Addendum to “Ethics Dunce: Anyone Who Criticizes Elon Musk For Being The First Trillionaire”

I wrote last night’s post about the socialist hacks attacking one of the U.S.’s most productive and innovative people for being too successful at what he does—as contrasted with his envious critics—based on old information, as in “what I had accumulated in my notes during the day while trying to do my far easier and less productive job. (In fact, it’s ridiculous how little being an ethicist accomplishes, if it accomplishes anything at all.) Here are some related items I would have included if I had taken a bit more time on that post….

1. In addition to being assholes, the Musk-haters don’t know what they are talking about.

A frequent and erudite “X”-pundit whose handle is “Cynical Publius” wrote:

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire.”

“As a securities law attorney, please allow me to explain how anyone who says this is basically lying to you:

  1. The Securities and Exchange Commission has a myriad of laws that prevent founders and other large stockholders of publicly traded companies from dumping their shares. There are substantial holding period requirements, volume of sales limitations and public reporting obligations for stock sales. Basically, Elon holds largely illiquid shares, he is a “trillionaire” on paper only, and the best analogy is when people peg your net worth based on your home’s market price. That’s not money in your pocket, that’s the house you live in.
  2. All that money raised in the IPO? That’s not going into Elon’s pocket like the lying socialist idiots want you to believe. It’s a capital influx that will be used to make more rockets and get more payloads into orbit. It’s a CAPITAL investment—that money is like a business loan, it’s not your money to keep, it’s your money to grow the business.
  3. If it WERE legal for Elon to dump his shares, the share price would crash basically instantly and the company could very well fail.
  4. If you bought SpaceX shares in the IPO, congrats. You just bought a lottery ticket, just like Elon. May the odds ever be in your favor.
  5. So the next time someone screeches about how unfair it is that Elon Musk creates wealth that benefits all of humanity, throw the truth back in their faces.”

Ethics Foul Call: The Jeffrey Epstein Obsession Is a Pure Trump Derangement Symptom and Another “Get Trump!” Hoax, Nothing Else

At this point, the statement above must be ruled not an opinion, but a fact. As a fact, it is another indictment against the political forces—“the resistance,” Democrats, the Left’s captive media, its politicized and corrupted justice system, and furious Republicans who resent the overthrow of their weak Bushy establishment—-that have plotted to destroy Donald Trump from the moment he upset Hillary Clinton’s dream of being the first female President.

The New York Times, hardly a neutral bystander in the Left’s unyielding effort to destroy an elected President by any means necessary, recently published a compendium of what their crack reporters have learned about Epstein, who has been dead for seven years. Sixteen years ago, in 2008, he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, and thanks to a “Dream Team” of high-priced defense lawyers and incompetent prosecutors, was allowed to accept a sweetheart plea deal. Epstein got himself indicted again in 2019 for sex trafficking minors but died in custody awaiting his trial, almost certainly by suicide. It is inconceivable that this single rich sociopath would still be in the news today or even remembered by most Americans if there was not an ongoing effort to use him to take down the President of the United States.

“More than 60 Times journalists have delved into the life of the sexual predator whose secrets spurred an international reckoning over money, power and complicity,” the Times announced in “The Big Questions About Jeffrey Epstein: What The Times Has Learned.” [Gift Link] “Oh!” I thought. “At least I know the Times will move heaven and earth to represent the matter in the most damning way possible regarding Donald Trump. Okay, let’s see it. Give us all the innuendo, the presumed Bad Orange Man criminal perversion sand guilt by association. What have you got, Times Trump Hit Squad? Lay it on me.”

Here is what they have under the “big question” “What were his relationships with Trump and Clinton?” First I should note that combining Trump with Clinton is a cheat and a guilt by association tactic all by itself. They are not equivalent cases. Clinton was involved with Epstein while Bubba was living in the White House and fooling around with a young female intern there. There is substantial circumstantial evidence raising legitimate questions about Clinton’s possible involvement in Epstein’s criminal sex procurement activities. The answer to that “big question” regarding Donald Trump however is, I conclude, zzzzzzzzzzzip.

The Times writes,

“Mr. Epstein was friends with Mr. Trump long before he became president, and he developed a relationship with Mr. Clinton during his time in the White House. Those relationships involved bonding with Trump over their pursuit of young women. The two men became good friends in the late 1980s, hanging out together at casinos, Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and other venues. A note and sexually suggestive drawing containing what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s signature was included in a 2003 book for Mr. Epstein’s birthday. Mr. Trump has denied writing the note. Some of Mr. Epstein’s victims, including [Epstein accuser] Giuffre, were recruited by Ms. Maxwell from Mr. Trump’s Florida club and residence, where Ms. Giuffre worked as a spa attendant. Mr. Trump said last year that he cut ties with Mr. Epstein in the early 2000s because he “stole” his female employees, although the relationship also deteriorated when the men fought over a piece of Florida real estate.”

