Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

A Bit More DEI Among Trump’s Cabinet and Agency Picks Would Have Been Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

…as in prudent, responsible, respectful, and competent.

President-elect Trump’s best mouthpiece, Rep. Byron Donalds, essentially humina-humina-ed the question on CNN about whether Al Sharpton’s criticism of the nomination and appointments so far emanating from Mar-A Largo was valid. Certainly Sharpton’s rationale isn’t valid: that Trump “owes” black voters more African American cabinet members, but the presence of just a single black nominee among the many selections, that being former NFL player Scott Turner nominated last week be Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is at very least unwise. Turner was part of Trump’s executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council; now he steps into the job held last time by Dr. Ben Carson. No, I don’t think there is any chance Turner will be rejected by the Senate.

It certainly looks like Trump has designated HUD as the slot for tokens: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who revealed himself during the 2016 debates to be an idiot savant, had no qualifications for HUD other than his skin color. Turner is more qualified, but still: if Trump wanted to ensure that the “Trump is racist” trope continues unabated, he could hardly have pursued a course that would have supported it more vividly. There are certainly a lot of nominations and appointments “of color,” but in the United States, for obvious reasons, blacks are in a special category.

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Rationalization #19B, ‘The Insidious Confession,” or “It Wasn’t the Best Choice” Is Officially Re-Named: “The Bus Driver’s Mitigation.” Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Talk about a parent’s worst nightmare…

In Castle Rock, Colorado, a relief school bus driver got rattled and confused when the kids wouldn’t quiet down and the tablet showing his route broke down. His solution was to drop all the students off at an unscheduled stop miles from their homes. More than 40 students were abandoned at a busy intersection, and the bus drove away.

Parents were not pleased.

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Breaking: Trump Has A New Attorney General Nominee, and Arguably, She’s Worse Than Matt Gaetz…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

It’s Pam Bondi.

Ugh.

  • She was the Ethics Alarms Unethical Prosecutor of the Year in 2016.
  • That year I wrote,

    “Florida’s attorney general Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump while she considered joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates, AP reports Trump’s $25,000 donation to Bondi came from a Trump family foundation in a likely violation of rules surrounding legitimate activities by 501 C (3) charities, which are not allowed to engage in political grant-making. And Justice for All, a political group backing Bondi’s re-election,  reported receiving the check on Sept. 17, 2013 — four days after Bondi’s office publicly announced she was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University’s activities.”

  • Still later, after the 2016 election, I wrote,

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Weenie of the Week: Disney [Pointer Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Is it too much to ask Disney to at least have the courage of its oppressively woke convictions?

An episode of the new Disney animated show “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” that centered on a transgender character was pulled from the series and there are no plans to broadcast it.

The Disney Channel will not show the episode in 2025 apparently because of its LGBTQ storyline, which involves a transgender character named Brooklyn who is on the girl’s volleyball team and faces discrimination from the opposing team’s coach. The evil coach uses a magic key to lock Brooklyn and her teammates in the girl’s locker room so they can’t play. Brooklyn, who wears pride-themed kneepads and has a “Trans is beautiful” sticker on her water bottle, tells her team mates, “I’m trans, my very existence breaks Greer’s rules.”

Although Disney claims that the timing of the cancellation notice is a coincidence, it seems that all of the artists involved in creating the episode believe that the Presidential election results motivated the decision. Emmy Cicirega, a storyboard artist, wrote on X, “Disney should be ashamed of themselves for canning this episode. You don’t get to approve approve approve something and then destroy it at the last minute, shattering the crew’s hard work and hopes.” Another animator tweeted, “If an episode got this far, it was approved multiple times by multiple divisions, only to suddenly be struck down at the last second? Total breakdown of process and spitting on your team’s careful/thoughtful work…The action being preemptive makes it so much worse to me. The absolute cowardice and second guessing when actually this is when this content is needed most.”

