Why don’t “the guys” take personal responsibility????
Update on the Tragic, Trump Derangement-Fueled Deterioration of the Once Ethical and Perceptive Ken White
Ethics Dunces
Unethical Quote Of The Month: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s October 7th Message
“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”
New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.
I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.
From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…
That’s tainted Special Counsel Jack Smith wearing an anti-Trump shirt last week.
Nothing says independent, non partisan, fair, objective and unbiased like appearing in public billboarding a message attacking the official you were supposed to investigate.
At least he’s a defiant, transparent unethical prosecutor.
What an asshole.
House Cleaning: Mystery Solved (Maybe)…The Identity Of EA’s Current Banned Anti-Semite Commenter Has Been Revealed!
Welcome to my world.
While you may think I spend my Ethics Alarms hours researching every imaginable source for interesting stories with ethics lessons to teach and then writing posts, and then responding to as many comments on the post as possible (70,000 such responses so far), which I believe makes me unique among bloggers with the number of commenters that I have. I also have to deal with the annoying task of blog moderation. That onerous and icky job is made more so when I am forced to ban a commenter for violating the clearly stated comment policies; it get particularly annoying when a banned commenter keeps finding ways to sneak in comments anyway post-banning, which almost all of them do, validating my judgment that they don’t have the ethical compass necessary to contribute here.
The most recent comment-bomber has been virulent anti-Semite Cassandra’s AI Agent, who hasn’t come close to the record number of unauthorized comments as the pompous A Friend, but it’s early yet. In the most recent spammed comment, which CAA posted at least three times, he/she/or it claims to be virulent anti-Semite Alizia Tyler, who was banned for using every topic to engage in her Jew-hating hobby. Many commenters had hypothesized that earlier, and I demurred, for several reasons. CAA has a different email address than Alizia, and unlike Alizia, doesn’t write like a bot, or as profusely. CAA is also an asshole, which Aliza was not. I’ve had off-site exchanges with Alizia in which I found her to be committed to being a productive commenter, even asking me whether I felt she should stop commenting in the best interests of Ethics Alarms.
If Alizia is in fact CAA, she’s clearly snapped. And because CAA is an unethical asshole, I can’t take anything he/she/or it says as necessarily true.
Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part Two: For Jews, Zionism=Survival
[Part I is here.]
Let’s see: what happened in the World of Jew Hate in the past 24 hours? Admittedly, this will only cover stories that leftist mainstream media hasn’t successfully embargoed: it is fine for the Democratic Party to be anti-Semitic, see, it’s just a bad look if the positions and conduct are expressly anti-Semitic right before an election, except to Muslim voters, of course.
I see…
- Jordan Bardella, a top figure in the French far right and Marine Le Pen’s top aide, authored antisemitic social media messages from 2013 to 2015. He had vehemently denied this.
- Italy’s Democratic Party refused to take part in a parliamentary committee vote on a bill opposing antisemitism,…
- Die Linke, Germany’s rising populist-left party, won 26% in elections to Berlin’s House of Representatives, its best performance ever. Meanwhile, a branch of Die Linke in Berlin recently welcomed Macklemore, the anti-Semitic rapper, and on election night a Die Linke MP was photographed with a representative of a pro-Palestinian group with terrorist connections.
- Canada is experiencing a surge of Jew hate. The Jerusalem Post reports “a significant rise in antisemitism, threats, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions…In 2025, 788 hate crimes targeting Jews were reported to police across Canada. Jews accounted for approximately 71 percent of all police reported hate crimes motivated by religion. .. During the most recent Rosh Hashanah, mezuzahs were torn from the doors of Jewish students’ rooms at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Days later, an armed man arrived at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville while worshippers were inside on Yom Kippur. A police officer protecting the synagogue was seriously wounded.
In the U.S.—remember, we’re just talking about today’s news—
- The University of California petitioned a court to kick out the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing UCLA of tolerating antisemitic harassment while seeking repayment of $2 billion in research grants. UC calls the case “political coercion” (how dare the government restrict a university’s right to allow the persecution of Jewish students on campus?) and argues that UCLA has made substantial changes since August of 2024, when a court ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith” and ordered the university to guarantee equal access to campus. A battle between anti-Israel students and counter-protesters was allowed to proceed without significant action by campus police.
- Close to me in Alexandria, a group of rabbis accused Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland of normalizing anti-Semitism. In a letter this week to the district’s [completely Democrat] leadership, they wrote in part, “Over the last three years, we have been on the front lines of the current crisis of skyrocketing school-based antisemitism. We meet regularly with students who are hurt and confused and parents who are angry that their children are experiencing harassment, isolation, and threats to their fundamental physical and emotional safety. We are alarmed that the lack of a meaningful response by MCPS has led to an increase in the normalization of antisemitic attitudes, language and behaviors in our schools.” Montgomery County is the most progressive and Democrat-dominated district in one of the most Democrat-dominated states in the nation.
Stay Classy, College Football!
As I will argue here until the metaphorical cows come home, football is a cultural embarrassment and a societal pathogen. In addition to that “giving players brain damage” thingy, both colleges and the pros allow their players to be felons and thugs if they are good enough. The King’s Pass reigns. Colleges now pay their football players, so they are truly fake students. The game (aka. business) advances the corruption of higher education. We once were told that a benefit of sports was that it conveyed the value of sportsmanship ( as in “ethics”) to rising generations. Riiiight, about that:
- A star on the #1 team in the nation, Texas’s Colin Simmons was flagged for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after he simulated urinating after a record-setting sack of Tennessee’s quarterback.
- Another player, Raleek Brown celebrated a touchdown by rubbing his genitals, sniffing his hand, and pretending to pass out. The Texas running back was not flagged for that disgusting celebration, after all, that was funny!