Wait…that’s it? Based on that, Democrats, Graham Platner, Marjorie Taylor Greene and my Trump Deranged Facebook friends call the President of the United States a pedophile, allege a cover-up, and claim that everything Trump does, eventhe war on Iran, is an effort to “distract from the Epstein scandal”? What scandal? Two billionaires knowing each other isn’t a scandal because one of them breaks the law. Hanging out in casinos isn’t illegal or unethical. Rich guys pursuing young women isn’t a crime; heck, it is inevitable. I don’t know why Trump bothers to deny a doodle included in a birthday book: it proves nothing. And that’s all! That’s all the New York Times has after it has sent 60 reporters to get dirt on the President and seven years of searching.

Rep. Jasmine Crocket On a Racist Rampage

And she was supposedly a rising star of the Democratic Party. Well, she’s better than Graham Platner…

Crockett, who lost her attempt to run for the U.S. Senate and now is a lame duck in the House, was in fine form this week. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the “hate groups” it railed against. One of the witnesses called by the Republicans on the committee was Dr. Alveda King. Her father is Alfred Daniel King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr., and she has broken ranks to be a GOP supporter and an advocate for President Trump.

After King’s statement, Crockett began shouting about how how “white men” had invited Alveda to the hearing and that those white men from the GOP wanted to “tell people of color who is fighting for who. People of color do not feel comfortable or welcomed within your party.”  

“That’s why you have to parade someone who has the name ‘Dr. King’ attached to them, so that people can be confused,” she continued. “Because I have been reading the comments online, and people are like, ‘Who is this Dr. King’ because you want them to believe that she somehow espouses who Dr. King was.” Crockett didn’t give this Dr. King an opportunity to respond, but the next speaker, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), allowed her to do so.

“Congresswoman, I am a bit emotional,” King began. “I’m going to watch what I say, but it seems as though you have suggested that I am a bastard to the King family legacy. I am legitimately the daughter of the Rev. Alfred Daniel Williams King and Dr. Naomi Ruth Barber King. We are a family who loves God. And I love you. God bless you.” 

Crockett walked out of the chamber in the midst of King’s statement. Nice.

She was just getting warmed up, though. Later that day, after the Karmelo Anthony guilty verdict was announced, the loud-mouth Congresswoman went on her “Clock It With Crockett”podcast and wildly distorted the facts of the case. She argued that the victim Austin Metcalf’s family couldn’t understand the pain black women have to endure daily. Crockett said that was made clear to her again while talking about the case to a friend who is a black mother. “Black women — especially black women who have black male children — live in fear and agony every single day,” Crockett said. “A fear and agony that I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way.”

How ironic that their unarmed son was the one who was murdered, not the worried black mother’s son who stabbed him in the heart.

Crockett then expressed the revolutionary idea that Americans need to have “real conversations about race in this country,” as if such conversations aren’t usually hijacked by race-hustlers like Jasmine Crockett, making them divisive and useless.

Crockett, ignoring the evidence at trial, insisted that the stabbing was self-defense. “If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,” Crockett said. She must have been thinking of Mike Brown. “Cuz I’m telling you right now, if you were twice my weight and got way more strength than me and you got me pinned down, I don’t believe I’m going to survive,” Crockett ranted. It was reported that Metcalf was 6’0, 200 pounds, and Anthony is 5’11 and 162 pounds. The latter was never “pinned down” nor was he in danger of being pinned down. Witnesses said that Anthony dared Metcalf to touch him, and stabbed him to death when he did.

Jasmine: “And when you look at like George Floyd, like George Floyd died, and they never took out a quote-unquote weapon. So this idea you can’t die is wild, right?” Wait, was Metcalf kneeling on Anthony’s neck? What was she talking about?

Then Crockett claimed the murder weapon (it was a knife with a five-inch blade) was too small.

“Well, I would have argued the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” she reasoned. By definition, if the knife penetrated Metcalf’s heart and killed the kid, it’s a deadly weapon.

Jasmine then said that Metcalf confronted Anthony because “this is the culture that is being instigated,” where white people are “gettin’ real bold with us right now.”

I guess the solution is to kill more white people when they get too bold.

 

And Speaking Of Swallowing Indoctrination Regarding Racist America, That Is How Brianna Turners Are Created…

What a moron.

Ethics Dunce Brianna Turner of the WNBA has announced that she refuses to wear the league’s special jerseys to celebrate the U.S.’s 250th Anniversary. “Whoever called for the WNBA all-star uniforms to have the USA 250 patch should have thought that through considering no WNBA players would have been free 250 years ago. The majority wouldn’t even have their freedom 100 years ago,” she tweeted.

