This weekend will be a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms while you’re snowed in. Or, if you don’t live in the storm zone, or are not snow-phobic like everyone in the D.C. area but me, it will still a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms.
I have to go to a funeral of a good friend at Arlington this morning, and don’t know when I’ll return. It’s a bad day for that, as I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, but as Yogi Berra sagely said, “You gotta go to your friends’ funerals. If you don’t go to theirs, they won’t come to yours.”
One more note on the previous post: while drinking my first cup of coffee, I saw the Two Guys on the Couch with a Blonde in the Middle on Fox News talking about one reporter at the Australian Open who was asking the American tennis players, “How does it feel representing the United States right now?’ If the athlete answered with an obviously pre-set, “I am always proud to represent my country,” the guy pressed on with, “I mean, you know, considering everything that’s happening,” fishing for an anti-Trump statement.
The Blonde in the Middle made the right point: it’s too bad one of the tennis pros wasn’t prepared to answer, “Oh, you mean Trump’s first year? Yeah, wasn’t that awesome? He finally got rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, the Education Department is toast, so maybe our kids will be educated instead of indoctrinated, inflation is down, the White House really needed a ballroom, we’re getting illegals off the streets, and even the tariffs are working!”
OK, gotta go. I’m going to visit Mom and Dad while I’m at the cemetery. It’s been a while.
Ethics Alarms 
I got fished while I was at the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade after COVID. The reporter asked me the usual about how I felt being there and I said it was great to be back, then she asked me if I wasn’t worried that all these people were out here without masks. I said we were all grown-ups here and responsible for our own health and safety decisions. That’s when she gave up. Did she really think I, a middle-aged white man in an FDNY hat, was going to give her a pro-mask statement?
We also have a funeral to attend today. A former boss (and a friend) died last month and his service is at 11. But Gina is sick this morning and there are bound to be a LOT of people there, so we’re not sure. We’ll decide in an hour.
We have a chance for a little snow tonight into tomorrow (a couple of inches), but what we lack in snowfall we make up for with cold. It’s -12 this morning with a windchill of -36.
In the meantime, this week I finished “Cyrano de Bergerac” and read “The Call of the Wild”, “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Fahrenheit 451”. I’m halfway through Stoker’s “Dracula”.
Not a single one of them referenced the name Donald Trump.
It’s been forever since I’ve gone through “The Call of the Wild”. I may need to pick that up again sometime. I started “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer” (about William Henry Harrison) last week, but I’m falling asleep after reading a page or two and can’t get into a rhythm with it. I’m going to just start over. Honestly compels me to admit that I’m reading this book on Harrison mostly because I want to get to Leahy’s bio of John Tyler, so I hope it turns into a worthwhile endeavor.
Thanks for sharing what you’re reading. I’m always interested in the books people around here have opened up.
When I go back to history, I’ll check out those books.
I really digged “Call of the Wild”. “Cyrano de Bergerac” was delightful after the heaviness of “The House of the Seven Gables”. “Slaughterhouse Five” was tolerable until Vonnegut quoted David Irving. “Fahrenheit 451” was better. I suppose I’ve been exposed too much to dystopian fiction to find Bradbury’s treatment illuminating. I also read “Treasure Island”. It would have been more surprising if I didn’t know that Long John Silver was a bad guy. “Dracula” was pretty good, though. I finished it today.
Next up: “The Gilded Age” by Mark Twain!
Today on “What’s Pissing Jeff Off”:
I’m part of the Board of the local Habitat for Humanity Chapter. We recently completed our latest build and had our key ceremony, and were looking for where we’d target for our next build.
One of the options was a government owned subsidized housing unit. A local government agency has a mandate to purchase homes and rent them out as a percentage of an indigent person’s income…. Which usually isn’t much. The agency doesn’t have much of a budget, the rental income isn’t that great, and they don’t have much of a mandate to do things like repairs or upkeep. As every landlord in the history of ever knows is inevitable on a long enough scale, a tenant will eventually ride your property hard and put it away wet, in these cases uninhabitable, and they tend to just get boarded up and rot. I don’t even know that the agency *should* repair them. These houses are derelict, and the agency will never recoup the cost of repairing them by renting them for $400 a month to indigents who will probably ride it hard and put it away wet again.
