ICE arrested Palestinian activist and former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil with the intent of deporting him in accordance with the announced Trump policy of deporting non-citizens who engage in pro-“terrorist” speech related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Predictably, the Axis is all-in supporting Khalil, who sure appears to be a bad human hill to die on. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move, “Violating rule of law, actually,” she wrote. That AOC defends him alone makes me inclined to want to get rid of the guy, but that would be irrational. Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York issued an order today halting Khalil’s processing and scheduled a hearing on the case for later this week. Ah yes, the Southern District of New York!
In a confusing essay at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin writes that deporting non-citizens for the content of their speech is a First Amendment violation and “a slippery slope,” then, in the fifth paragraph, acknowledges that 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3), bars “Any alien who … endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” I’d say endorsing and supporting Hamas qualifies under that law, wouldn’t you? So Somin says, “Such laws, too, should be ruled unconstitutional.” But until and unless it is, the Trump administration has the law on its side.
The question remains, is such a restriction on the free speech of non-citizens ethical? Somin:
“The First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech, like most constitutional rights, is not limited to US citizens. The text of the First Amendment is worded as a general limitation on government power, not a form of special protection for a particular group of people, such as US citizens or permanent residents. The Supreme Court held as much in a 1945 case, where they ruled that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”
In 1936, Merle Oberon, best known today because of her co-starring role opposite Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights,” became the first Asian actress to get an Academy Award nomination, for her role in “The Dark Angel.” But in 2023, Michelle Yeoh was widely hailed as the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ first Asian Best Actress winner. That is because Oberon hid her ethnicity from journalists and the public for her entire career in order to have a career at all. It worked: in addition to getting the much-sought role of Kathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Oberon played Anne Boleyn (in the Charles Laughton classic, “The Private Life of Henry VIII”) at a time when non-traditional casting was unheard of.
Oberon died of a stroke in 1979; it wasn’t until four years later that it was revealed that she had been born in Bombay, India, the daughter of an Indian woman who had been raped by a white man. Written before the secret was revealed, the Times obituary seems naive in retrospect: “A diminutive 5 feet 2 inches tall, Miss Oberon was of an almost exotic beauty, with perfect skin, dark hair and a slight slant to her eyes that was further accentuated by makeup.” Almost!
Marco Evaristti’s “art” titled “And Now You Care?” at an art exhibition in Copenhagen consisted of three live piglets confined by two shopping carts on a pile of straw. The artist announced that the animals would be given water but no food until they died. Allowing the piglets to starve to death while on public exhibition was, you see, a powerful commentary on animal cruelty in Denmark, one of the world’s largest pork exporters. Evaristti explained yesterday that he aimed to “wake up the Danish society,” which is insufficiently concerned that tens of thousands of pigs die each day in Denmark because of poor conditions.
Oh, good plan.
Now do child neglect.
The exhibition was set inside a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen. Large paintings of the Danish flag and slaughtered pigs hung on the walls around the doomed little pigs. “Mona Lisa” this wasn’t.
The pigs were expected to live up to five days, but Evaristti said he also would not eat or drink along with them. That makes starving the helpless animals better, apparently. But as the exhibition space was being cleaned—it looked like a pig sty!— over the weekend, members of a Danish animal rights organization stole the piglets. Evaristti, says he does not expect his art to be returned.
“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.
[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.
“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.
The Chengdu Snow Village project in the Sichuan province in southwestern sought to attract tourists over the Lunar New Year holiday by promoting its property as a “winter wonderland,” showing photos of thick, gleaming white snow covering the grounds and the roofs of its cabins. When the tourists arrived, however, the “snow” they saw was obviously puffs of cotton, plastic, beds sheets and other white camouflage. One structure was covered in what looked like bedding material with visible staples.
The Snow Village issued an apology on social media blaming warm weather in the region. No, the warm weather wasn’t the problem. The problem was and is the complete breakdown in societal and cultural ethics in China, a direct result of Mao’s “cultural revolution” that induced the nation’s full embrace of Orwellian government alternate realities in the 20th Century. In 2020, as political correctness censors sought tp protect China from its accountability for the world pandemic, a Hong Kong protester summed up the ethical status of China with the memorable quote, “Don’t trust China….China is asshole! ”
That’s the chest of CNN’s Jake Tapper above. He was making a little frowny-face yesterday for the idiots viewing CNN who are too dim to realize that the accusatory headline is a non-sequitur, like “I like ice cream, can you swim?” The White House suspending the AP’s White House privileges—that’s privileges, which are distinct from rights, Jake—has nothing to do with freedom of speech or even the First Amendment, so the implied hypocrisy is more fake news.
Added: On “Twitter/X” J.D. Vance responded to another journalist making the same “point”:
The remarkably negative (and ignorant, and biased) Axis media reaction to J.D. Vance’s speech in Germany proves one again that as often as President Trump exaggerates, calling the news media the “enemy of the people” was neither excessive, unfair nor untrue. That’s exactly what it is. It is now the enemy of democracy as well, and nothing illustrates that better than the rush to condemn the Vice-President for telling European leaders to stop censoring speech based on political content.
