.
…what hope is there for sanity and rational discourse in the near future?
I am distraught. The meme above was posted with approval by a elite college history professor I have known for 50 years. I know he’s smarter than this, wildly so, and that he would flunk any student exercising such poor critical thinking skills in an essay or thesis. So how did he come to post such obvious crap, and how can he be helped? Continue reading
…he might have designed something like that bridge above, the Rail Over Bridge in Bhopal, India.
Central India’s Madhya Pradesh Government recently suspended the seven engineers responsible for the incompetent and dangerous design. Two construction companies have also been blacklisted, and small wonder. The bridge cost 200 million rupee ($2.3 million) and was announced 10 years ago to improve connectivity between Mahamai Ka Bagh, Pushpa Nagar, and the station area with New Bhopal. It was meant to eliminate long delays at railway crossings and shorten the commute for nearly three hundred thousand people.
VD Verma, the chief engineer on the project, claims that he and his team had no choice but to include the 90-degree turn because of land space and the presence of a metro station nearby. Of course he had a choice: tell officials that there was no way to build a safe bridge in the area available. Bhopal authorities are now trying to purchase more land, to allow the implementation of a safer turn. See, the idea is to do that before you build the bridge, not after.
I don’t understand how this could happen, do you? Nobody spoke up in either the planning or the construction stage to say, “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t have 90 degree turn on a bridge!”? Apparently these workers, so far unidentified, completed the bridge…
George, meanwhile, replied regarding his design,
—Libertarian pundit Ken White, in the introduction to his annual retelling of personal July 4th reminiscence.
What happened to Ken White over the last several years or so? Once a frequently-praised, reliable advocate of free speech and responsible analysis, he has slowly morphed into a standard issue “resistance” hack, although better writer than most. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds might say (and maybe he has), “Ken White morphed into Charles M. Blow so slowly I almost didn’t notice it.”
Ken was the main blogger at the now defunct libertarian blog Popehat. Now he periodically issues his Popehat Report newsletter, which you can subscribe to for free. That’s a good thing, because the most recent edition was the first one in 2025. He also has a podcast, like virtually everyone breathing but me.
Apparently every Fourth of July Ken posts some version of his “Fourth of July story,” a personal reminiscence about an incident he says was “epiphanal and . It describes “a formative experience in my life and in my identity as an American.” It’s a nice story about a naturalization ceremony the judge he was clerking for at the time performed for some aging Filipino veterans. However, White feels compelled to introduce it this year with the same kind of lazy, reflex, Trump-Deranged snark that infests so many of the less erudite post of my Facebook friends these days. A favorite approach of their posts is the “Everything is Terrible” Big Lie (#5), which has been, as I wrote in “The Big Lies of the Resistance,” “has been a veritable mantra of the ‘resistance,’ Democrats, progressives and the mainstream news media from the second Donald Trump had been declared the winner of the 2016 election.” You read this in social media and hear it from all over, the side comments about “the way things are now,” “these difficult times,” and “with what’s going on.” This is how the Trump Deranged signal that they’re not a deplorable: it’s like a secret handshake. If I wanted to have whole days wasted by arguments with people who don’t care about reality, I would ask these TDS sufferers, “What exactly is that supposed to refer to?” Then their answers would make me lose respect for them, because they would be regurgitated talking points, massive hypocrisy, or proof positive of crippling ignorance and gullibility.
Light whatever ethics fuses you choose here today. As usual, traffic is minor on a long weekend. I have only one matter to pass on: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ dishonest and aburd criticism of the Paramount/CBS/”60 minutes” settlement, which would be an “Unethical Quote of the Week” if so many Axis hacks and liars hadn’t been saying the same thing. Quoth Bernie,
“Paramount’s decision will only embolden Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which he has labeled ‘the enemy of the people.’ It is a dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press — an essential part of our democracy. It is a victory for a president who is attempting to stifle dissent and undermine American democracy.”
Asshole.
In order:
1. Trump should be “emboldened.” The media has been indulging in fake news, manipulated reports, partisan bias and anti-democratic fact-hiding for far, far too long, and a reckoning is overdue as well as necessary.
2. The press should be intimidated to make it stop abusing the freedom of the press and deliberately misleading the public.
3. The news media is the enemy of the people. The “60 minutes” scandal showed why.
4. The dark day for independent journalism arrived the first time a major news source like CBS set out to elect one candidate over another instead of reporting objectively and fairly on both. Making it clear that journalists face some adverse consequences when they betray their public trust this brightens the day.
5. The essential part of democracy is the public being reliably informed about the world, the nation and its elected officials objectively, responsibly and fairly. so they can competently participate in their own government. When the free press decides to misuse its power and special privileges to mislead the public, that’s an attack on democracy.