Disney denies it all, but why should anyone trust Disney these days? It does seem spectacularly stupid to self-censor a work of art because of a Presidential election and a close one at that. It seems just as stupid to pull an episode that everyone will think became too controversial because of Trump’s win. If Disney believes as fervently in its all-in support of LGBTQ issues as its much maligned output in recent years suggests, then the company should show some integrity and guts, stick to its metaphorical guns, and tell Brooklyn’s story. One thing you could count on Walt for: if he had a vision, he didn’t care whose ire it aroused. Like all great artists, innovators and creators, if where he was going was into a headwind, he wouldn’t turn back. The decision to red pencil Brooklyn’s story reeks of a company without principles just trying to go where the winds seem to be blowing. Weenies.

Now watch everyone blame the lost episode of “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” on Trump.

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Pointer: Willem Reese [This is a correction: I initially credited JutGory for the tip, who quickly disavowed. EA apologizes to all concerned.]

Thanks, BlueSky!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

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.

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Ethics Quiz: Smoking Daddy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the YouTube video posted by “web influencer” Rosanna Pansino (over 14 million YouTube subscribers—I’m all the way up to around 230 followers in my recent return to Twitter/X!—the 39-year-old baking star smokes her dead father’s ashes in accordance with his dying wish. She says her father, dying of leukemia, wanted her to grow a marijuana plant with his ashes and then smoke him. So five years after he died, with his pot plant flourishing, Pansino lit a joint that had particles of her father in it and smoked it for the entertainment of her YouTube audience.

Classy. So tasteful.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day…

“Is this unethical, or just icky?”

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Wait, I’m Sorry, I’m Getting All Confused: WHICH Is the Party That Is An Existential Threat To Democracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms noted [Item #6] that Democrats in Pennsylvania had voted in favor of counting mail-in ballots that were ruled invalid by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and will be counting those disqualified ballots to try to overturn the apparent victory of GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick over incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in the upcoming recount. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, and he is now leading Casey by over 17,000 votes.

This fondness for counting void votes is, of course, passing strange conduct from the party whose captive journalists keep saying that President-Elect Trump’s four years of claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” from him are “completely groundless.” Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes are among those the incoming President felt were stolen. Call me crazy and paint me puce, but I’d say deliberately and openly counting votes the state Supreme Court says are invalid is prima facie evidence that this a party not above cheating to hold onto power.

Now, after the Republican National Committee sued last week after several counties decided to openly cheat by counting ballots with incorrect dates, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court today reiterated its decision from November 5. Justice David Wecht wrote in his concurring statement that it is “critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey orders of this Court.” Justice Kevin Brobson likewise wrote that local election officials do not “have the authority to ignore Election Code provisions that they believe are unconstitutional.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed on November 1 that requiring mail-in ballots to have handwritten dates is constitutional.

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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

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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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In New York, Dishonest Progressive Math: Not Charging Commuters As Much As Was Originally Proposed Saves Them Money

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What is this? Gaslighting? Misdirection? Whatever it is, it’s unethical.

But typical.

“I always have and I always will fight to put more money in the pockets of everyday New Yorkers,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, as she imposed a new 9 dollar commuter toll on New Yorkers who drive into the Manhattan business district. How is a new toll that will go into effect in January 2025 for the first tine saving New Yorkers money by putting more money in their pockets? It isn’t.

Follow closely, now. The original “NYC congestion plan” was supposed to cost $15 when it was proposed, but the plan was suspended by Hochul until after the election, because she was afraid it would cost her party votes. Now that the election is safely over in the state, she’s reinstating the plan, but at a lower cost. Nonetheless, lowering the cost of a new state expense being imposed on commuters isn’t putting more money in anyone’s pocket but the state’s. The new toll takes money away from commuters, just not as much money as was originally announced.

I’m not evaluating whether the toll is a responsible and fair policy; I don’t care. I do care about the apparently never-ending “It isn’t what it is” addiction of elected officials who try their damnedest to confuse and mislead the public. Hochul is literally saying to the public, “Be grateful that I’m not taking more of your money than I might. Why, it’s almost like I am giving you money!”

No, charging commuters more than nothing, which is what they had been paying to come into Manhattan, is taking money, not giving it. War is Peace, and the state taking your money is putting money in your pocket, because it could be taking even more.

Got it.

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Sources: NYT 1, 2, and 3.