The National Audubon Society, the famous non-profit dedicated to the conservation of birds and their habitats, wants to make the U.S. “bird safe” by shaming homeowners into “turn[ing] off unnecessary lights at night” and “clos[ing] blinds, [and] curtains,” along with other precautionary measures. Businesses should install bird-safe glass, for example, which has patterns that make it more visible to birds. This, the Audubon’s ornithologists claim, will save the lives of “up to a billion birds a year.” The group told WBAL-TV viewers in Baltimore that “lighting and reflectivity, specifically during migration for birds, is a really dangerous problem and kills up to one billion birds in North America per year.”
Sure. Advocacy groups love fake statistics, and this one screeches “Made-up!” like a bald eagle in heat. That “up to one billion” number is partially based on a 2014 abstract estimating that between “365 and 988 million birds” are killed annually by “building collisions” in the United States. Of course, since the objective isn’t to fairly communicate facts but to support the extreme positions of single-issue activists, the Society chose the highest estimate, already probably polluted by confirmation bias, and rounded up. The society used estimated bird collisions with walls to assess the deadliness of windows alone. In addition, the fake number mixed in ball park estimates that North America has lost 3 billion birds since 1970, and oh, let’s say a third of those died in “building collisions.” Yes, let’s.
This could easily be a Babylon Bee satire, but unfortunately it isn’t.
Professional race-baiter and ethics villain Al Sharpton responded to the routinely bombastic and semi-grammatical Truth Social post by Donald Trump by going on MSNBC and saying, “Donald Trump, himself…using the word “riggers” – Is this the kind of party the Republicans want to show the country that they are?”
“Yecch” doesn’t begin to express my disgust and revulsion regarding this development, but right now I can’t think of anything stronger, and I don’t know how to spell the sound of projectile vomiting, so…Yecch!
After informing the Republican Party that he will not pledge to support its candidate if the GOP’s choice isn’t him, Donald Trump not only plans to skip the first GOP candidate’s debate in Milwaukee this Wednesday, he is going to actively compete with it, teaming up with fellow toxic narcissist Tucker Carlson for an online interview on the same night.
It’s perfect, if you think like Donald Trump, which is to say, obnoxiously, unethically, and undemocratically. No degree of perfection in my sock drawer would prompt me to forsake it to watch the Tucker and Donald Show. “Mr. Trump’s apparent decision to skip the first debate of the presidential nominating contest is a major affront to both the R.N.C. and Fox News, which is hosting the event,” writes the New York Times, for once not being unfair to Trump. Sure, why not stick his thumb in the eyes of two organizations substantially responsible for Trump’s rise in the first place? This full-time troll who claims to value loyalty and gratitude has none himself. Naturally Tucker Carlson wants in: after all, he wants his revenge on Fox too. Nowhere in the consideration of either man, assholes that they are, are the best interests of the nation and the democratic process.
In the city of Federal Way, Washington, Denise Yun is running for the City Council on a platform of protecting businesses from crime. Meanwhile, Nick Rose, a Federal Way Trinity Ace Hardware store owner, apparently caught her attempting to steal multiple hammers from his store by stuffing them into her purse.
Seeing her act suspiciously and spying the glint of something metallic in the woman’s jumbo purse, Rose asked if he could see what she had in there, to which Yun replied, “Absolutely not!” So he reached into her bag anyway, and pulled out one of his hammers. “It was one of my hammers that had a little ACE tag hanging on it. It was a ball peen hammer, so I just grabbed it. And as soon as that happened, she just stormed out of the store,” he said. Taking the rest of the hammers.
Four days ago, rebel Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was being questioned on his abortion views by a reporter from NBC at the Iowa State Fair and said, “I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life,” but “once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.” Kennedy then said he would support a federal ban on abortion after the first three months of pregnancy.
That’s not a very intellectually consistent position on abortion, but it qualifies as moderate and reasonable for a progressive like Kennedy, especially as the Left’s pro-abortion Borg increasingly adopts the frightening position that unborn children should be candidates for extermination right up to birth. Unfortunately, because the Democratic Party now embraces the extreme version of “choice,” Kennedy immediately backed down, turned around, and retracted his statement.