6. How can anyone describe what CBS did with the Harris interview (or NBC, with “Saturday Night Live,” giving Harris an illegal free campaign commercial three days before the election) as “dissent”? Answer: They can if they are dishonest, unscrupulous, shameless Machiavellian leftists like Bernie. This is the guy who said outright that Harris was pretending to be more moderate in her views to get elected, and that was fine with him. “By any means necessary,” after all!
Did I mention that Sanders is an asshole?
7. Bernie and anyone else who stood by and allowed a demented Democratic President be manipulated by unelected back-room aides is estopped from ever using the term, “undermine American democracy”again. Channeling Albert Brooks in “Lost in America,” I’d say that they can’t even use the components of that phrase, “undermine,” “American,” and “democracy.”
8. And can we please stop tolerating the “Paramount settled because it wants the merger to be approved” lie, the agreed-upon narrative the news media has pushed to shift the blame from “60 minutes” to Trunp? Paramount and CBS settled because they did not dare go through discovery, which would reveal high level emails in which various executives openly discussed how to make sure Harris won and Trump lost. Those would create a professional scandal from which CBS might never recover.
When I first saw the headline, I assumed that it had to be from Brietbart or one of the other untrustworthy conservative news sources that I will no longer peruse. But it was the New York Times that yesterday evening ran a story headline,“Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application.” The piece tells us, as a high school senior in 2009, Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic candidate for NYC mayor, applied to Columbia University after claiming that he was “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his admission form. The story adds the obvious:
“Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.”
The Axis of Unethical Conduct, the Trump Deranged, and the Galactically Stupid either don’t know this or don’t want anyone else to know it. That is unpatriotic and unethical. But first, a song! The singing comes at the end, words by, of course, John Phillip Sousa…
Now on to the inventory. I will try to post more up-beat stories tomorrow…
1. This, of course, is autocracy: The Environmental Protection Agency today placed 144 employees who signed a letter accusing the Trump administration of politicizing the agency on administrative leave and opened an investigation into their their conduct. Good. There is no workplace where an employee publicly criticizing and attacking his or her employer isn’t likely to be fired and shouldn’t be fired. “Current and former E.P.A. employees, lawyers and advocates expressed alarm at the development, saying the agency appeared to be ignoring the employees’ First Amendment rights.” Of course they do, because undermining their own Executive Branch is their objective, and they think they should be allowed to do it. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch wrote in an email. OK, that’s unnecessarily bombastic, but basically correct. The suspended employees signed the letter using their official titles. They don’t have a metaphorical ethics or legal leg to stand on.
July 3 was the final day of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, reaching its bloody climax in General Robert E. Lee’s desperate gamble on a massed assault on the Union center. In history it has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge, after the leader of the Division that was slaughtered during it.
At about 2:00 pm this day in 1863, near the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, Lee launched his audacious stratagem to pull victory from the jaws of defeat in the pivotal battle of the American Civil War. The Napoleonic assault on the entrenched Union position on Cemetery Ridge, with a “copse of trees” at its center, was the only such attack in the entire war, a march into artillery and rifle fire across an open field and over fences. When my father, the old soldier, saw the battlefield for the first time in his eighties, he became visibly upset because, he said, he could visualize the killing field. He was astounded that Lee would order such a reckless assault.
The battle lasted less than an hour. Union forces suffered 1,500 casualties,, while at least 1,123 Confederates were killed on the battlefield, 4,019 were wounded, and nearly 4000 Rebel soldiers were captured. Pickett’s Charge would go down in history as one of the worst military blunders of all time.
At Ethics Alarms, it stands for several ethics-related concepts. One is moral luck: although Pickett’s Charge has long been regarded by historians and scholars as a disastrous mistake by Lee and in retrospect seems like a rash decision, it could have succeeded if the vicissitudes of chance had broken the Confederacy’s way. Then the maneuver would be cited today as another example of Lee’s brilliance, in whatever remained of the United States of America, if indeed it did remain. This is the essence of moral luck; unpredictable factors completely beyond the control of an individual or other agency determine whether a decision or action are wise or foolish, ethical or unethical, at least in the minds of the ethically unschooled.
Pickett’s Charge has been discussed on Ethics Alarms as a vivid example, perhaps the best, of how successful leaders and others become so used to discounting the opinions and criticism of others that they lose the ability to accept the possibility that they can be wrong. This delusion is related to #14 on the Rationalizations list, Self-validating Virtue. We see the trap in many professions and contexts, and its victims have been among some of America’s greatest and most successful figures. Those who succeed by being bold and seeing possibilities lesser peers cannot perceive often lose respect and regard for anyone’s authority or opinion but their own.
