“This is a perfect microcosm of the Russiagate fraud that the country endured for four years. Hoaxes were repeatedly cooked up by private intelligence operatives working for the DNC or anti-Trump factions within the CIA and FBI, and then fed to friendly reporters, who laundered the falsehoods by publishing whatever they were given, without the slightest concern for whether they were true….”
It was only two days ago—less, really—that I highlighted performer/celebrity logorrhea victim Nicki Minaj’s cretinous statements about the Wuhan virus vaccine, which, naturally, have been cheered by various conservative trolls like Tucker Carlson as if Minaj ever gives any thought to what she opines before she broadcasts it to her fans. Now I have to defend the rapper whom I had the misfortune to become acquainted with when she was an American Idol judge and made poor Mariah Carey roll her eyes so hard I was afraid they might pop out of her head when Minaj offered one ridiculous thought after another.
You see Twitter, which I quit a few months ago for exactly this reason, banned Minaj for tweeting her dumb story about her cousin’s friend in Trinidad supposedly becoming impotent after being vaccinated after ”his testicles became swollen.” The theory, I gather, is that Nicki was spreading “misinformation.”
Minaj is angry about this, and in the blunt, crude, self-important stream of consciousness manner for which she is famous, expressed her pique. She said in a video directed at her fans and Twitter followers [Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy read…]:
1. Fair Harvard, you continue to be an embarrassment. This is a candidate to make it into my “why I’m boycotting my reunion” note for the Class book: Giang Nguyen, executive director of Harvard University Health Services, sent a campus-wide memo telling students to follow these rules while eating and socializing in the dining halls. (I learned more eating in the dining halls and in late night snack sessions than I did in my classes):
“Eating and drinking together are a cornerstone of human social interaction, but there are ways to interact that minimize the time spent unmasked and in close proximity,” Nguyen wrote.
Among his requests to students:
Follow the “Quick Sip Rule” when drinking. Lower your mask, take a sip, and then promptly cover your mouth and nose. A straw can make this more efficient.
Do not linger with your mask down. If you wish to slowly savor a hot beverage, do it away from others.
Consume and cover! Consume your meal and immediately mask up when done.
Conversation, checking your phone, and other activities should be masked, even when you are in a designated indoor dining area.
If you are taking your time between bites (for conversation, for example), put your mask back on.
Dine in small parties of 2-to-4 people.
Avoid table-hopping.
Consider dining consistently with the same small group of people rather than a different group at every meal of the day.
Keep your close contacts to a minimum.
Limit each interaction to under 15 minutes.
Plan events that don’t involve eating, drinking, or removal of masks
My advice to the author of such a “request” were I a student today: “Bite me. Then put your mask on.” Harvard has a 94 percent vaccination rate among its students. As of this week, its test positivity rate is 0.18 percent.
2. Fake Woolly Mammoth ethics.This article managed to go on at great length about how a new company is planning to “de-extinctify” Wooly Mammoths and start new herds in Siberia as if it all made perfect sense. They’ve fooled private investors into giving them $15 million for the project: this is a scam, whether they know it or not. As far as the Times piece goes, it rates an ethics foul for never once mentioning “Jurassic Park.” Come to think of it, the article should have mentioned “The Producers.” Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D, and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, explains just how absurd the project is:
“What they are doing is making a genetically modified Asian elephant by inserting into its genome a maximum of sixty mammoth genes that they think differentiate the modern species from the extinct one: genes that involve hairiness, cold tolerance, amount of fat, and so on. What they’d get would be a genetic chimera, an almost entirely Asian elephant but one that is hairier, chunkier, and more tolerant of cold. That is NOT a woolly mammoth, nor would it behave like a woolly mammoth, for they’re not inserting behavior genes…Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system? But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), [the group] has this bright idea…’make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells.’
California’s thoroughly terrible governor, Gavin Newsom, survived his recall election by joining the state’s captive news media in calling a black challenger a racist and a white supremacist. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said, but there so much more. For example, a woman in a gorilla mask, which would clearly have been interpreted as a racial slur if that black challenger had been a Democrat, pelted the accused white supremacist with eggs without any outrage being expressed by major California publications. There is still more…
In a statement that would be right at home in a satire of U.S. government cretinism like “Lil’ Abner” or “Mars Attacks!,” the Biden State Department expressed “concerns” over the composition of the new interim Afghan government announced by the Taliban. There’s just not sufficient diversity, you see.