Over the weekend, I got to watch (again) the nauseating spectacle of Detroit Tigers firstbaseman Miguel Cabrera disgracing his own legacy as one of the greatest players of all time. A guaranteed first ballot Hall of Famer with over 3,000 hits and more than 500 career homers, Cabrera is no longer even a passable performer at age 40, and hasn’t been since 2017. That year and every year since, Cabrera has been paid an average of $30 million a season for production that the Tigers could have gotten from a mediocre minor league journeyman playing for the Major League minimum salary. All weekend, the TV broadcasters were blathering on about what a wonderful human being “Miggy” is. If he were really wonderful, he would have retired as soon as he realized he was stealing his salary and hurting his team in the process.
Cabrera has graciously announced that this will be his final season, as if he had any choice in the matter. His long term contract is up: he’s squeezed over $200 million out of it without having a single season worthy of his reputation or his salary. He has one (1) home run this season, with less than a third of the schedule to go. The year he signed his contract, he hit 44.
But Cabrera isn’t the subject of this post; I already complained about him and other greedy, fading players here. There’s a worse offender in baseball now, believe it or not. The current miscreant is St. Louis starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, who had announced before this season that it would be his last. [Wainwright, by the way, has one of the more varied and interesting Ethics Alarms dossiers among pro athletes.] He is 41, and not only are 40+-year-old pitchers who still belong in the Major Leagues rarer than star sapphires, Wainwright’s 2022 season at 40 was not a harbinger of optimism, though he still was getting batters out, albeit not as he once had. But Adam Wainwright has pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and only them for 17 years , winning just short of 200 games along the way. He is regarded as a hometown hero to Cardinal fans, who also wanted him aboard for one more campaign because they had reason to think their perennial play-off team had a real chance to get to the World Series again in 2023, and nothing is more valued on such teams as a grizzled old veteran who has been through the wars before.
It was a good theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Wainwright was done, through, cooked, out of pitches and excuses. This season his earned run average is almost 9 runs a game, which means he is pitching batting practice to the opposition. A starting pitcher without a long-term contract and with no reputation as a team legend is usually cut if he can’t keep his ERA below 6; under 4 runs a game is good, under 4.5 is considered acceptable. But 8.78, which is what Wainwright has delivered in 15 starts? A decent college pitcher could do that well, maybe a top high school pitcher too. And for this consistent failure, Adam Wainwright is being paid $17,500,000.
The AP story and ensuing controversy about Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her decision, along with many other mountaineers, to leave a climbing companion dying in the snow on K2 immediately rang a metaphorical bell: Haven’t we discussed this issue before on Ethics Alarms? Indeed we have.
Back in 2011, I reposted a 2006 essay from the old (but still useful) EA predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard about the death of 34-year-old David Sharp on Mount Everest, after over 40 other climbers walked past him on their trek to the famous peak. It concluded,
The significance of the David Sharp tragedy is not that the mountaineers did the wrong thing. Of course they did the wrong thing. Nor is it that they are callous or unethical people, for they are probably no more so than you or I. The importance of the story is that it vividly shows how difficult it can be to make even obvious ethical choices when powerful non-ethical considerations are in our sights. Every one of us has a goal or a dream or a desire that could make us walk by a dying man. It is our responsibility to recognize what those goals, dreams and desires are, and to force ourselves not to forget about right and wrong as we approach them.
Harila was on K2 to set a record, and she did: along with her Sherpa guide, Tenjin, they became the world’s fastest climbers by getting to the top of the world’s second highest peak, scaling the world’s 14 highest mountains in 92 days. But of course that mission had nothing to do with her decision to leave Mohammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter and father of three, to die after he slipped and fell off the narrow path to the summit. The Norwegian climber told The Associated Press on Sunday that “in the snowy condition we had up there that day, it wouldn’t be possible to carry him down.”
It was impossible! All righty then, case closed!
Drone footage showed dozens of climbers pushing past Hassan to reach the mountain peak, the path to which was unusually crowded that day (July 27), because it was the last day of the season for a possible ascent. The nerve of that guy losing it all up by falling!
Austrian climber Wilhelm Steindl, who shot the drone footage after he had abandoned the climb because of bad weather, told the AP that more could have been done to save Hassan. “Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley. I don’t want to kind of directly blame anybody, I’m just saying there was no rescue operation initiated and that’s really very, very tragic because that’s actually the most normal thing one would do in a situation like that.”