Towns hate this, because the properties are eyesores. The agency hates this, because these houses tend to rack up bylaw citations, and it’s not like they’re bad people, they just don’t have a budget. So we step in. Habitat would buy these homes for $1, gut them, bring them up to code, and get new homeowners into them. This was a win for everyone: A family gets a home, the town loses an eyesore, the agency loses a liability.
Well, there was recently a change in government, and the new government has decided in their infinite wisdom that the agency absolutely does not have a mandate to sell these properties, and stopped all current and future deals. Of course, they didn’t budget anything to actually deal with the properties either, so… yeah. I guess we just wait until some squatter comes along and burns them down.
If you wonder why the left and right can’t get along, check out this explanation of leftist thinking:
Internet archive link to the complete article: https://archive.is/20260122190907/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/ice-conservatives-minnesota-dhs-protests/685705/
Their basic premise is that ICE is, by default, in the wrong and the protesters are in the right. I’m not a big fan of some of the conduct of ICE, but darn it, they’re in the legal right when deporting people here illegally. If protesters are interfering with ICE, they’re the criminal. The protesters are defending and supporting criminals, and in some case pretty bad ones too.
My only solace is they’re in the minority by a good margin. The protesters are making a bunch of noise. This is why Trump won, in spite of his issues. He’s the first mainstream politician to actually do something on the issue, and it is a HUGE reason he won.
that’s a Jonathan Chait article. Here’s is EA dossier. Chait has completely ruled out any reason to trust him or believe him regarding anything by his hypocrisy and perfidy. He’s the worst kind of hack, a smart hack, and The Atlantic is a good swill-pot for him. It still breaks my heart that Ken White ended up there. What a betrayal. I hope he and Chait are happy together in Hell down the road a bit.
An interesting article.
https://reason.com/2026/01/23/ice-demonstrates-why-we-need-the-second-amendment/
Here is the early leader, in the clubhouse, for longest posted comment of the year.
Somebody is “reporting” the presence of ICE agents to the anti-ICE hotline, at location that turn out to be outlaw biker bars.
I’d file it under “not ethical, but funny”. At best, it will only gum up the hotlines for a short time. Then the people running them will learn to look up the place first, and if it’s not a biker bar simply send an advance scout to see if ICE are there. In the meantime you’re setting people up to be assaulted, and not just the protesters. If a person calls in a random place just for yuks, the innocent people there will suddenly have a gang of protesters to deal with.
But what if we just send them to multi-level marketing meetings? Or how about time-share condo pitches? Junior league meeting?
I’m trying to decide if that’s more cruel to the people there or to the protesters…
Modern problems require modern solutions.
I deliberately tried not to offer commentary and let the event speak for itself. Luring anti-ICE protesters to a biker bar in order for them to receive a beating is ethically sketchy. However it leaves quite a few people with a sense of moral satisfaction. This is typical in situations where a) there are identified “bad” guys b) law enforcement is ineffective in stopping the bad guys c) the legal system gives the “bad” guys a pass d) the people who are or feel victimized by the bad guys take the law in their own hands.
Why do people feel moral satisfaction when people turn vigilante? I think that goes back to deep human history, when a) crime including murder was rampant b) no law or legal system existed c) ethos was based on honor d) honor required revenge for murder, crime, and personal insults.
This is why people like(d) to watch Western movies, where frontier justice is being applied, or why the Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) and Death Wish (Charles Bronson) movie franchises were popular, as even while the protagonists broke all the rules the killing of the bad guys achieved a deep moral satisfaction.
And that is why deceiving the anti-ICE protesters into a beating is seen as “not ethical, but funny” with the emphasis on “funny”. The interpretation of this is that we may technically agree that a certain course of action is ethically not on the up and up however we allow that to not bother us; we respond with laughter instead because deep in our hearts we consider the outcome of the event as morally satisfying. The stone age man in us wins it from the civilized and cultured liberal, as ultimately we care more about a intuitively just outcome than whether all the artificial legal rules are followed to the letter.
“the protagonists broke all the rules the killing of the bad guys achieved a deep moral satisfaction.”
I must confess a certain affinity with that genre, which (IMO) should include the Equalizer Trilogy and its unflinching murderer par excellence, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington)
PWS