I never know when a relatively obscure topic will strike a chord and produced a bumper crop of terrific comments. “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”turned out to be such a post. Here is the second standout response, a Comment of the Day by johnburger 2013 on the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?
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Here I thought Berklee College of Music was a serious institution. Silly me. Any institution with the following mission statement should be dismissed:
“The mission of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is to support and sustain a cultural transformation in jazz, with the commitment to recruit, teach, mentor, and advocate for musicians seeking to study or perform jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles.” (emphases added).
Just out of curiosity, what the hell does “gender justice” mean and what does it have to do with vamping in E flatMinor? Do we only study songs written by women? Do women prefer major modalities over augmented fifths? Do women avoid playing the F#maj13add4addflat7 chord?
Music is the one medium where gender and race are monumentally irrelevant. Is Within Temptation fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. The combo is great because their music is complex and full of surprises. The Warning (my most recent favorite band) isn’t great because it consists of three Mexican sisters. No. They are great because their music is intricate and heavy. The fact that they started out very young and have gained world-wide recognition as a family band is interesting but they are phenomenal musicians and songwriters. Kiki Wongo isn’t great because she is a woman, but because she has talent and tone, and can melt your heart or tear your face off with her guitar playing (Smashing Pumpkins realized her greatness when they selected her out of 10s of thousands of applicants for their lead guitarist on their latest tours). Linda Ronstadt wasn’t great because she is a woman; she was great because her voice compelled attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures. [Editor’s note: Linda cannot sing any more because of Parkinson’s, but she was indeed great, and is still a great interview.)
As for “racial justice,” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not considered jazz geniuses because they were African American. No, they were great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Was rich great because he was white? Hardly: he is great because he could play drums like nobody’s business and had a sublime sense of rhythm.
The recent essay about the efforts of an apparently bonkers music school to apply DEI policies to the jazz world was really a “Bias Makes You Stupid” post, and perhaps I should have framed it that way. After all, nobody, no institution, no profession, no workplace “needs” DEI discrimination. As my father would say, the nation and society need DEI “like a hole in the head.” In fact, DEI is a metaphorical hole in the head of the nation allowing core American principles to leak out.
I found Sarah B’s Comment of the Day, prompted by Chris Marschner’s comment regarding the correlation between jazz improvisation ans mathematics ability, both fascinating and, as usual with Sarah’s comments, illuminating. (I also found the context of her use of the phrase “toot my own horn” brilliant. )Here it is, in response to the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?:
…
As a woman musician and mathematician (my husband would claim engineers aren’t mathematicians, but the lay person sees no difference), I think there is one aspect of Jazz that you are forgetting. I tried Jazz and not only do I hate the sounds of Jazz (I like Chopin, Beethoven, and Holst as my personal preference), but I also found the emphasis on improvisation impossible. I cannot improvise music, or anything really. I have no skill at making up music, though if you give me sheet music not horrendously above my level, I’ll play it for you, at least with adequate practice. I can sing nearly anything (in my range) that you can throw at me in at least seven different languages, and with a little time, I can do them from memory. I have a repertoire of several hundred songs that I can pick up and perform adequately on a given day without much more than a little warmup. I read soprano and bass clefs before I read English (my only language). I dabble in 7 instruments, with 2 of those mastered “enough”.
All of this is not to toot my own horn. I have much I could do to improve my music, but I have other priorities and I am happy at “good enough”. However, with all this musical study, I have found that while I can do a lot, I CANNOT improvise, nor can I make up my own lyrics. This means that Jazz musicianship is beyond my reach. It takes a different type of mind than mine to be a good Jazz musician, and not just someone who knows the math and the theory. There is another element besides musical and mathematical thinking, that of a certain type of creativity.
It looks like the settlement will amount to around 16 million dollars when all is tallied up, more than what ABC paid for George Stephanopoulos repeatedly (but not maliciously, oh no, never that!) calling Donald Trump a “rapist” on national TV. Several cynics were telling me today that this was “a drop in the bucket” for Paramount—it doesn’t matter. The settlement is an admission of wrongdoing, and what CBS and “60 Minutes” did by stealth editing a Kamala Harris interview late in the Presidential campaign to make her sound like less of an idiot was wrong, another “enemy of the people” act, and a blatant attempt to mislead voters and support the Democratic Party under the guise of journalism.
More important than the symbolism of the money perhaps is CBS’s promise to install a mandatory new rule requiring the network to promptly release full, unedited transcripts of future Presidential candidate interviews. It is the “Trump Rule.” That a television news division had to be forced into institutionalizing such transparency tells us all we need to know about the dismal state of broadcast journalism.
Ethics Alarms 