Yesterday, August 9, was the nine year anniversary of one of the many distorted, exploited and incompetently reported race-related incidents that have hurled the United States decades backwards in race relations. It was on August 9, 2014 that hulking thug Michael Brown was shot and killed by policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in self-defense after Brown escaped custody, tried to take Wilson’s gun, and charged him with all of his 300 pound bulk. But because the 18-year-old’s pal and partner in crime told the credulous media that Brown had put his hands up and cried “Hands up don’t shoot!” before the fatal shot, Brown’s death was reported as an execution by a racist cop. This, in turn, resulted in horrific riots in Ferguson, full-scale social justice virtue-signalling by the mainstream media (like the 2014 display by CNN’s hacks above, referencing both the Brown shooting narrative and the death of Eric Garner), and a boost to the fortunes of the racist Blacl Lives Matter movement, which had been launched by another falsely reported tragedy, the death of Trayvon Martin.
Even though Barack Obama’s untra-partisan and race-obsessed Attorney General, Eric Holder, would have loved to show that Darren Wilson had murdered Brown, it was once again demonstrated that, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” His DOJ found that there was no credible evidence to back up the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative. To the contrary, forensic and eye-witness evidence made it clear that Brown, who had just committed a petty theft and intimidated a shop-owner, punched Wilson after the officer arrested him, tried to grab pistol in the patrol car, and after he had bolted from the vehicle charged at Wilson, precipitating the fatal shooting. A grand jury exonerated Wilson, whose career was destroyed and life was ruined, but he was just a white cop, so c’est la vie! Continue reading →
Democrats and the mainstream media decided to go nuclear with the false accusation that the new Florida history guidelines, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want schools to teach that slavery was beneficial to enslaved African Americans. It’s an outright lie, as anyone who reviewed the guidelines could see, and as Ethics Alarms explained. The Vice President of the United States made the accusation in multiple venues before African American audiences. (Yes, she’s an idiot, but she’s still Vice-President, and her statements are publicized widely). The usual race-baiters and liars among the partisan punditry, like MSNBC’s vile Joy Reid, repeated the lie, and even a GOP Presidential hopeful, weak, cowardly Sen. Tim Scott, gave it credence.
Far from being evidence of racism, white supremacy or prejudice, the guidelines are really evidence of how extremism succeeds by producing “compromises” that are irresponsibly radical anyway. The slavery history teaching guidelines require an absurdly disproportionate emphasis on slavery in grade school, and will result in inadequate instruction on many other more essential topics and skills. Never mind though: as Hitler and Goebbels explained, the purpose of Big Lies is to get a damaging narrative widely distributed, so much so that the target has to respond to it, giving the lie legitimacy and keeping it in the public consciousness.
I don’t mean Rudy Giuliani. Maybe the former mayor of New York City really did harass and “sexually assault” Noelle Dunphy, seen above with Rudy, after he hired her (she says) in January 2019 when the old prosecutor was 75 years old. Even if that is true—and, frankly, no man over 60 these days is likely to be able to avoid committing legal harassment, as in creating a “hostile work environment,” working closely with a young woman who is looking for offenses to protest (See:Joe Biden, the late George H.W. Bush, and too many others to count.)—Giuliani is at least partially the victim here. Use the wrong word and it’s pervasive sexism; touch a shoulder without consent and it is “assault.” Yes, there is no excuse for men of any age not to keep up with the evolution of ethics in this area and others, but kindness, compassion and the Golden Rule dictate a reaction other than lying in wait for an opportunity to exact revenge or worse, exploit a past relationship for current personal gain.
Rudy is currently under attack from all sides, primarily as part of an organized effort to punish the allies of Donald Trump, particularly the lawyers. Already named as a co-conspirator in the latest indictment of Trump, Giuliani is in the process of being disbarred in the District of Columbia on the theory that he “helped destabilize our democracy” and “done lasting damage” to the oath to support the U.S. Constitution that he had sworn when he was admitted to the bar. [No further comment from me: I have a conflict in this matter] Dunphy or her lawyer decided that this was the perfect time to pounce, with Giuliani already being savaged in the news media like anyone who doesn’t publicly reject Trump. So she not only chose now to sue him, she also included embarrassing quotes the old man made when he thought the two were alone and his comments were private.
“Jews! They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time. Man, oh, man. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. OK, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.” Says the Times, “In another portion, he engaged in a derisive discussion of the size of Jewish men’s genitals.”
Sexism? “In another transcript, Mr. Giuliani says that he is physically aroused by Ms. Dunphy’s intelligence, adding, ‘I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she’s not attractive.'”
The New York Times gave us the chart above, in an article about how the “he could shoot someone at high noon in central park and we wouldn’t care” Trump “base” will make a Republican effort to nominate a responsible, respectable, competent candidate for President difficult if not impossible. Look at that array! And my sister, a Democrat, complains that her party’s options are terrible, which they are.
