Phooey. Missed it by that much! When I searched my Facebook feed this morning for one of my FBF’s freakouts, all I could find was a relatively tame rant about Republicans giving tax cuts to the rich. Then, just a few hours later and after I had posted “Groundhog Day Ethics Update: Post-Election Freak-Out and More!,” this masterpiece was posted by someone whom I have known since 1978. After her name, there were over a hundred signatories.
Comments are solicited.
Enjoy!
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This story gets a Kaufman, the Ethics Alarms label for a topic that rates George S. Kaufman’s famous assessment of his interest in Fifties crooner Eddie Fisher’s difficulties finding younger women to date. (Eddie, you may recall, was the husband Elizabeth Taylor divorced to hook up with Richard Burton, and who earlier, with Debbie Reynolds, fathered Carrie Fisher.) Kaufman said, when posed with Fisher’s dilemma on a TV panel show,
“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”
And yet there have been dozens of news stories and social media posts about the current story, and I feel compelled to comment.
“Emilia Pérez” is a 2024 Spanish-language “French musical crime comedy” about a Mexican cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear so that she may transition into a woman. [Comment: Well, other movies with insane premises have managed to be good…] At the 97th Academy Awards, “Emilia Pérez” will have 13 nominations, including Best Picture. Karla Sophia Gascón, who plays the cartel leader, is the first openly trans woman to be nominated as Best Actress.
“The Nelson,” the Ethics Alarms designation for very special episodes of swell-earned schadenfreude, was introduced in 2023 in a post about…Disney’s live-action reboot of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the 1937 animated film that began building the Disney entertainment empire. Thus it is nicely symmetrical for Nelson to give his trademark “Ha ha!” to the trailer of this slow-motion disaster, which has set what is believed to be a YouTube record with, as of yesterday, 40,383 “likes” and 1,012,299 “dislikes.” The film is hitting theaters in March. Ethics Alarms warned Disney about what was bound to happen if and when this botched project ever got out of the cutting room. I wrote in part,
The ethics value defied here is competence, and what we are seeing is the classic sunk costs fallacy in its classic form. The Vietnam War was the most painful example of this breach of life competence and common sense, which holds that devoting a lot of time and/or resources to a failed project argues for devoting more of the same, lest those “sunk costs” go to waste. In reality however, what is being missed is that fact that whether or not one has invested a great deal in a lost cause, its status as a project that has proven itself unworthy of investment is unaltered. Doing what Disney is doing with the “Snow White” project is called “throwing good money after bad.” It is bad business—incompetent, wasteful, and irresponsible.
First, Disney woke fanatics thought it made sense to cast a Snow White-of-Color, which makes no sense since the story makes such a big deal about how “fair” the heroine is. Then, because a single au courant little person actor complained about the dwarfs in the classic fairy tail, Disney eliminated them in favor of these dorks…
Nah, the Trump Deranged aren’t losing their frickin’ minds…
That’s the most recent cartoon from Ann Telnaes, that witty, subtle, objective and non-partisan political cartoonist who quit the Washington Post who didn’t think her juvenile submission was worth publishing. So now she’s operates from her substack, issuing brilliant art like that. Incredibly, one of my oldest and most accomplished friends posted that crap—it’s the equivilent of a schoolboy drawing of the unpopular kid with blacked out teeth and horns—with approval on his Facebook page, where his decision was roundly praised as he revealed that he subscribed to her visual hate-fests. This is the equivalent of someone announcing that he has decided to subscribe to the “Turd of the Week” service. Another equally rational, intelligent Facebook friend until he went bonkers posted a long, irrelevant quote from the Nuremberg trials about the nature of fascism, and everyone metaphorically nodded and applauded as if it has anything to do with current events.
It is mordantly amusing to listen to progressives on MSNBC bemoan the incursion of ICE into the “sanctuary” of churches attempting to extend their invisible force field around illegal immigrants. These are the same people who have shown no respect or reverence for Americans who assert their religious beliefs regarding, to take one infamous example, compelled speech.