This kind of intellectually flabby and historically dunder-headed calculation is typical of the sad victims of anti-USA hate, which is inflicted on them through devices and lies like the “1619 Project.” Hers is also the intellectually handicapped mindset that accepts the “reparations” propaganda: she is personally angry at ancient conditions that never affected her directly or personally.

Citizens who live in the United States of America derive many benefits therefrom. There is no professional women’s basketball in England, for example: Turner is a direct beneficiary of what happened 250 years ago this July. Without the second-rate basketball league that pays Brianna six figures, my guess is that her intellect would have her working at a diner or bouncing drunk and disorderly lesbians from gay bars rather than basketballs.

To be fair, there is no reason why Turner’s stupid historical observations on social media should have any more publicity than anyone else’s. Indeed, at least she isn’t a New York Times reporter posing as a historian or a DEI history professor or one of the anti-white racists elected to Congress. They and others like them make the same offensive statements about the nation they are so lucky to live in, but have sufficient credentials, however dubious, that many Americans take them seriously. You know. They are “experts.”

Come to think of it, I don’t know why what Brianna thinks about anything that doesn’t involve throwing a ball through a hoop is newsworthy. Why is Fox News, Newsweek, USA Today and other allegedly serious news sources reporting this? In fact, why am I writing about it? She’s not even a real celebrity outside of Las Vegas, which is where her team plays its inferior brand of basketball that any of the top 100 men’s college teams could trounce them in.

Never mind. She is a stupid and ignorant woman, and this is a wasted post and I wasted my time thinking about it.

But the all-anti-white–race-victim-propaganda all-the-time site “The Root’s” America-haters were impressed. It writes,

“Turner’s critique cuts straight to the core of an ongoing issue in professional sports, how many marketing campaigns prioritize shallow patriotism over historical reality. By forcing a league made up predominantly of Black and LGBTQ+ women to wear a blanket celebration of 1776, the league completely ignored the systemic chattel slavery and disenfranchisement that defined that era.”

Morons.

Hey! I’m back where I started!

Combine The Societal Corruption Of Legal Sports Betting With The Ethics Void In Collegiate Sports With The Woke Delusion That Every Wrongdoer Is A Victim And You Get…

…the head-exploding court decision that Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby is eligible to Big 12 football this season.

Sorsby had admitted placing at least 40 bets on Indiana football while he was playing for the Hoosiers, and approximately $90,000 in sports wagers using other people’s sportsbook accounts. He spent four years concealing his gambling from three different schools and only came clean once law enforcement swooped down on him. Now he says he is a gambling addict, and it would be hard to dispute that. The NCAA was alerted to Sorsby’s gambling in March. The organization notified Texas Tech of its investigation in April, and Texas Tech made Sorsby ineligible while it fought to have the star reinstated. Then Sorsby’s lawyers sued NCAA on May 18, seeking an injunction that would prevent the NCAA from banning him. And they were successful.

You won’t believe why, or maybe you will if you have followed the slippery slope of progressive enabling of wrongdoing. The judge’s logic: The NCAA would be harming a recovering gambling addict—poor lamb— by enforcing a rule that every pro sports league in this country enforces. Sorsby’s gambling history is a mental health and addiction issue, so the NCAA must consider his well-being and support him rather than punish him. Judge Ken Curry ruled that the quarterback would suffer “irreparable injury” if he isn’t granted a temporary injunction allowing him to play for the Texas Tech Red Raiders this season. To deprive him of the ability to “benefit from the elite coaching, training resources, camaraderie and regimen that only being a member of a Division I college football team can provide”would be unconscionable.

The fact that there is no way to be sure the gambling addict calling the plays hasn’t placed bets on his team’s point spread or isn’t under the metaphorical thumbs of organized crime or angry bookies, and been told that if his team doesn’t lose, his mother will be fish food? Never mind.

Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular!

1. In a clip from a post-firing interview, the unbearable Scott Pelley actually says that nobody on the “60 Minutes” staff, including Pelley, thought that the long-time left-leaning Sunday magazine show was biased. Pelley himself is living proof that the show was biased. Here’s a brief montage of Pelley being what he thought was objective and fair over the years,

2. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty of deliberately mishandling classified documents, a deal that requires him to pay a $2.5 million fine. He pleaded guilty because he was guilty. ABC and NBC, however, framed the news as President Trump getting “revenge” on a critic.

“He was a prime target of President Trump’s retribution campaign, said ABC’s justice correspondent. “And tonight, sources tell ABC News Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is planning to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.”

