And the “Great Stupid” Continues to Spread Its Dark Wings Across the Earth…

On the bright side, I guess, it appears to be much stupider across “the pond” than here, which is astounding. However, the fact that anybody has been so addled by the various Woke and Wonderful agenda items as this story indicates has to concern everyone. My reaction to it is barely contained in the catch phrase, “I can’t even…”

Emma Pinchbeck is chief executive of the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). She recently announced the group’s conviction that frequent flyers should pay higher taxes so that less affluent Brits can take nicer vacations.

Oh. What??

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Gee, I Wonder Why Americans Are Losing Trust In Their Nation’s Institutions? It’s a Mystery!

Science, Academia, Journalism, Government.

On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.

The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.

The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.

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Least Shocking Scandal of 2025…

Jonathan Turley reports,

“[A] long-withheld report from the Biden Administration directly contradicted the claims of climate change used to limit increased U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The suggestion is that this was an knowing effort to cap carbon admissions rather than carbon emissions. The impact that new U.S. LNG exports have on the environment and the economy was reviewed by U.S. Energy Department scientists and completed by September 2023. It appears that neither President Biden nor Secretary Jennifer Granholm liked the science or the conclusions. Rather than “follow the science,” they buried the report while allegedly making claims directly refuted by their own experts…The draft study, “Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports,” found that, under all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production would not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It further found that it would not increase energy prices for consumers. Biden and Granholm reportedly buried the report and then announced a pause on all new U.S. LNG export terminals in January 2024, citing the danger to environmental and economic impacts.”

Gee what a surprise.

But seriously folks, anyone who is even faintly surprised at this development hasn’t been watching, listening or paying attention to either the “science of cliamte change” or the debate over energy policy. What is far from “settled science” is deliberately presented as a consensus. Policies that harm the U.S. economy and consumers have been regularly inflicted on the nation as pure virtue-signaling to the Left, with full knowledge that they can’t possibly have any effect on the world’s climate, present or future. And revealing that the Biden Administration engaged in public deception….well, this is a group that regularly manipulated government employment figures, Wuhan virus pandemic statistics and social media to control public opinion as much as as possible.

Heck, this is a group that hid who was really wielding power in the White House! Hiding a study that doesn’t support a Democrat-Progressive world view? Totalitarianism 101, and the Democratic Party is poisoned by a totalitarian-trending political culture now, as we repeatedly saw during the last four years.

My only problem with Turley’s analysis is that it is thinly sourced, because apparently only Fox News has covered the story so far. I searched for it at the New York Times site: nada. If the story is somewhere in the Times, then the news story is being buried like the study itself…or this is another example of the partisan divide in our unethical “journalism” making it impossible for the public to find out what’s really going on.

That wouldn’t be shocking either.

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The Hypocrisy of the Climate Change Racket

From the BBC:

“A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people – including world leaders – at the conference in November.

“The state government touts the highway’s “sustainable” credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact. The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.

[Insert snide Ethics Alarms aside: Ya think??]

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Ethics Quiz: Trump-Proofing

In the last couple of weeks there have been multiple news reports regarding President Biden “Trump-proofing” the government in advance of the newly elected President taking over as the voters have willed. The decision to veto the bi-partisan act that would create more federal judgeships was such a measure: though the new judges are desperately needed to address the backlog in the courts, apparently whoever is pulling Biden’s strings has decided that no new judges at all are better than Trump appointed judges.

Today there was another example. Bloomberg reported that President Biden is will issue an unusually resilient executive order permanently banning new offshore oil and gas development in some US coastal waters.The executive order will bar the sale of new drilling rights in portions of the country’s outer continental shelf, potentially foiling Trump’s promise to ramp up domestic energy production. The plan will exploit a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect US waters from oil and gas leasing. The same law does not without explicitly empower Presidents to revoke the designation. (It sounds legally dubious to me, but I haven’t read the law.)

Trump is expected to order a reversal of these attempted permanent protections, but whether he will be able to do so is unknown.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this…

Do you think it is ethical for an outgoing President to take measures to impede the agenda of the incoming President?

In a Fascinating Though Risky Experiment, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Decides To Test If Anything Can Make Voters Reject The Democratic Party

I confess, I don’t know what to call this post, how to define NY Gov. Kathy Hochul at this point, or how to explain American citizens who would put up with her.

She’s had quite an exciting December. On the same day and just two hours after a psychopathic illegal immigrant set a sleeping woman on fire in a New York City subway train, Hochel sent out this…

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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!

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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,

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The 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Births the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Caboose

So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

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Ethics Alarms Awards a “Nelson” to the Guy Who Inadvertently Threw Away $527 Million

I guess this seems a bit harsh, but then, I never let my late wife forget that she threw out our Paul McCartney concert tickets, and that was only $500 down the metaphorical drain.

$527 million! And it’s really worse than that, believe it or not.

James Howells, 39, accidentally threw out a hard drive containing his bitcoin stash in 2013. It was worth around $1 million then but now has an estimated worth of about $527 million.

Since that epic “Oopsie!” Howells has requested, demanded and implored the Newport, Great Britain, Council, which oversees the landfill where his hard drive ended up, to retrieve it for him. The body has refused; after all, the necessary excavation will take between 18 and 36 months followed by a year of area restorative work, and the council says that all of this would be environmentally irresponsible. Now Howells is suing the council for $646 million in damages because it won’t remedy his mistake. Hoping that the lawsuit will leverage the council into being “reasonable,” Howells has assembled a team to carry out the $13 million excavation. On the team is the council’s former head of landfill, who claims to know the exact area where the hard drive is. He’s also dangling the prospect of a 10% commission to the Council when the hard drive is found.

The Ethics Verdict here: Howells’ dumb mistake is not the Council’s responsibility. Their duty is to the community, not him. The appropriate and ethical response to Howell’s threats is “Bite me!” He and the former landfill head can get shovels and dig for the thing themselves. Who knows? They might get lucky.