“Look, he’s Yale Law guy. I’m a public school teacher.”
—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, expressing his anxiety about this week’s debate with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.
I can’t bring myself to believe that this debate will have any impact on the election at all, and I have made up my mind pretty securely about both Vance and Walz, neither of whom were responsible choices to be “a heartbeat from the Presidency. ” At least Walz, unlike Vance, has some executive governing experience, and at least Vance isn’t a parody of a woke idiot. But Walz’s comment pings so many ethics alarms that attention must be paid.
It’s been slim ethics pickin’s of late, probably because everyone is obsessed with the campaign and the Debate To Decide The Fate Of Democracy (or DTDTFOD for short). These things always launch ridiculous numbers of fake news items, like “How Trump and Harris Will Try to Attack Each Other at the Debate” on the Times website, a variety of what I call “psychic fake news;” “How Trump Has Used Debates to Belittle Women” (‘poisoning the well”) on its front page, and also “As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity.” Translation: The mainstream media Democratic shills want to make the election about “age and capacity.” Then we have the hilarious “Hillary Clinton Has Advice on Debating Trump: ‘He Can Be Rattled’” Taking advice from Hillary on how to beat Trump is like taking advice from George Foreman about how to beat Muhammad Ali. I chuckled at “Liz Cheney Accuses G.O.P. Trump Backers of Betraying Their Principles.” Kamala Harris literally represents the opposite of everything she and her father at least pretended to stand for until Trump Derangement struck. Still, there are some issues lying around that need to be cleared…
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has joined the large cadre of fools who seem to seriously believe former President Donald Trump has a strong similarity to Adolf Hitler. After the assassination attempt on July 13, Caraballo posted on Twitter/”X”: “Trump is going to use this as his Reichstag moment to crack down when he’s elected.” See?
President Joe Biden’s climate adviser Ali Zaidi continued the intellectual dishonesty of the Biden administration’s climate change pandering, warning this week that that the President’s political rivals are preparing a “U-turn agenda” that would reverse all the administration’s “progress.” He was appealing to young, ignorant, woke climate change cultists who are threatening to refuse to support Biden’s re-election, since he hasn’t sent U.S. business and society back to the stone age.
Zaidi said that a reversal of Biden’s policies “actually puts us on a U-turn trajectory. A U-turn to [a] less competitive economy. A U-turn to unsafe communities, a U-turn on jobs. That’s a really big deal. It’s very problematic.”
He also claimed, ludicrously, that passions of young people on this topic reflects their experiences, with “wildfires turning the skies orange” and policymakers’ actions “failing to meet the urgency their generation believes is needed to keep global temperature increases in check.” He said, however, that the administration is heeding the the “call of science,” with Biden is committed to his goal of slashing U.S. emissions in half this decade.
None of the wildfires of recent years have been credibly connected to climate change. Moreover, who cares what barely-educated life-neophytes “believe”? They don’t actually know anything except what demagogues and partisan scientists dumbing down their rhetoric tell them.
That’s the outspoken, racist, Dunning-Kruger suffering lawyer on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, saying out loud and on national TV that climate change causes eclipses (yes, also earthquakes, but we’ve already heard public figures make fools of themselves on that topic, like here and here…). This was so bad that even Whoopie felt compelled to correct her: Whoopie’s problem is that she’s uneducated, but she’s still easily the smartest lady on “The View,” which admittedly is faint praise.
We could have an entertaining debate over whose statement is more idiotic, Rep. Jackson Lee’s claim that the moon is “mostly gas,” of this head-exploder from Hostin. But that’s not the point of this post.
Sarah B. submitted this Comment of the Day over the weekend, and it dovetails neatly with today’s post on the immediate politicizing of the Baltimore bridge disaster. Of course, that most recent incident is but a fractal of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck, which saw both misinformation spread by the news media and our supposedly non-partisan, trustworthy health organizations, agencies and institutions, cripple the economy, damage our children, turn large swathes of the population into fearful, mask-clutching weenies, and damage the integrity of a national election. That’s where Sarah’s cautionary tale begins.
My mother, an RN (and massage therapist) became livid at all her TDS suffering friends and patients repeatedly calling Ivermectin a “horse drug”. She went and got documents discussing the usage of Ivermectin in certain patients with various types of issues, and how the drug was routinely used to treat certain infections.