Well, to be fair, it isn’t. What might have changed the way the climbers reacted would have been a strong leader with the personal magnetism and persuasive skills to reorient the climbers from pursuing powerful non-ethical considerations to embracing an ethical one. No doubt about it, trying to get the injured man down the mountain involved sacrifice and risk, and might not even succeed. There is, however, an ethical duty to try. A life was at stake.
What’s worse than Ethics Dunce? What Wander Franco, the Tampa Bay Rays sensational young shortstop, has done is so flagrantly destructive to himself and so ruinous to his team and family…and so obviously wrong and avoidable that “dunce” is an understatement.
If you don’t follow baseball, I need to tell you bit about Franco. At 22 years old, he is already in his third major league season. He plays shortstop, the most important and difficult defensive position besides pitcher and catcher, and his team, the Tampa Bay Rays, are a perennial powerhouse in the American League. He is handsome and built like a Greek statue: so clearly does everything about Franco scream “Superstar!” that the Rays took the almost unprecedented step of signing him to an eleven year contract before this season, before he has won a single batting title, Gold Glove or MVP award. He has already made just under $4 million dollars; the rest of his contract will pay him an estimated $176 million more, whereupon he will be eligible for another long-term contract as a free agent conservatively worth more than twice as much.
He has all of that before him, and that’s just the money. He is looking at being a community and national celebrity, a product spokesperson and endorser, a role model for the young, and a legend in his sport. And what did he do?
As do I, and as commenters here have made clear, many believe that the best way to punish the Democrats for their unprecedented legal pursuit of the ex-President (which began when he was President-elect in 2016) is to, once again, elect the object of their undemocratic, indeed Soviet-style, assault on democracy as a protest and demonstration of contempt.
That may be appetizing, but at what price? More than once, most recently here, I have analogized the shock election of Trump in 2016 to the climax of “Animal House”:
Electing Trump certainly seemed stupid. Yet it served a purpose, indeed several purposes, just like the “stupid and futile gesture” that is the climax and operatic finale of “Animal House,” when the abused members of Delta House turn Faber College’s homecoming parade into a violent riot…
Voting for Trump was an “Up yours!” to the elites, the sanctimonious media, the corrupt Clintons, the hollow Obamas, and obviously corrupt Democrats like Pelosi and Harry Reid, machine Republicans like Mitch McConnell, and pompous think-tank conservatives like Bill Kristol.
“Americans got tired of being pushed around, lectured, and being told that traditional cultural values made them racists and xenophobes. They decided to say “Screw that!” by electing a protest candidate whose sole function was tobe a human thumb in the eye, because he was so disgusting to the people who had pretended to be their betters. Don’t you understand? It’s idiotic, but the message isn’t. It’s “Animal House”! and “Animal House” is as American as Doolittle’s Raid….In Germany, The Big Cheese says jump and the Germans say “How high?” In the US, the response is “Fuck you!” Obama never understood that…. I love that about America. And much as I hate the idea of an idiot being President, I do love the message and who it was sent to. America still has spunk.
But you can’t keep justifying repeats of the same stupid and futile gesture. Eventually, you have to get serious. (The Capitol riot was a more literal emulation of Delta House’s protest, but even more stupid and futile.) That so many people are actually considering a sequel is evidence of just how difficult it is to determine what the “right thing to do” is when ethics zugzwang looms. It can’t be the right thing to let the strategy adopted by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (aka. “The Axis of Unethical Conduct,” or AUC) in the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck succeed, but if the cure—re-electing Trump, another thumb in the eye— isn’t worse than the disease, it’s still reckless, risky and irresponsible.
So now what? The Ethics zugzwang theme is magnified by the competing theories about what the Democrats hope to accomplish by prosecuting Trump for anything they can think of. Is it as simple as trying to use the justice system to remove him from the field? Is the AUC really that stupid and naive? Of course this strategy enhances Trump’s status with those inclined to support him, just as the bogus impeachments did. Nah, it must be that the Left is playing three-dimensional chess…you know, like the deranged Custer of “Little Big Man…
I really don’t know what’s going on, and the many commenters on Ann’s post don’t agree either. For example….
Ethics Alarms 