How can a nation this large and diverse have no leaders who seem capable of doing the top job ethically and well? This is a societal, cultural, systemic failure.
That a character like Donald Trump, former POTUS or not, can have that kind of overwhelming support in the midst of indictments, the long, long trail of ridiculous and offensive statements, and his disqualifying conduct of refusing to accept his electoral defeat yet tells us that something is deeply rotten in the state of America. And whatever that state of rotteness is, returning either Joe Biden or Trump to the White House would be an invitation to too many disasters to contemplate.
But let’s start from the bottom of the list, where hope blooms. Nobody wants Chris Christie to run. Good. He was an ethics villain in 2016, knocking off Trump’s adversaries in the debates when he had the rhetorical tools and ammunition to take out Trump the way he reduced poor Marco Rubio to a laughing stock. Then Christie endorsed Trump, whom he knew was unfit, in a corrupt quid pro quo deal, probably to be Vice-President, which Trump reneged on. Then Christie was out to get Trump again, but it was too late. The one-time rising GOP star’s star was already permanently tarnished by his George Washington Bridge fiasco anyway. He’s running to get headlines and speaking fees, I guess. That he has almost no support speaks almost as well for the Republican voters as their support for Trump is damning.
Vivek Ramaswamy is the GOP equivalent of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the last cycle for the Democrats. He’s not a serious candidate, and anyone who thinks he is doesn’t understand the American Presidency. Like Christie, he’s just static in the race, and a distraction. In a very important election like the one approaching, causing static and distractions is unethical.
I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.
…he would announce that he was withdrawing from the Presidential race immediately, because the prosecutions he faces, just or unjust, will be a destructive distraction from the election as well as an impediment to him serving as President if he were nominated and elected.
And if I were an aardvark, I could save money on groceries by eating ants and termites.
Trump won’t do this, of course (that is, drop out, not eat ants and termites), but it is the only ethical alternative. A lawyer facing a single serious indictment would step away from his or her law firm. An ethical judge would resign. A doctor facing indictments would take a leave of absence. A general facing such legal jeopardy would retire. The United States cannot have a Presidential candidate laboring under the shadow of multiple criminal prosecutions any more than it can afford to have a mentally declining President who serves as a puppet for aspiring totalitarians. Trump continuing his candidacy increases the likelihood of both.
If Richard Nixon had been like Trump—a toxic narcissist—he wouldn’t have resigned, and the nation would have been roiled and scarred by a genuine impeachment process. Clinton is like Trump—maybe a teeny-weeny bit less of a narcissist, but not much—and he should have resigned as the truth of the Monica Lewinsky allegations emerged. The nation and the Presidency—and his party—would have been far better off today if he had, and Clinton’s scandal was not even in the same metaphorical ballpark as Trump’s, which also includes a sexual assault civil ruling.
At this point, Trump continuing to seek the Presidency can only do damage, and the question is just “How much?” I don’t want to think about how much. His entire career has been built on a foundation of stubbornness, resilience and a refusal to admit defeat: quitting his quest for redemption goes against his core. Real patriots and great leaders, however, can muster the character and courage to do what needs to be done even when it violates all of their baser instincts. Unfortunately, I am not an aardvark, and Donald Trump is neither a real patriot or a great leader.
I was so tempted to headline this post with the res ipsa loquitur tag, but didn’t at the last minute. The reason: I was convinced that as obvious as the scientific and logical nonsense her tweet represented should be, a lot of usually intelligent people wouldn’t allow themselves to see it, because, as Ethics Alarms notes repeatedly, “bias makes you stupid.” The post’s comments turned out to be a marvelous example of that.
One persistent defender of Omar insisted that it was crucial that I had checked the alleged authority for her gaffe before criticizing her. It happens that I did, but I didn’t need to. Nobody did: that’s the whole point. If the woman had the requisite number of brain cells to rub together to start a bonfire, she would have known what emerged from her keyboard when she typed that was hilariously silly with the application of basic critical thinking skills.
Recently, Major League Baseball teams broke the record for the most runs scored in all games on a single day. It was remarkable, because the record was more than a century old: the day occurred in the 19th century. All of the articles about this event specified the day. If, as Omar’s ignorant tweet claimed, the Earth had broken its previous record for “hottest day in 120,000 years,” there would be a day from 120,000 years ago that held the broken record. No source mentioned such a day, however, because there are no daily records of the Earth’s weather—daily temperature is weather, not climate—from 120,000 years ago or even a thousand years ago (though we know Pompeii got pretty damn hot when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.) Estimates of global climate in the periods before records were kept depend on “proxy data.” Here is a chart explaining what proxy data can tell scientist about distant climates:
Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.
Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politicothat the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? Andit’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
Ethics Alarms 