But despite the high usage of the drug on humans in these papers from reputable medical journals dated over decades, she was told that she was too simple to understand that this was misinformation and that Ivermectin was only a conspiracy theorist’s solution. She was told that she needs to check with people with real medical degrees, not just crunchy folks in massage therapy school. Her bachelors in nursing with decades of experience was ignored in this discussion.
My mother’s insistence that people should look at the evidence lost her friends and clients, many of whom no longer contact her at all and haven’t since 2020, despite being friends for decades prior.
I suppose it’s comforting to know that the U.S. isn’t quite as infected with the toxins of The Great Stupid as Great Britain or Canada. Yet.
The Goodfellas Wood Oven Pizza on Old Mill Dr. surprised diners recently with this at the bottom of the bill:
A 2% “carbon fee” ! For what, exactly? The bill explains:
Oh. Canada’s restaurant czars told reporters that the fee was legal since it wasn’t called a tax and that because the establishment’s website informs consumers that this is what they are in for, diners have to pay it. My reaction would be “Bite me!” If you are so fearful of the climate effects of eating, then don’t run a restaurant.The website explains in more detail, “what we eat fuels climate change. Goodfellas uses certified D.O.P products from Italy to remain true to the brand, and it’s not always possible to buy local. Adding 2% to every restaurant bill to invest in carbon capture will help offset our carbon footprint.”
The Toronto Sun’s article about this overt nickel-and-diming, virtue-signaling exercise says that the diners they interviewed said that the charge didn’t upset them. Canada, Land of Woke Weenies. The charge is unethical, obnoxious, and dumb. Anyone with any self-respect who hasn’t been indoctrinated and beaten into loving Greta Thunberg like Winston Smith loved Big Brother would refuse to pay the charge and dare the restaurant to have them arrested. Or say,”Fine: I’ll reduce my tip by three dollars.” Better yet, eliminate the tip entirely because the place had the gall to attempt this scam.
I don’t know how Canadians got this way, but it reminds me of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I think we need to start paying more attention to our northern border to keep these pod people out.
“How throwing soup at the Mona Lisa can help fight climate change”
You can read this opinion piece if you want, but the headline accurately conveys all you need to know by itself, I hope. The author, an associate professor of environmental studies at USC (so you know the quality of critical thinking and ethical analysis they are teaching there), essentially is making an argument for terrorism, because sometimes it works.
“Objections to acts of climate activism such as the latest food fight at the Louvre are understandable but might miss the point. Protesters’ perceived madness is indeed method,” Shannon Gibson writes. And the method is attracting attention to a cause by disruptive, selfish and destructive acts having no relationship to the goals of the activists. In some respects, violent acts of terrorism are easier to rationalize: at least those seeking a Palestinian state are directing their “method” at those with some direct relationship to the entity the terrorist blame for their plight. Throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or the Mona Lisa has no such relevance.
The trouble with protesters, to cut to the chase, is that a large percentage of them in virtually every protest and demonstration don’t know what they are chanting about and are just happy mob participants. I remember when my college was shut down by a student strike my freshman year, several of my friends were happily raising their fists and carrying signs despite the fact that they weren’t interested or informed on the matter being protested. They all reassured me that they were involved to meet girls. Later, in my first job after law school, the PR director I worked with in D.C. seemed to be attending a protest or rally every weekend. When I remarked that she was unusually politically active for someone who never discussed politics at all, she assured me that she just enjoyed the energy of crowds…and found it a good way to meet guys.
Since yesterday was “Capitol Insurrection Day,” which I predict will be made a national holiday as soon as Democrats get control of Congress, it seems a propitious opportunity to ponder an equally stupid protest in Clifton, Bristol (Great Britain). A resident reported that his Tesla’s tires were deflated, and on the windshield was this message:
Other automobiles on his street were also victims of tire-deflating. The group behind the mass flattening calls itself “the Tyre Extinguishers.” ( The play on words would work better if the Brits spelled “fire” as “fyre.”)
The annoyed Tesla owner told reporters, “It’s ironic, because I was trying to do the right thing by buying an electric car. It’s ridiculous and inconvenient. I get why [climate activism] is happening, but I’m not seeing the point of this.”
The point he ought to derive from the incident is that most climate change protesters know almost nothing about climate science and related matters, like the full environmental effects of electric vehicles. They are passionately protesting what they don’t understand sufficiently to have an informed opinion about, and therefore shouldn’t influence anyone beyond persuading observers that they are passionate, unethical dolts and blights on society.
Ethics Alarms 