There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…
“bias makes you stupid”
How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?
2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.
The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”
Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”
But wait! There’s more!
Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign
Ann Althouse gets the pointer for finding this: Giles Coren of the London Times wrote in “I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes” …
“And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy? Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…. The ads stand for NOTHING…. They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s ‘joy.’ It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right.”
Bingo! What a perfect analogy: they should show the Jaguar silliness on talking head shows every time a progressive propagandist says Trump won because of sexism and racism, or because the voters are stupid. Would anyone smart buy a Jaguar based on that ad? (EA posted on it last week.)
Meanwhile, the meme-makers and parodists have been having a ball mocking the thing, while Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, has described criticism of its incompetent marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance,” saying that its message has been lost in “a blaze of intolerance.” Sounds exactly like Rob Reiner, The View, and all of my bitter Facebook friends, doesn’t he? Jaguar is a corporate hypocrite as well: it has been pointed out that most obvious transsexual model in the ad was cut out of the version showing in the Middle East.
For your early Sunday viewing pleasure, here are a couple of the parodies I could embed. (There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.) But the real ad is funnier than any parody, especially when one considers that its makers thought it would sell luxury cars.
Stop Making Me Defend Katy Perry!
Pop singing star Katy Perry has one of the longer and less complimentary Ethics Alarms dossiers among overly-influential celebrity types. Let’s see: her last appearance was as an Ethics Dunce in 2023, when she freaked out on “American Idol” over the fact that a contestant had survived a school shooting. Katy screamed, “This is not OK!,” announced that the country had “fucking failed us” and that she was “scared too.” I wrote, in part,
“That’s fine, Katy. Now go along with these nice men in the white coats, and they will help you. This is just the latest example of how celebrities degrade both the level of civic discourse on important issues and the intellectual abilities of anyone foolish enough to take them seriously. I’m pretty sure that no one, literally no one, believes that mass shootings anywhere, not just in schools, are “OK;” Perry was seeking virtue-signaling points for stating the screamingly obvious. Moreover, I am 100% certain that Perry doesn’t have the tiniest clue about how the U.S. has “fucking failed us” because of this school shooting or any schools shooting. What do you want, Katy? Martial law? No Bill of Rights? Everyone stuck going to school via Zoom forever? And if Katy Perry is ‘scared too,’ she should hire better bodyguards.”
Now Katy is being attacked from the conservative side because of a trademark dispute she won in Australia. The Daily Caller wrote in an editorial that Perry had “successfully bullied a woman in court and won, marking another unfair victory by a pretentious celebrity.” The story: An Australian woman named Katie Perry launched a fashion label using her name. Katy Perry’s real name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, which the Daily Caller seem to think is significant. (It isn’t.) Perry also had a trademark for clothes using Katy Perry, and sued Katie for trademark infringement, not for, as Katie describes it, using her own birth name for her brand. Katie beat Katy in the initial round, but Katy filed an appeal and won. “Now the designer has lost everything she worked so hard to build,” sobs Tucker Carlson’s news and commentary site. “This is everything that’s wrong with Hollywood.”
No, this is everything wrong with conservative media. “An innocent person can no longer operate her long-time business with her own legal name. Fake Katy Perry for the win — seriously?” says the Caller.
Ugh. The Daily Caller chose to leave out some rather important details, I’m guessing because it’s open season on show biz celebrities now that Donald Trump’s win has them seeking exile, BlueSky, or rest homes. Among the relevant facts absent from the editorial:
Ethics Dunces: 17 Democratic Senators
To be specific: Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Tina Smith (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), Rafael Warnock (D-GA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT).
Yikes, what a rogues gallery! This unethical group voted for three resolutions submitted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) seeking to block transfers of crucial weaponry to Israel. Their logic is the same as the Hamas-supporting student protestor who harassed Jewish students on campuses across the country, as well as the anti-Semites who dominate the United Nations. let’s listen to the career-long ethics dunce, Senator Durbin. “This war must end,” Durbin said in a statement after the vote. “Israel’s strategy of deadly attacks on and near civilian populations must end as well. The United States should not be sending arms and ammunition that continue to take the lives of innocent people. It is time for real humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinian people. I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”
Palestinians are no more innocent of the terrorist attacks against Israel than the citizens of Germany and Japan were of the war-mongering of their governments. The war being fought by Israel “must end” when that nation is no longer a target for genocide by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It is astounding that the same party whose President is risking World War III by escalating the Ukrainian conflict is pressuring a loyal ally and a true democracy (the Ukrainian government is still a somewhat shaky republic) to forgo a just and necessary war in the interest of its survival.
No Republicans voted for the resolutions, and even the Biden White House, like a stopped clock, was right this time: “Disapproving arms purchases for Israel at this moment would … put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas at the worst possible moment,” it told the Democratic Senate contingent.
Trans-Mania Loses Disney But Gains…Jaguar?
A couple of things, I think. The two ethics issues are trustworthiness and competence.
Apparently Jaguar has decided that it is within the mission of a car manufacturer to promote transsexuals and other forms of dubious sexuality. Or maybe clowns, based on the characters above that inhabit the company’s very strange ad. Have you seen it? No?
Here you go….