That’s classic deceit and false framing for partisan purposes, but also typical of how the Axis networks cover news regarding the Trump Administration. On NBC, the same game plan was in view. “Bolton was national security adviser during Trump’s first term,” the nightly broadcast began. “Then became a fierce opponent of the President. Now, sources tell NBC News he plans to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information. For a year and a half now, the Justice Department has been pursuing cases against the people you see here, those the President believes have wronged him…”

The investigation of Bolton’s crime began under the Biden Administration’s Justice Department. Both ABC and NBC got that in at the very end of their reports, which is deliberately reversing the priority of the facts. This was by definition not a “retribution prosecution” by Trump because it began under Biden. That information belonged at the start. The fact that Bolton was a Trump critic is of interest but not central to the story. Placed up front, however, it “poisons the well.”

Ethics Dunce: Bride-To-Be Rochelle Mindrum

When social media over-sharing meets publicity obsession, the result is misbehavior like Rochelle Mindrum’s.

The 29-year-old was expecting her boyfriend Jak Keller to pop the question, and had even gone ring shopping with him. She specified that she wanted the proposal to be done “in nature.” When they took a trip to Georgia together, she figured it must be coming soon. Sure enough, after a hike, on the side of a cliff, Keller set up his phone to take a video. He took Mindrum’s hands in his, got down on one knee, and proposed. But when Mindrum looked down at the ring, she saw that her fiancé had chosen a blue diamond rather than the colorless diamond she’d picked out. And she blurted out her disappointment on camera: “It’s so blue!”

Rochelle accepted, then posted the video on Tik-Tok along with a note that she was disappointed with the color. “I was extremely surprised by the blue diamond,” she says now. “The box it was in was dark blue, so at first I thought it was a reflection of the box. Once it was on my finger though, I was able to see that the diamond was in fact blue.”

The Amityville House has some advice for Jak, her already hen-pecked fiancé:

Unbelievable! This guy tries his best to give his girlfriend the proposal she dreams of, and the thanks he gets is to have her complain about the color of the diamond on TikTok, where it went viral. Why? Because she’s an ungrateful ethics dunce, and viewers were horrified.

It gets worse! Since the video was getting so much attention, “People” magazine, which apparently has nothing better to write about, gave Rachel another platform to bitch from, and sure enough, she did. From the article “Woman Surprised When Boyfriend Got Down on One Knee and Proposed. The Type of Ring He Chose Left Her ‘Shocked’ (Exclusive)”:

“I thought the ring was gorgeous, however, I had always dreamed of my engagement ring being a colorless diamond, so it just didn’t fit my vision,” she explains. “It does not help that my birthstone is aquamarine, so I am used to receiving blue-hued stones.” “It turns out he was trying to get me a higher quality diamond and the website was a little confusing, so he thought the higher quality diamonds all threw off a little blue hue, as the pictures online were a very faint blue,” continues Mindrum. “He was scared to drop the ring, so he never took it out of the box. He only looked at in the box. So he was just as shocked as I was with how blue it was!”

Proposition: A Basic Knowledge Of US History Should Be Prerequisite For Running For Congress, Because It Is Incompetent And Irresponsible For Any Rep. To Be As Ignorant As Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA)

A straight “Unethical Quote of the Week” or “Incompetent Elected Official” EA honor still doesn’t do Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) justice. She is special. Well, I hope she is.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was crossing rhetorical sword points with Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) during the House hearing over U.S. military action in Iran. When Rep. Chu accused the administration of not caring about Americans’ financial struggles—which is, after all, completely irrelevant to the decision to defang a hostile nation seeking nuclear weapons that has been at war with the U.S. since 1979— Bessent asked her who was President of the U.S. during World War I. After a pause, apparently to check all the blank files in her memory banks, Chu answered “I don’t know.”

Jill Biden’s Elder (And Former President) Abuse

What an awful human being...

This story is too awful to contemplate. If you have a soul, maybe you don’t want to read it.

Former President Joe Biden was planted in the audience this week at a New York City stop on his wife’s tour promoting “Dr.” Jill’s memoir, “View from the East Wing.” Whoopi Goldberg was moderating the Q and A segment (How’s that career going, Whoop?) when President Biden wandered up to the edge of the stage and said “I have a question.”

“Joe has a question? Like you couldn’t ask it later?” the distinguished author said. Oh, nice! If you didn’t want Joe to embarrass you or himself, why did you place a mentally declining old man in a position where he might do so? Or was he having another “stroke”?

Joe, as he has been for years now, was oblivious. “Who do you love most in the whole world?” what is left of Joe Biden asked. “I love you most, Joe. Was that it? Was that the answer he wanted?,” Jill said to the group, talking about him in the third person as if he were a toddler. The 46th President of the United States stood and blankly faced his wife.

The shell of Joe Biden then said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?,” whatever that means. At least he didn’t say “We beat Medicare.”