Steve Sarkisian, the Texas coach, said about the penalty,“We took [Simmons] out. We addressed it, and put him back in. I’m not gonna give the guy the death penalty over an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. We’ve got to fix it, though. That can’t continue as we move forward.”
Why does “that” exist at all, Coach? It’s your job to manage the culture on the team. I guarantee that a Major League Baseball player who mimed urinating on the field would be suspended immediately, and for a very long time, if not released. Why did one of your players think such public vulgarity was appropriate? Yeah, yeah, upbringing, growing up with a bad crowd, Hip-Hop, yada yada. College once was where young idiots were supposed to learn how responsible adults get through life. Notice that the coach was concerned about the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, not the unsportsmanlike conduct.
Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate
Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.
In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.
Huh. Tough choice; let me think.
The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly
- Egypt
- Jordan
- Lebanon
- Syria
- Iraq
- Saudi Arabia
- Palestine
- Qatar
- Kuwait
- Oman
- Yemen
- Sudan
- Tunisia
- Algeria
- Libya
- Mauritania
- Somalia
- Comoros
- Turkiye (Turkey)
- Iran
- Pakistan
- Afghanistan
- Bangladesh
- Indonesia
- Malaysia
- Brunei Darussalam
- Maldives
- Myanmar
- North Korea
- Turkmenistan
- Uzbekistan
- South Africa
- Senegal
- Djibouti
- Nigeria
- Angola
- Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Spain
- Brazil
- Peru
- Bahamas
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Botswana
- Ghana
- Cabo Verde
Nice!
Again: Progressive Hysterics Over A Responsible Trump Policy Change
I thought the clip from “Poltergeist” fit here: Welcome back, Dana!
The New Republic, biased and dishonest as usual, bleats, “Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees: Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.” It terms this as “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”
Oooh, banning students! Sounds like a mad dictator to me!
The President isn’t “banning students” or degrees. This is a financially and educationally responsible move that should have been done decades ago. If a student wants to waste a college education on majoring in “Queer History,” or “Slavik Literature” (Plymouth State University allows students to major in “Adventure Education” by taking “Rock Climbing Fundamentals,” “Canoe Paddling Fundamentals,” “Wilderness Expedition,” and “Whitewater Kayaking”) that’s swell: they just can’t use taxpayer funds they will never be able to pay back to do it.
The Department of Education, or what is left of it, tweeted in response to that unethical New Republic analysis,
“This is fake news at its finest. First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs. Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job. Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”
There is a strong case to be made that college itself is now a high-cost scam that doesn’t prepare students for the work force, just anti-Israel rallies and pro-illegal immigration riots, but okay, let’s go with the hoary myth that college is essential to life success. The student debt crisis in this country has reached levels that never should have been permitted, and higher education is as expensive as it is because the schools realized that could charge absurd tuitions and the US government would enable it by backing bigger and bigger loans. Taxpayers and the government subsidizing degrees only makes sense if it incentivizes the development of skills from which the the nation and society will derive tangible, quantifiable, practical benefits. Those are also skills that have a fighting chance of translating into jobs with sufficient compensation to allow reasonable loans to be paid back.
Declaring that the government will only back a student’s loan when 1) that loan is likely to be repaid and 2) when the loan is paying for a benefit to society rather than a self-indulgent frolic is responsible leadership. Unique among U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump sees his most responsible acts reflexively condemned through a combination of misrepresentation, bias and animus. I’m surprised there isn’t a college major in that.
Unethical (And Infuriating) Quote of the Month: Fake Conservative Pundit David Brooks
And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.
But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.
Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.
—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.
Pardon my Portuguese, but what an asshole.
The Rest of the Story: A Non-Apology Apology For An Unethical Quote of the Month
Toronto Blue Jays star Vladimir Guerrero Jr. kind-of, sort-of, not really “apologized” yesterday for the ethically brain-dead comments he made during a Spanish language interview about his $500 million, 14-year contract. I wrote earlier in the week about his absurd protestation that his huge contact wasn’t meant to pay for what he would produce on the field over the next decade-plus, but just a reward for what Vlad had already done. When the erstwhile slugger was criticized for the statement, he doubled down. Now, a scant two days later, he is suddenly contrite, or something.
“The main reason I’m here is because I regret my comments the other day,” Guerrero said through a translator. “I feel from my heart that my fans, my teammates, they needed an apology from me and that’s what I’m here for. Obviously, I’m also here because I’m just going to tell everyone that I’m going to continue to keep working hard to make my contract a great one.
“I just gave it some thought and I felt like the comments I made the other day is not what I really wanted to say, and I really feel that everyone, my fans, everyone deserves an apology from me and that’s the main reason I’m here today.”
Oh. What??? Wait, what exactly is Vlad apologizing for? He’s apologizing because others “needed” an apology because he didn’t say what he “really wanted to say?” We still don’t know what he wanted to say, or if he even understands what he’s apologizing for.
This isn’t even a level 10 apology on the Apology Scale ( “An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust…”). He might as well have said, “I apologize, whatever that means.” He regrets his comments because he’s getting criticism from fans, and someone, apparently his Hall of Fame father, Vlad Sr., told him that he had better say he didn’t mean what he said. Guerrero obviously did and does, because he said what he said twice, and that was essentially, “I don’t owe the team of fans anything going forward. So I stink this year; deal with it. I’ve got my money.” Guerrero’s contract includes a record $325 million signing bonus that protects his contract from the possible work stoppage everyone expects in 2027.
Now he says he “regrets” what he said twice, which is not the same as a sincere apology.
To be fair, I’ll concede that Vlad doesn’t speak English very well. I’ll also note that there’s no excuse for this, since he has split his residences between Florida and Toronto for at least seven years.