That’s right, no mention of driving, cars, or anything related to transportation. This is a cognitive dissonance scale maneuver for someone seeking a ridiculously narrow market. The ad says “being sexually ambiguous is cool.” Is it? I don’t think so; I think being sexually ambiguous is a problem. Like many minorities with problems, I understand the urge to insist that the problem is really an advantage and a badge of honor, something to take pride in, but why is Jaguar making that argument at the expense of promoting their product?
The ad is propaganda tinged with virtue-signalling for those who think extreme advocacy for marginal sexual identities is virtuous. I don’t regard it as virtuous. I regard this ad as a company abusing its influence by presuming to indoctrinate the public to achieve an interest group’s agenda. Meanwhile, the ad is incompetent advertising, since it doesn’t promote the product the company is supposed to be selling.
At least when Bud Light decided to promote transsexuals while marketing beer, the beer was somewhere in evidence. For all we know after watching that Jaguar ad, the new Jaguar looks like a Stanley Steamer.
And the Great Stupid is still rolling on…
Thanks, BlueSky!
The self-proclaimed progressive onclave social media platform designed to isolate the Good people from unclean thoughts and their Nazi neighbors is proving to be a magnificent social experiment testing the proposition that the Mutated Left of the 21st Century can’t tolerate dissent or any ideas that don’t make them feel warm and cuddly.
As first noted here by commenter Michael R., “Apparently, all the liberals who left X went to BlueSky and immediately started reporting everyone else for not being ‘woke’ enough for their tastes. Their ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ reports have gone from 350,000 in all to 2023 to over 40,000/day since the election. Of course, some moderation requests probably can’t even get in because they are busy.” Yes, the experiment is working out just fine. These people, as they and their Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates demonstrated, don’t get that freedom of speech thingy. The funny part is that it was in great part the bubble progressives live in that led their party to its2024 disaster, and their solution is …..to construct a stronger bubble.
Pop Ethics Quiz! What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…
It’s Time To Accept Reality: We Can’t Trust Science Writers, So We Can’t Trust What We Read About Science
The ethics rot of “Scientific American” came to a climax last week with the firing of longtime editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth after she went on a social media tirade against Trump voters and tried to blame it on the demon Pazuzu (well, not explicitly, but that was what her “apology” amounted to). During her tenure she had politicized the once respected science magazine, using it to advance her own social justice agenda which dovetailed nicely with that of the extreme progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Weaponizing science for political advantage is more totalitarianism on the hoof, and one might think that Helmuth’s demise might slow down or even begin to terminate this dangerous trend, once rampant on the Reactionary Right, now characteristic of the Doctrinaire Left. Nope.
Based on the latest from esteemed (not by me, but still…) science writer John Horgan, who modestly calls himself “The Science Writer”—he’s a science writer—the political roots of the field’s ethics rot is already embedded too deeply to extract. Horgan has strong credentials, as he’d be the first to tell you. He’s been writing for Scientific American since 1986 with an eight year break in the middle, and also authors pieces on science issues for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek. He has written several books; he’s has been interviewed on PBS, MSNBC, NPR, AP, BBC, and other broadcast media. He’s lectured at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, McGill and the London School of Economics, among other institutions.
Yet Horgan still thinks that scientists are correct to be driven by political bias and to let it affect their work. His recent essay in the wake of Hormuth’s oh-so-well-deserved demise is a flashing neon warning that science, as an objective, fact-driven, intellectual pursuit for the good of mankind (aka “a profession”) is as dead as Darwin, or mighty close to it. Horgan’s website piece is titled, “Scientific American Loses Its Bold Leader.” “Bold” is a terrific ambiguous cover word. In the case of Hormuth, it means courageous and reckless to the point of subverting her duties. From there, The Science Writer argues,
Rita Moreno Thought She Was Justifying Hollywood and Broadway’s Woke Casting, But Instead Proved Its Hypocrisy
Last December, right before New Year’s Eve, there was a blow-out Broadway celebration of the 80th anniversary of the memorable Rodgers and Hammerstein musical partnership that produced the acclaimed musicals “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “The Sound of Music,” and a couple of clunkers. It was a manufactured event to say the least. Why the 80th anniversary, for example? The team’s first successful collaboration was “Oklahoma!” in 1943, but it opened on March 31 of that year, so they were celebrating the so-called anniversary a full nine months late. (Try THAT with your wife!) But the real anniversary of the team’s formation was when Rodgers and Hammerstein collaborated on the 1920 Varsity Show, Fly With Me when the two were at Columbia University together. Nobody remembers that show, however, but Broadway could have celebrated the 100th Anniversary of R&H in 2020 right before the stupid pandemic lockdown almost killed live theater.
PBS has been showing the event on its “Great Performances” series, and it’s not that great. I was tipped off that the thing would drive me crazy when for some perverse reason the opening number, after the 40 piece symphony orchestra performed an overture that was a medley of well-known R&H tunes, featured a group of gay young men singing “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” from “South Pacific.” There might have been one straight guy among them, but my Gaydar meter almost blew up. Whose idea was that? If you’re going to have gays singing that lament supposedly belted out by horny, sex-deprived sailors in WWII, at least tell them to butch up, or better yet, pick a different song.