It takes special chutzpah for any media organization to accuse Trump of stifling press coverage when he has made himself more accessible to the news media in less than a month than Joe Biden was in four years. I would also venture that the Associated Press could get more useful information surfing the web that it ever got from Biden’s idiotic, stumbling, incompetent, lazy paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre. The AP has proved itself conflicted, partisan and anti-Trump as well as unreliable. Why should it be entitled to attend press briefings instead of, say, Ethics Alarms?
Also on CNN, Nick Paton Walsh attacked Vance’s speech while defending censorship to prevent “authoritarian regimes.” This was the excuse used to justify banishing Trump from social media. I suppose it was also the excuse for blocking coverage of and commentary on Hunter Biden’s laptop on news platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Those who would punish and censor speech always have “reasons,” but the real reason is maintaining their own power and crippling the functioning of democracy. Just listen to this hack…
“Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In the smartphone and post-9/11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.”
Hilarious! Enshrined in law “but”! If speakers, writers and artists can be censored and punished for words and opinions that some authority rules “unsafe,” then there is no free speech. It’s amazing that advocates for censorship still use Oliver Wendell Holmes’ thoroughly discredited “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy. Ken White of Popehat, perhaps the sharpest and most eloquent blogger in captivity until he was infected with the Trump Derangement virus, decisively explained in “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough” how Holmes’s famous opinion has been misused to defend government censorship of speech that mentions or threatens violence without actually inciting it on the spot. This includes “hate speech,” which is what many of the European countries outlaw and what the totalitarian Left here would love to outlaw in the U.S. “Hate speech” would mean “speech that progressives hate.” (Knucklehead Tim Walz said on national TV that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment.) Walsh, like Walz, literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he is quoting an opinion he hasn’t read, and he definitely hasn’t bothered to read White’s explanation of why that defense of censorship is based on legal and constitutional ignorance.
CNN’s censorship rationalizing pales before CBS’s efforts, however. Incredibly, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan really and truly asserted to Marco Rubio that Hitler’s Germany used “freedom of speech” to spark the Holocaust. Kudos to the Secretary of State for not channeling Dan Ackroyd from the old Saturday Night Live “Point/Counterpoint” skit and responding, “Margaret you ignorant slut!” She deserved it.
On President’s Day in 2012, I wrote a dispirited assessment of where the United States stood regarding spreading American ideals and values to other nations. This was in the context of Barack Obama’s feckless foreign policy, which, as with his puppet stand-in later, Joe Biden, consisted of threats and warnings (remember Obama’s “red line” in Syria?) without credibility of resolve. I thought about the post as I was contemplating how J.D. Vance was getting mockery and criticism from the Axis because he exhorted our allies in Europe to begin a new commitment to freedom of speech.
The main thrust of the essay was the question of whether the United States should be “the world’s policeman,” a situation that now has fallen into ethics zugzwang: it is irresponsible for the U.S. not to accept the role of world policeman, and irresponsible for us to accept it either.
“Quite simply, we can’t afford it,” I wrote. “Not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions.” I found the 13-year old post useful and thought provoking for perspective purposes. It raised many questions. Is the U.S. better off today than in 2012, when I was so depressed about its prospects and integrity? What does it mean to “make Amerca great again” in 2025?
I’ll have some more 2025 thoughts at the end. Here is the rest of that post:
***
Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President [George W. Bush] unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense to insist that the public pay for it. The current administration [the Obama Administration] is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.
Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →
I rate this episode as pure King’s Pass misconduct by both organizations and professional tennis.
Jannik Sinner, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, just got a three-month ban for testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid last March. He says he “accepted” the short ban, and why wouldn’t he? It means he won’t miss any Grand Slam tournaments. The French Open, the season’s next major, starts May 25 and the ban ends May 4. This is like baseball banning a starting pitcher for throwing a doctored ball for three games so he doesn’t miss any starts.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency had decided earlier not to suspend Sinner by buying his excuse for why he tested positive: the clostebol in his doping sample was due, see, to the player getting a massage from a trainer who had used the substance to help a wound on his finger heal quicker. Never mind that virtually every athlete caught using steroids has claimed “accidental” contamination. It is why baseball went to a strict liability system after its steroid scandal.
Ah, but professional tennis is more dependent on its big stars than baseball for its gate income and TV ratings, so suspending the #1 ranked player in the world has unpleasant ripple effects.
This convenient resolution of Sinner’s violation, however, is also causing some rippling. After the settlement was announced, three-time major champion Stan Wawrinkaposted on X: “I don’t believe in a clean sport anymore …” # 8 ranked Daniil Medvedev, said, alluding to double standards (Ya think?), “I hope everyone can discuss with WADA and defend themselves like Jannik Sinner from now on.”
Ethics Alarms 