In the case of church sanctuary, they are oh, a couple centuries behind the times. Allowing a church to harbor criminals and others sought by the state is a tradition that goes back to Roman times, and here and there it has been bolstered by the law. Not here and now however. The tradition makes no sense in modern times, and if churches have no legal grounds to protect lawbreakers, the claims of so-called sanctuary cities and states are weaker still.
The political and ideological Left has dashed itself on the rocks of illegal immigration, and based on some of the talking head nonsense I saw on MSNBC and CNN today, they are still dashing. When they are not crying “Think of the children!” (Note: law-breaking parents who put their children in untenable positions by their parents’ conduct are 100% accountable for those children’s plight) the apologists for illegal border-crossers are asserting that they are “human beings” and deserve to “have their humanity respected and recognized.” That’s fine: nobody denies that they are human beings. They are also human beings who do not belong in the United States.
This, for some strange reason, seems difficult for some progressives and Axis hacks to grasp. One of the two women I saw rending their garments over the Trump deportation policy, stuttered, babbled, shrugged, sighed and finally said, “I just can’t believe that this is happening! It’s so cruel!” Her partner in absurd “Good Illegal Immigrant” rhetoric nodded and agreed that deporting illegal immigrants who weren’t violent criminals is a violation of human rights.
There is apparently, according to these revolutionaries, a human right to live anywhere you want to. This is pure “Imagine-ism,” probably caused by hearing John Lennon’s fatuous paean to brainless utopianism one time too many. Both women also bemoaned the “collateral damage” of deportations. All law enforcement has “collateral damage” to families and others who depend on the law-breakers. That is a reason not to break laws, not to stop enforcing them.
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Bonus cultural literacy quiz: Who is that lovely young actress playing Esmeralda in that clip from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”? No cheating, now: this is an ethics blog…
Does anyone say “Color me X” any more? Oh hell, I don’t care: Color me unimpressed with “MAGA Granny” rejecting her pardon from President Trump for her role in the January 6 Capitol riot that was the worst thing to happen to the United States since 9-11. Or Pearl Harbor. Or the Civil War.
She’s the retired 72-year-old drug and alcohol counselor from Boise, Idaho who pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation. She was one of those “rioters” who was basically walking around. The Axis media is singing her praises because she announced that she says won’t accept the pardon.
Hemphill said in an interview this week that she was turning President Trump’s gift down. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation,” she said. “If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.” She now says she doesn’t support Trump or (in the words of the New York Times) “believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.” (For the thousandth time, that is not a lie but an opinion that cannot be proven or disproven). A therapist had helped her change her view of the episode, you see. Now she realizes, she says, that the “Stop the Steal” movement. “was a cult, and I was in a cult.”
Winston Smith knows just how she feels.
I wonder if that therapist put a cage of hungry rats on her face to prompt Pam’s epiphany?
Here is an example of what is being discussed, from January 15:
A poll that I saw this morning (and that had mysteriously vanished when I looked for it just now) found that 43% of Los Angeles citizens would consider looking to the Republican Party for future leadership. That was considered significant in a city with only 18% of its residents identifying themselves as Republicans. I thought the amazing finding in the poll was that 48% still say they would only vote for more Democrats.
I probably wouldn’t have voted for Pete Hegseth to be Trump’s DOD Secretary; certainly not until he answered a lot of crucial questions he never was asked. He should have been grilled about the extent of his management, oversight and negotiation experience, but the Democrats, because they have no principles, decided to use the Kavanaugh strategy to slime him (because that worked so well the first time).
Hegseth is easily the worst of Trump’s major appointments, and the fact that he was confirmed last night (by the narrowest margin possible) demonstrates that the terror expressed by the Trump Deranged that unlike last time around, the Republicans in Congress are inclined to help their party’s President achieve his goals rather than obstruct them is justified. (To that, my reaction is “Tough. You have nobody but your own party to blame, along with people like you who enabled and supported an arrogant, incompetent, corrupt, untrustworthy, and increasingly totalitarianism-embracing government.”)