The statement noted that the list of names announced by the Taliban earlier in the week“consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women.”
In a related statement, the State Department also expressed its shock and dismay that all the members of the interim government appeared to be Muslims, and no African-Americans were included.
OK, I’m kidding about that. But it would be no more ridiculous than the real statement. Maybe the diabolical strategy of the Biden Administration is to cause the Taliban to perish from laughing so hard their hearts explode, or something, like in Monty Pythons’ “Killer Joke” sketch. If the U.S. government has ever made an official statement that more embarrassing weak and pathetic than this one, I’d like to see it. Did the Hayes administration, after the corrupt deal in 1876 giving Rutherford B. Hayes the Presidency in exchange for pulling Federal troops out of the former Confederate states express its concern that former slaves were not being accorded the full rights of American citizens? That would be close.
This is one of the best examples of where ethics estoppel applies, easily surpassing Hillary Clinton condemning sexual harassment and demanding the female accusers of powerful men must be believed. When the U.S. abandoned the people of Afghanistan in a manner that evoked another Python classic moment…
…it forfeited all rights not to be mocked mercilessly if it dared to make any demands or express any “concerns” about what the known radical, brutal Islamists it left in power to do whatever they wanted did, which everyone knew would include treating women like a lesser species.
The Taliban talibanned women from participating in sports yesterday, and the Biden State Department thinks it is going to react to the expressed “concern” that it won’t allow women to participate in its government with anything but hilarity and derision? Who ARE these people? Does diversity and inclusion mean that our State Department has to be run by alumni of Madam Louise’s Home for the Bewildered?
What is this? Could the Biden experts we now have running our foreign policy really be this stupid and tone deaf? Or is it the public the Biden hacks think is so gullible that such hollow virtue signaling will prompt Americans to respond, “Good for us; that’s telling ’em!”? Is it women and feminists this bunch of desperate incompetents have such contempt for?
I don’t understand. What are they doing? What do they think they’re doing? What’s going on here?
The Biden Presidency is now officially an Ethics Train Wreck.
“It is obvious to anyone that voting by mail is ripe for fraud. The US Mail is not meant to be a secure transactional system. We have all known since we were children that you don’t send cash through the mail –our voting rights are far more sacred than cash. Bipartisan and Democrat Voter studies and commissions have found vote-by-mail to have the highest risk of fraud1 and most first-world democracies, such as Germany, either ban Vote-by-Mail outright or place very heavy restrictions on its use. Banning Vote-by-mail is a very simple solution to a huge problem for our Country. We cannot give up our fundamental right to vote, upon which America was built, simply because we are too lazy to go cast a vote in person.”
—– Liz Harris, in the Executive Summary to the just issued “Maricopa County “Election 2020 Grassroots Canvass Report.”
An independent canvas of the 2020 election in Maricopa County claims to have found over 260,000 “lost” and “ghost” votes, according to a report released last week. This effort is independent of the audit being done by the state legislature, and was the work of the Voter Integrity Project, founded by Liz Harris. The canvas only visited about 12,000 voters in Maricopa county, so the estimates reported, frequently misleadingly, are extrapolations of the data actually obtained. The report is here.
What the group claims to have shown is that there were “an estimated” 173,104 “missing or lost” votes in a county that essentially gave the state’s electoral votes to Joe Biden. Of course, Donald Trump is crowing about this, and of course the mainstream media is ignoring the canvass as the work of crazy “Trumpists.” However, Harris’s opening statement to the report is, or should be, undeniable. Her assessment is identical to what others were saying before the election, in which Democrats in states across the country successfully used the combined hysteria over George Floyd’s death and the pandemic to push through relaxed voting procedures that were an open invitation to manipulation. Republicans and honest civil libertarians were caught flatfooted and were too late in reacting, so the election went forward with millions of mail-in ballots that changed hands untold times before being recorded (if they were recorded).
