Burn and desecrate all the American flags you want, but don’t you dare mar the “Pride Flag”!
In Spokane, Washington, police arrested three people for using their cycles to put skid marks on the large “Pride” flag painted on a street. Then Lime, the ostentatiously woke e-bike distributor, resolved to punish anyone who used one of its vehicles for a similar activity, announcing,
Incompetence or bigotry?
Over the weekend the announcement came out that Caitlin Clark was not on the roster for the USA women’s basketball Olympic team for the games in Paris. This seemed, and seems, strange to put it mildly. Clark, a rookie this season, is by far the most famous, publicized and popular professional women’s basketball player of all time, as well as the most important. Her stellar performance as a college player led her to be the obvious #1 first round draft pick in the WNBA draft, and her presence in Indiana Fever games has led to a significant spike in attendance, TV ratings and public interest. The Olympic Games are mostly publicity for the league and the sport: once professionals were permitted to play, the U.S. women’s team has been unbeatable for decades. It would win the gold if the Olympics team coach picked the names of the team member out of a hat. But having the league’s charismatic rookie play would guarantee more interest in the sport during the Paris Games this summer, which logically should translate into more attention—popularity, TV ratings, money—for the sport itself.
So why isn’t Clark on the team?
In the stunning exchange above on May 22, Sen. Ted Cruz confronted one of Biden’s nominees to the Federal bench who placed a serial rapist who is a biological male (that is, all standard equipment included) in a women’s prison. She claimed, incredibly, that she always makes her decisions based on the facts of a case and the law, while repeatedly refusing to answer Cruz’s specific questions by repeating an obviously pre-programmed evasive answer (like the three university presidents who kept saying that whether anti-Semitic speech was acceptable on campus depended on “the context”), “I considered the facts presented to me, and I reached a decision…,” etc.
Cruz contended that the judge made ideological loyalty a higher priority than the fact or law, citing the fact that she deemed a 6’2″ serial rapist with a penis a “safe” inmate in a prison full of women.
Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, seemed to be leveling harsh criticism at the health community. “Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science,” she wrote. “What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense…Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them…Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.”
Her condemnation appeared uncompromising: “I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities. Their delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans. Failure to acknowledge the basic facts of Covid transmission led the authorities to pointlessly close beaches and parks, leaving city dwellers to huddle in the much more dangerous confines of cramped and poorly ventilated apartments. The same failure also delayed the opening of schools and caused untold millions of dollars to be wasted.”
Who would have thought that New York Times readers could do such a terrific Peter Sellers impression?
Paul Krugman, once a Nobel Prize winner, now the very model of a modern progressive hack, issued his contribution to the current “Protect Joe Biden!” hysteria among pundits and journalists. It’s called “Why You Shouldn’t Obsess About the National Debt,” and if this won’t get the Nobel people to demand their prize in economics back, nothing will.
The intellectual dishonesty of the piece is stunning even for Krugman—I remember how an old friend favorably posted one of Krugman’s columns to Facebook and the scales fell from my eyes making me realize that the old friend was an idiot and had always been one—and the rationalizations he uses to shrug away the $34 trillion national debt are breathtaking in their audacity. Some examples:
Once again, a pile-up on Route Ethics has me doing another Saturday multi-story post. These take twice as long as most posts to prepare, and generally attract less than average traffic and minimal comments. Nonetheless, they are necessary, for me if not anyone else, just to come closer to covering the topic.
Sooooooooooo,
1. Starting off lightly, with more evidence from “The Ethicist” that people are indeed getting ethically dumber: Today’s inquirer literally asks, “Is lying ethical?”
2. The D.E.I. Ethics Train Wreck hasn’t stopped yet, Harvard notwithstanding. The University of California, Los Angeles, was accused by a whistleblower of discriminating on the basis of race in violation of California and U.S. law. Black and Latino applicants. it was alleged, are held to lower standards than whites and Asians on exams and other measurements of competence. The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, denied the claims and said that students and faculty “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” Hiring and admissions decisions are “based on merit,” not race, “in a process consistent with state and federal law.” Oopsie! Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that includes an illegal a race-based fellowship.
3. More on UCLA: You can read about how far UCLA’s medical school has fallen here. The take-away from the report is that both admissions and graduation standards are being lowered for minorities. One professor claimed that “a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.” “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” another UCLA professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
Last night I saw this story in the New York Post, relayed by conservative provocateur Ace of Spades:
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan revealed Friday that a Facebook user claiming to be a “cousin” of a juror in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial suggested he had advanced knowledge of last week’s guilty verdict.
“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote in a letter to Trump attorney Todd Blanche and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted … Thank you folks for all your hard work!!! ….’” the judge explained.
The story also reveals that “Michael Anderson” is a self-admitted “shitposter,” someone who uses social media to spread falsehoods and derail serious discussions on politics and other matters.
Hmmmm.
So the guy, if he is a guy, who revealed this supposed conspiracy to rig the jury verdict against Donald Trump has no credibility at all. He’s a lying asshole and proud of it—you know, like Michael Cohen.
It is only responsible for the judge to reveal this, and for an investigation to take place. This, in turn, will probably give “Michael Anderson” the fifteen minutes of fame he craves, and inspire more assholes to enter the wonderful, profitable, destructive field of “shitposting.”
Meanwhile, I saw MAGA types all over the web last night calling for the trial verdict to be abandoned based on this almost certain trolling effort, thus making themselves look like gullible fools, and confirmation bias victims.
Is this a great country or what?
What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.
It’s also discriminatory.
And stupid.
What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
I suppose I should clarify that by noting that what the New York Times calls “extremists” are really “Americans who believe that organizations shouldn’t be aiding and abetting law-breakers and those who deliberately defy U.S. immigration laws.”
This Times story (again, I’m making a gift of it, because I pay the Times fees so you don’t have to) is a virtual cornucopia of fake news and progressive propaganda devices by the Times (but I will doubtless get a protesting email from self-banned Time apologist “A Friend” saying that it’s OK because some Times readers point out the dishonesty.)
Let’s see: the gist of the thing is that “after President Biden took office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to migration, these faith-based groups have increasingly become the subjects of conspiracy theories and targets for far-right activists and Republican members of Congress, who accuse them of promoting an invasion to displace white Americans and engaging in child trafficking and migrant smuggling. The organizations say those claims are baseless.”
I’m dizzy already:
Ethics Alarms 