This morning I decided to surf between MSNBC and CNN to hear the screams of the Axis propagandists who hang out there [Oh NOOO! ICE is really arresting illegals! Oh NOOO! Trump is making villains like Anthony Fauci pay for their own security details! Oh NOOO! Trump is killing DEI!] When they weren’t screaming about all of that, they were indignant that someone was now leading the Pentagon who could not be trusted to be ready for a crisis phone call every hour of the day, 365 days a year. These assorted partisan hacks and the Democratic party “contributors” who joined in their self-righteous lament are ethically estopped from making that complaint about Hegseth.
I may start pairing this category from now on. These two recent examples of elected officials who would be working at Pizza Hut if they were subject to the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule” are, sadly, not as unusual as they should be.
The mention of the Stupidity Rule reminds me: over on my Trump Deranged Facebook feed, an otherwise sharp and perceptive FBF posted a scathing reaction to the Trump administration’s announcement directing that government employees who witness efforts by their supervisors or other staff to defy executive orders must report the violations. This proves Trump is a Nazi, you know. I had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to resist posting that all the new administration is doing is reiterating a law of long-standing: government employees must report illegal conduct, and Executive Orders have the force of law. Ignorance makes it so much easier to be Trump Deranged…
But I digress. Let’s look now at the incompetent elected Republican, a dolt in the House I was happily unaware of until now. Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, making a strong bid to land on the Ethics Alarms list of the worst members of Congress before the 2026 elections, introduced a resolution to amend the U.S. Constitution, repealing the 22nd Amendment, to allow President Donald Trump and other future Presidents to serve a third term. Trump, of course, is the reason for this irresponsible and DOA proposal.
Trump “has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal,” said Ogles. “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration. He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
Well, I’ve never said that there weren’t members of Congress who would support a dictatorship.
Trump is 78: getting him through the next four years without seeing him keel over or start speaking in tongues like our previous President is going to take some luck as it is. Ogles wants a two-term President who will be 86 by the end of his tenure. President George Washington was brilliantly prescient to set the precedent (aka “democratic norm”)by serving only two terms, while Franklin Roosevelt, who decided that the war gave him leave to keep getting elected President even though he was failing intellectually and physically, was dangerously wrong. The U.S. learned that lesson, and Ogles wants to unlearn it.
I have a better idea: let’s limit Ogles to two terms (he’s in his second).
Moron.
Three impressive, qualified, white male law professors applied to join the faculty of Northwestern School of Law. They were First Amendment expert (and Ethics Alarms favorite) Eugene Volokh, Ernest A. Young of Duke University’s Law School, and Ilan Wurman, a distinguished professor at The University of Minnesota Law School. All were rejected in favor of DEI hires, despite being objectively better qualified than the successful candidates. Now “Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences” (FASORP), a collective of professors and lawyers who seek to expose and stop racial and gender preferences in higher education, is suing on the professors’ behalf.
“As a result of the [DEI] mandate, Northwestern University School of Law refuses to even consider hiring white male faculty candidates with stellar credentials, while it eagerly hires candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records who check the proper diversity boxes,” the complaint alleges. Northwestern violates the law by “hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability,” the suit says.
“But this is prohibited by federal law, which bans universities that accept federal funds from discriminating on account of race or sex. University faculty and administrators think they can flout these anti-discrimination statutes with impunity because they are rarely sued….But now the jig is up.”
The case of Volokh would seem to be particularly difficult to refute. The suit asserts that Volokh’s accomplishments exceed those of nearly every professor currently on the Northwestern Law School faculty, but because he is a white man and “neither homosexual nor transgender,” he was judged unacceptable.
Ethics Alarms 