1. Another infuriating case where a man was falsely accused and convicted of murder by lying witnesses: After being imprisoned for 26 years, David Black was finally released after a key witness, dying of cancer, admitted that his testimony had been coerced by police. Another eyewitness had signed a declaration before dying that she “never saw a shooting but was harassed by the police into saying so. “All I wanted to do was go home,” she wrote.
I don’t understand how such witnesses can live with themselves. She just wanted to “go home” so much that she was willing to see an innocent man’s life destroyed. Nice. And there seems to be no way to punish such people that won’t make it harder to address similar miscarriages of justice.
2. This…
Tucker Carlson has either lost his mind or decided that accusing President Trump of treason for supporting a crucial U.S. ally is his best route to continued relevance. I am proud to say that I recognized Carlson for the principle-free creep he is long before he became a right-wing celebrity.
3. Donald Trump attended the re-do of the White House Correspondents Dinner knowing that he would face a largely hateful and hostile audience, did the expected Presidential stand-up routine, and bombed. This gave the news media yet another target for criticism that literally has nothing to do with Trump’s performance as President. Apparently the routine was terrible, but it could have been a Bob Newhart classic delivered with skill and brio and it would have bombed anyway. I speak as a professional in such matters: a hostile audience will almost never laugh at the object of their hostility. Trump is now, absurdly, blaming his speechwriters, an Ethics Foul. He delivered the thing. If he did so without reading it first, that’s his mistake.He hired the writers. He is 100% accountable.
4. Police shot another perp resisting arrest, this one “brandishing” a substantial knife, and as usual the anti-police, presumed-racism mob is angrily protesting in Madison Wisconsin. They don’t know all the facts in the episode, which is still being investigated, the protests are punishing innocent citizens because they have shut down a main thoroughfare, and the protest flunks every item on the EA Protest Ethics Checklist. Meanwhile, Ben Crump, a serial chaser of metaphorical presumed racism police shooting ambulances, is on the case. Of course he is.
5. Gift link! A Native American writes in the Times that “land acknowledgements” are pandering and foolish. He writes in part,
“Because the ritual still treats land as something that can be owned, it names the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it this way: “The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership.”
6. Times headline of the month that demands not reading the article under it: “Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong.” Gee, I wonder what that could be? That the guy had no qualifications at all? That his background wasn’t vetted? That he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest? That he had written outrageous posts on social media? That he routinely abused women? Was there something else that “went wrong”?
Ethics Alarms 
#5 is bison dung. Tribes were fighting over resources, hunting grounds, and enslaving each other long before whitey showed up on these shores. They were at the mercy of each other and nature. If you want to call that reciprocal…fine.
Yep, when they say these lands were the ancestral lands of a tribe, what they are failing to acknowledge is that tribe likely completely drove other tribes from that land, either by physically forcing them off or completely destroying them.
Modernity is a real challenge for so many cultures. I don’t understand why Indians think they can live as a separate culture within the larger American culture. Doing so seems self-defeating. Same with Islamism. Is it smart to impose a regressive culture and belief system on a population just so you can have four wives and impregnate twelve-year-old girls?
“Is it smart to impose a regressive culture and belief system on a population just so you can have four wives and impregnate twelve-year-old girls?”
If your priorities are to have four wives and impregnate twelve-year-old girls, yes.
Well, A M, you can’t fight logic like that.
#4: Reporting at Ground Zero here in The 77 Square Miles Surrounded by A Sea Of Reality, I find it…um…interesting that so many hissy-fitting protesters have such great jobs where they can just up and leave them in order to gather at the drop of a hat.
Lefty LUVs them some criminals, and Corey (remembered as “fun-loving”) Ruiz, as a career felon/offender with a record a mile/1.61 kms long (47 arrests in ~18 years) gave them a LOT to LUV!
Yet you should read the Lefty comments on neighborsnextdoor (THEY Report/YOU Decide!) who are preparing to commission a bronze statue.
We’re left to ponder where his…um…grieving family (explicably grown exponentially in the last few days and lined up with the hope of a payday) were in the run-up to this “fun-loving” victim’s demise.
If the Dane County DA’s office had been doing their job, he’d have been in jail for his most recent excellent knife-wielding strangulation adventure.
He’s also still be alive.
PWS
Paulie. Other than yours, is there any honest reporting on this guy?
“Other than yours, is there any honest reporting on this guy?”
I’m flattered beyond words, YB!
That said, this is disproportionate on steroids; a Complete Cluster-Phuque: The Hissy-Fitters got any number of major events (Concerts On The Square, Atwood Fest, the grand-opening of the decades in the making Public Market, the Farmer’s Market, et al), cancelled.
How many vendors made plans, bought perishable items, and expected to make bank from those events, but can’t because of these cluelessly whiney pr!cks!
PWS
Can Trump make a deal with Canada so that Alberta becomes part of the United States and Wisconsin part of Canada?
“Can Trump make a deal with Canada so that Alberta becomes part of the United States and Wisconsin part of Canada?”
Not so fast there, Mister; they’ll make my beloved WESconsin part of Canada only after they pry my cold dead fingers off’n a Fish Fry & Beer!
