Saturday Morning Wake-Up (2): A Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck Update

1. I’ll introduce this by noting that an American Research Group poll found that public approval of President Biden’s handling of his job has fallen to just 39%.

Of the 39% of Americans saying they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, 65% say they expect the national economy will be better a year from now. (They are whistling past the graveyard.) Of the 56% saying they disapprove of the way Biden his handling his job as president, 71% believe the national economy will be worse a year from now. Why wouldn’t it be?

Of Republicans polled, just 3% approve of the way Biden is handling his job. 34% of Independents approve, but 80% of Democrats actually told another human being that they approve like the way Biden is running his Presidency because every thing is going so well. That’s incompetent citizenship. One can still be a Democrats and be able to honestly assess a disaster when a Democrat is at the helm of the Ship of State, can’t you? Talk about cult-like behavior.

2. Here’s a more encouraging poll, sort of: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly three-quarters ,72%, of voters believe that “America is becoming a police state” under Biden. Rasmussen defined “police state” as “a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.” Targeting of political opponents? Why would anyone think that?

(Yes, I’m going to work that reference to Biden’s ‘anyone who opposes my party and government is a fascist and danger to democracy’ speech every chance I get. Lest we forget.)

Republicans led the way with 76% expressing fears of totalitarian trends under Biden, but Democrats were not far behind at 67%. Combining the two polls, one can only conclude that a large number of Democrats like the fact that Biden is overseeing a developing police state. And I think that’s a correct impression.

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2024’s Voters: This Goes Right Into The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” File…

But I bet they know all about systemic racism and the impending climate change apocalypse….

Observations On The Revived Claim That Google “Steered 6 Million Votes” to Biden in 2020

Ben Bartley reports on PJ Media: “Robert Epstein….director of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), has concluded through a quantitative analysis of Google search engine manipulation and subsequent extrapolation to the population level that the company… added six million votes to Joe Biden’s column in 2020. If accurate, this was more than enough to have artificially swayed the election….The value of Epstein’s work is that it confirms what is immediately obvious to anyone paying attention who searches a contentious term in Google and then searches for the exact same term in a non-compromised search engine like DuckDuckGo.”

Observations:

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A “When You Keep Hearing ‘Racist Dog-Whistles, You’re The Dog” Classic: All Those “Racist” State Flags

Jason Patterson, an African American artist who is obsessed with flags and who apparently can sniff out racism that normal people don’t notice, managed to convince the Washington Post to validate his hysterical assessment that the seven state flags pictured above (on a field of “The Stars and Bars” flags) are all secretly sending anti-black, racist, pro-slavery and pro-Confederate messages. He thinks they all should be removed, even though (I’m estimating here) not one American in 10,000 would detect any such messages at all. This is the weird state of mind that has led to statue-toppling across the country, movements to end the honoring of essential Founders like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, and, at its silliest, the elimination of “Turkey in the Straw” as the tinkly tune played by ice cream trucks. It’s fair to describe Patterson as obsessed and unhealthily so, making the Post’s effort to spread his paranoia unethical and irresponsible.

Here’s a summary of Patterson’s flag-o-phobia:

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Is It Unethical To Laugh, Mock And Applaud As “Sanctuary Cities” Define The Bard’s Phrase “Hoist With His Own Petard”?

No, of course not. In fact, it’s mandatory, necessary, and appropriate. Everyone knew, or should have know, that the progressive, woke, Democratic grandstanders who undermined U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law by announcing that their cities would not cooperate in the enforcement of immigration laws were irresponsible fool, indeed (sorry) destructive assholes all along. (Anyone who voted for such officials are also irresponsible assholes, just to get the accountability aligned,) Now, however, we know that they know they are assholes, and have to behave in a manner that exposes to all what assholes they are. This is great.

The utter hypocrisy of mayors and governors declaring their love for illegal immigrants as long as most of them arrived and stayed in cities along the Southern borders was exposed when governors of states overrun by what the news media calls “migrants” to hide their problematic and illegal features have sent busloads and plane-loads of the them to cities like New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Suddenly, the “sanctuaries,” which were so compassionate and welcoming as long as there were few negative consequences of their facile lip-service were not so understanding.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Donald Trump Has No Convictions, But He Has No Convictions

by Curmie

[Notes from your host: 1) Curmie and I did not coordinate our posts, and 2) as usual, his erudition puts me to shame.]

