Anyway – I’m not sure what I owe my neighbor.
Can y’all help me out with this situation?
Now, let’s talk about the problem of Europe.
From the start of the modern era, that is the late 1500s on Europeans engaged in continent-wide savage bloodlettings on multiple occasions.
1618-1648: The Thirty Years’ War consumed possibly 4.5 to 8 million people out of an estimated population of 75 million people (6-10% – though slightly less because it doesn’t count full amount of new births in that era). The Franco-Spanish War occurred roughly contemporaneously, adding to the death count. These sucked in various German states, the Dutch, Spain, France, Sweden, the Hapsburg realms (Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, etc)
1672-1678: Franco-Dutch War; France, England, Sweden, the Dutch, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, several German states, etc, slogged it out to the tune of some 340,000 soldier deaths alone.
1688-1697: the Nine Years’ War; the Dutch, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, etc duked it out chalking up another 680,000 soldiers KIA.
1683-1699: the Great Turkish War; (somehow along side the 9 years war); the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Venice, and the Spanish Empire against the Ottoman Empire. Europe sent another 384,000 soldiers to their doom.
1701-1714: the War of the Spanish Succession; consumed 700,000 to 1.3 million soldiers alone and saw Europeans stretch their legs to include combat abroad as their colonial empires grew. This sucked in France, various German states, England, the Dutch, Prussia, Portugal, and others.
1700-1721: the Great Northern War; Sweden, Poland, Ottoman Empire, a large variety of Slavic nationalities, Russia, various German states, Lithunia, England, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch, Denmark, Norway, Prussia, Moldavia, et al, managed to run this war on the side of the War of the Spanish Succession at the cost of about 500,000 soldiers dead.
1740-1748: the War of Austrian Succession; France, Prussia, Spain, various German states, various Italian states, Sweden, some of Scotland, the Hapsburgs, Great Britain, and Russia laid each other out with 750,000 casualties. This war also saw widespread combat across the globe.
1756-1763: the Seven Years’ War; in another conflagration fought between Europeans across world wide locations; Great Britain, Prussia, Portugal, France, the Hapsburgs, Russia, Spain, Sweden, et al, slogged it out with some 630 to 850 thousand dead soldiers. This one saw widespread use of local colonial forces in the combat with Americans, Native Americans, Mughal Indians, Bengalese involvement.
1793-1802: the French Revolutionary reaction; France and some allies, Holy Roman Empire, Great Britain, Spain, the Dutch, Switzerland, some German and Italian States, the Ottomans, Portugal, Russia, the United States and various colonies – another 280,000 (at a minimum).
1802-1815: the French expansion and collapse – The Napoleonic Wars; here we get to see a prelude of what was really to come. The United Kingdom, the Hapsburgs, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Italian States, Iran, the Ottomans, Montenegro, German States, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and the French get to learn what unhealthy nationalism can allow a dictator to lead to – an unlearned lesson to the tune of at least 6 million dead.
1853-1856: the Crimean War; the Ottomans, France, the United Kingdom, go after Russia, with a loss of anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million dead.
1870-1871: The Franco-Prussian War; finally, a remarkably “isolated” war, pits France against Germany, but just the two nations racked up some 200,000 dead soldiers and 250,000 dead civilians.
Alongside all of that 250 year war-fest there were dozens of sideshows on the European Continent that were spats involving more than just neighboring powers in addition to the fights between unhappy neighbors. This summary history begins with the modern age primarily because Europe’s wars prior to this – the drama of the middle ages, mostly resembled what we would see familiarly in modern era in places like Africa or the Middle East – that is, man’s perennial condition – limited local wars of varying intensity waged primarily between prima donna young men and their loyal constituencies trying to make a name for themselves or two ethnos that just flat out refuse to live together.
March 1 was the 395 day anniversary of my wife’s sudden and unexpected death on Leap Year, 2024. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind , tolerant and supportive here. To be honest, it seems like yesterday that I found her lifeless body. I still have nightmares, anxiety, attacks of regret and sudden sadness when something triggers a memory, and almost anything can, from my dog to movies to songs, like this one, which for no reason at all suddenly started going through what I laughingly call “my mind”….
“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”
Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.
President Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the U.S. It will be instructive to see which Far Left anti-Americans freak out over this move. I do not believe there is a legitimate, ethical, responsible, historically-based argument to oppose it
The order rescinds a Clinton policy requiring agencies to provide assistance programs for people with limited English proficiency. Agencies shouldn’t hire employees with limited English proficiency. The EO allows agencies to voluntarily keep those support systems in place, which is more lenient than my order would have been.
“Who’s really being removed by ICE tonight? The child who would’ve discovered the cure for cancer in 2046? The 9th grade nerd who would’ve stopped that asteroid that’s gonna hit us in 2032? Do we care?”
Yes, activist communist and has-been documentary-maker Michael Moore really and truly made that head-explodingly stupid argument, my candidate for the most ridiculous rationalization for allowing illegal immigrants into the U.S. yet, even topping the “But that poem on the Statue of Liberty!” excuse.
It is so stupid that the theory would be a valuable diagnostic tool on IQ tests. If someone checks the “Sounds good to me!” box, that test-taker’s cognitive ability should automatically be judged as “dangerously impaired.”
As we have explained here many times, consequentialism is the ethical theory for dolts, the concept that a decision or action is right or wrong depending on what happens as a result of it. Moore is saying that an action is unethical or wrong if anything good might have happen if a different choice had be made. I hesitate to give this walking, talking ethics corrupter credit, but he just has to be smarter than to believe that. As usual, Moore is trying to con the dimmer members of the public, a large contingent among Americans who still pay attention to him.
One wag on social media responded to Moore’s insulting question with “Now do abortion.”
Above you see the President with a photo of the late, great, baseball slimeball doing the Nazi salute like Elon Musk, which I’m sure is what endears him to Trump.
Kidding!
Not kidding: between their various pardons, I’m pretty sure Presidents Biden and Trump have so degraded the status of the Presidential clemency power that it will never recover. Once, such pardons conveyed ethical values and legitimate justifications for a President’s compassion. This thobbingly stupid pardon should make the gesture an embarrassment forevermore.
Here is the President’s asinine, even by his standards, Truth Social post:
Ugh. Fisking this crap is too easy but noxious, like shooting dead rats in a barrel…
Of course, the corrupt news media sees no problem with this. As ABC helpfully points out, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information “adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published publicly through its federal website.”
And factors like the need for climate scientists to show that the climate change apocalypse that they constantly predict for us is based on convincing data, when in fact it is based on flawed data, as the scientists admit once you cut through the jargon. For example, traditional glass thermometers have been replaced with more precise digital sensors warranting “adjustments” to accurately compare readings between the two instruments. Sea surface temperatures used to be taken manually from a bucket off of a boat, unlike the network of buoys and satellites that are used to gauge water temperatures today. Then there is the “urban heat island effect”: Cities heat up more than rural areas due to human activity, infrastructure and the concentration of buildings, roads and other heat-absorbing materials, causing higher temperatures in cities compared to surrounding areas. This can distort temperature data, making an area appear hotter than it is. So the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes adjustments to account for that too.
Ethics Alarms 