PWS
I wonder why zero exonerees attemoted to destroy society?
2. A very young friend of mine – barely in his teens – has a small YouTube channel. His content is fun, off-the-wall little 15-20 second animated videos that he puts together. In one of his videos, he mis-typed the video description to list a “red” object rather than a “blue” object. That video received nearly a million views and thousands of comments from people correcting his error. His mistake caused his channel to be monetized.
If Tucker is like most other “social media” influencers, then he makes his money by getting people to watch his content, tag it, and respond via comment. Thus his goal is not to necessarily be truthful, logical, consistent, or even sane…it’s just to inflame people enough – one way or the other – to watch his content and post. What is anathema to him is what I do – ignore him.
It’s sad, because I can recall him being cogent, reasoned, and pretty well-researched when he wrote for Kristol’s “The Weekly Standard” two decades ago.
How times change…
3. I listened to a few minutes of the President’s comments at the dinner…at least I did if part of his talk was commenting about Adam Schiff’s “watermelon” head. What I heard was barfalicious…and horribly so. Yeah, the buck stops with Trump, but if someone else wrote that garbage, he/she should never be allowed to put pen to paper for a public presentation again. And President Trump was an idiot for going with it. He does some things very well, and sometimes his trolling is caustic and simultaneously hilarious. Other times, he sounds like an unforgiving, butt-hurt, crass buffoon. What I heard was one of the “other times.”
Do you think it could have been an inside job? I can’t believe he even attended it. I think he should have just skipped it and left the correspondents to bask in their glory without him.
Good question, OB. It certainly could have been, though that’s REALLY “inside” if you’re set up by your speech-writer. And I’m with you…why attend the dinner at all? Even if his delivery was flawless and material perfect, he wouldn’t have converted anyone to his side. In the best case, it would have been little more than the proverbial “casting pearls before swine.”
#1 The biggest ethics dunces are the police officers who coerced the witnesses into this testimony. And what about the prosecutor who knew that his closing argument to the jury could not be the truth? Stories like these are why qualified immunity for police and prosecutors are a topic for debate.
https://friendsofjustice.blog/2022/07/19/police-generated-testimony-1-david-black-is-innocent-and-i-can-prove-it/
Yes! The lack of the conduct of the officers is not a good look Jack. Are they not the most culpable in this?
I think there could be potential good news on the qualified immunity front. In the recent supreme court case of HENCELY v. FLUOR CORP, Thomas wrote that congress makes their intent to have immunity clear, and in the absence of clear intent to provide immunity, courts shouldn’t add it. I think this is a roadmap that could be used to push the removal of qualified immunity.
That aside, qualified immunity is strictly about civil cases. There is also the criminal angle. Prosecutors at both the state and federal level should do their civic duties to put these types of cops in prison. There are plenty of different laws to go for to do this. I’ll argue there is around 5% of cops that should be in prison. Doing so makes the job of good cops all the easier.
I’d have to know what the witnesses called coercion. They had the ability to leave any time they felt coerced. if they didn’t know that, then they are at fault for being civically ignorant. They are the ones who lied and put an innocent man in prison. Literally nothing could make me testify falsely under oath. The accountability has to be, first and foremost, on the false witnesses.
There are defendants who confess to crimes they did not commit. I understand that even less. But police coercion can be very effective. And I am not talking about cases where the defense attorney tells his client to take the plea deal as the risk for losing the trial is to big.
Re your “friend”. Does she know, or have recently discovered, that you have this blog? Is she in the a typically intolerant leftist? We know they tend more to depression and mental issues, and are much more likely to “unfriend” and drop even family members over differing political or social views.
Saw part of Trump’s performance, and it was pretty cringy. He usually does better just winging it, though the content may not be any more worthwhile.
No, she pays no attention to the blog. She and her husband are pretty far left and hate Trump (he lost his job when USAID went under), but this isn’t political.
“but this isn’t political.”
What would it be, then?
PWS
It is, I believe, a lack of interpersonal ethics and emotional maturity. She’s got personal problems and is mad at the world right now, so she’s lashing out randomly, closing off rather than opening up, punishing her loved ones for problems they can’t control.
I was glad to see that most of the comments in the NYT article agreed with the author, that land acknowledgements are empty performance at best. I particularly liked this one from VanIsle:
To expand on that point, land ownership is a concept everywhere you have a settled society, no matter what culture or where it is in the world. Those who use the the same cropland, same fishing spots, etc. year-round are going to take issue with tresspassers threatening their resources. Even nomad cultures like hunter-gatherer and pastorals tend to rotate through the same areas throughout the year, to give the grass time to grow back for their animals, time for the desired foods to be in season, and so forth. Even if they didn’t consider the land to be a commodity like more settled peoples did, they would absolutely have a problem with interlopers crossing their path and using the land’s resources. Standard practice for these events would be for the bands to raid each other until one either gave up and moved out of range or was slaughtered (with the women and children often incorporated into the victorious band). In that respect, land you can count on using when you need it is just as important for hunters and herders as it is for farmers. Perhaps even more important, because when you need this tract here available at this time of of year, and that tract there a few months later, how do you sell the usage rights to any part of that land and get something of equal value?