***

I’m currently in the process of moving into a new office which is far too small to accommodate my collection of books, even after I gave away over 1000 of them.  One of the volumes I still haven’t figured out what to do with is my Penguin paperback copy of Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” purchased over 40 years ago for a course I took in grad school.

Coming across that volume triggered a memory of struggling with one of that book’s most famous sections, the Stasis in Corcyra.  It wasn’t that the passages in question were too confusing.  Rather, it was that word “stasis”; no one would describe the civil war on the island of Corcyra in 427 BCE as static. 

A little digging (well, actually more than a little, as these were the days before the internet) revealed that virtually all English translations of those passages of Thucydides had simply adopted a cognate of the Greek word στάσις (stásis), meaning roughly “that which is stood up.”  So something firmly placed and unchanging would be static, or in a state of stasis.  But the word also carried the meaning of “standing up against,” in the sense of resisting authority.  So the insurrection on Corcyra was, in fact, an act of stasis.

These linguistic constructions, known as contranyms, auto-antonyms, or “Janus words” (among other locutions) are not uncommon.  We all understand that a peer might be a member of the English nobility or an equal, or that “it’s all downhill from there” might mean that the system is in decline or that the hard part is over and we can coast to the finish line.

I’m not sure if there’s a word for the variation on the theme that forms the title of this essay: the two meanings of the term are not in direct contradiction, but they lead to pretty close to opposite conclusions.  What I find interesting is that both definitions can apply simultaneously. 

That is, “having no convictions” can mean lacking a system of guiding principles, especially one involving a moral compass or an ethical center. It can also mean that the subject has never been convicted of a crime.  I’d argue that Donald Trump fits both descriptions rather well. 

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Snap Out Of It! Trump’s Latest Disqualifying Statement Is Signature Significance—Stop Pretending He Is A Rational Option To Elect President

Asked by Glenn Beck in an interview “[I]f you’re president again, will you lock people up?”, Donald Trump, the supposed champion of democracy and heroic foe of the Democratic totalitarians, answered, “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.” 

Dingdingdingdingding! This is signature significance, just like his earlier musings about suspending the Constitution. As I wrote earlier this year, “As divided as Americans are, it doesn’t appear that enough of them care about preserving democracy to do anything to preserve it. They only differ on the means by which they are willing to let it collapse.” Electing Donald Trump as President, with his sick “tit for tat,“Do unto others as they do to you,”vengeance is mine” approach to ethics magnified by his “the ends justify the means” orientation can’t possible “save” democracy. The most it can do is maximize the chances that the totalitarians we end up with aren’t socialists, anti-white bigots and addicted to toxic woke fantasies. That shouldn’t be good enough. It isn’t good enough, not for this nation. That so many still think it is depresses and frightens me greatly.

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Two Schadenfreude Treats!

1. The deified U.S. women’s soccer team lost to Sweden and exited the World Cup in the round of 16, its worst performance ever. Megan Rapinoe, the ostensible leader of the squad who made the team’s image at least as political as it was athletic, was substantially responsible for the loss, shanking a penalty kick that could have secured a victory.

Good.

U.S. soccer fans shouldn’t mourn the team’s defeat because this team never represented the United States honorably or respectfully. It has “taken a knee” during the National Anthem’s playing on foreign soil; this time, its members slouched, looked down, and behaved like 10-year-old jerks before a baseball game (“Take off your cap, Billy!“) while a few of the women mouthed the words. They compete in international tournaments as our representatives, and don’t have the option of wokey, anti-American self-indulgence. When asked about potentially accepting an invitation to be honored by at the White House when Trump was in residence, Rapinoe spoke for her team, spitting out, “I’m not going to the fucking White House!”

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky)

I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.

Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.

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Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part II]

US-original-Declaration-1776

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

—-The Declaration of Independence

“It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever. “

—-Daniel Webster, U.S. politician and orator

“Liberty is the soul’s right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist.

“Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense – the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.”

—- Senator William Borah (R-ID), 1917

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

—-George Orwell
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