It was a fait accompli. There was no way to prove that the election had been “stolen” or even that a substantial number of votes had been changed, harvested, lost or faked, not in time to do anything about it. Faced with a rigged election—that it was rigged doesn’t mean it was stolen, but it was rigged—that resulted in a personal defeat, then-President Trump was obligated by his office, tradition and basic ethical principles of leadership and character to accept the results, allow a peaceful transfer of power, and allow others to determine what happened. But Trump posses no basic ethical principles of leadership and character, at least in sufficient quantity, so he claimed instead that he won the election, and even hired a bunch of incompetent lawyers to try to overturn the results without sufficient hard evidence to do so. (Now many of them are being disciplined by bars and courts.)
The story, from the ABC local affiliate, is here. A quick summary:
Baltimore City mother Tiffany France’s reached out to local TV stations to complain when she learned that her 17-year-old son, who attends Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore, will not only not graduate this year, but will be returned to the 9th grade. His transcripts show him passing just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits. France says she didn’t find that out until February, and thought her oldest son was doing well because was being promoted. He failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III. In his first three years at Augusta Fells, the boy failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. France says, however, that despite what school policy requires when a student is absent, she was never contacted. Maybe that’s because, on a curve, he was doing fine. France’s son’s transcripts show his class rank is 62 out of 120, meaning about half his classmates, have a 0.13 grade point average or lower.
The ABC story concludes,
“Project Baltimore asked the City Schools administrator what they would say to France. The administrator replied, ‘I didn’t have a hand on this student, but I worked for City Schools. So, he is one of my kids. I would hug her, and I would apologize profusely.’ ‘He feels embarrassed, he feels like a failure,” France said of her son. “I’m like, you can’t feel like that. And you have to be strong and you got to keep fighting. Life is about fighting. Things happen, but you got to keep fighting. And he’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?‘
But one brief observation: The chart gives me one more reason to say “Oh, bite me!” to the vaccinated mask-police who recoil in terror and tell me to “Get back!” because I am maskless and intend to remain so. So far, I’ve responded thusly only twice, but I plan on upping the frequency.
I was going to retire the post collecting the Big Lies used to undermine the Trump Presidency, and now I’m considering updating them. In addition to still flogging old ones (Trump is a racist; Trump is a threat to democracy) at least three newer Big Lies are being weaponized by “the resistance”/Democratic Party/ mainstream media (The Axis of Unethical Conduct), because they think Trump Derangement can save them from accountability for putting Joe Biden in the White House. It had to be done, you see, because Trump is EVIL! EVIL!!!
The three Big Lies are the last one added, #9 “Trump’s Mishandling Of The Pandemic Killed People” and two not on the current list: “Trump incited an insurrection” and “Trump is responsible for the disaster in Afghanistan.” In order to bolster these lies, all useful to try to impugn Republicans and conservatives who still support Trump and to try to poison public opinion sufficiently that even Kamala Harris might defeat Trump if he runs in 2024, the Democrats and their allies routinely drag his name into every negative context imaginable. It is like subliminal brain-washing or hypnotism: Trump is dangerous! Trump is racist! Trump is the cause of all that is going wrong now! Everything is his fault, and the fault of all those fascist conservatives and racist deplorable who supported him!”
This mantra turns up everywhere. Tamsin Shaw, a professor of European and Mediterranean studies and philosophy at N.Y.U recenly reviewed “Dirty Work,” a non-fiction book about the unpleasant and ethically-troubling jobs in America. He includes this at the end of his review:
“I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball. If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.”
—-ESPN sideline reporter Rachel Nichols in a phone conversation nearly a year ago after learning that she would not host coverage during the 2020 N.B.A. finals, as she had been expecting.
The phone call, unbeknownst to her, was being recorded, and someone leaked it to the ESPN brass and the public. The ethical issues raised by that conduct are clear and have been discussed here often: it is a dastardly thing to do, a breach of basic Golden Rule ethics, and indefensible because it creates harm to all involved. But that’s not the issue at hand.
After the video was leaked, many black ESPN employees told one another that it confirmed their suspicions that outwardly supportive white people talk differently behind closed doors. Nichols, seeing the ominous handwriting on the wall, tried to apologize to Taylor with texts and phone calls. Taylor did not respond. Meanwhile, ESPN employees turned against Nichols, whom they perceived as indulging in a “common criticism used by white workers in many workplaces to disparage nonwhite colleagues” when she suggested that “Taylor was offered the hosting job only because of her race, not because she was the best person for the job.”
Ethics Alarms 