Netflix has a Christmas movie (well, if “Die Hard is a Christmas movie, this is) about a TSA agent caught up in a diabolical scheme to kill all the passengers on a commercial airplane for some reason or another—that part doesn’t really matter. In “Carry On,” our hero stumbles into the plot and is made the unwilling pawn of the villains, who are ubiquitous, brilliant and high-tech. Through an earpiece, the agent learns that the love of his life who is also pregnant is being watched by the bad guys and will be murdered at any second if he doesn’t use his position to get a piece of luggage containing a device that will release nerve gas through security screening. Suspense, thrills and unexpected twists ensue.
Family
“Ick” or Ethics? The Miracle Baby
Awww. Isn’t that romantic? Two inmates charged with murderer managed to conceive a love child while in prison without ever meeting each other face to face.
Daisy Link, 29, is charged with second-degree murder after being accused of killing her boyfriend in 2022. Joan Depaz, 23, (pronounced “JO-an”] is facing trial for first-degree murder. Both are being held at Metrowest Detention Center in Miami.
Link began talking to Depaz through the connecting vents in their cells. They fell in love. Then the love birds decided to have a child together. So Depaz deposited his semen in Saran Wrap about five times a day for about a month. The packages were pulled through the vents by Link using bedding material. Link inserted the fresh sperm using a yeast infection applicator. Eventually…success! She became pregnant, and now Depaz’s mother is raising the baby girl born in June.
Officials are conducting an internal affairs investigation. Yes, I’d agree that this is prudent.
What a lucky kid. She gets to grow up with the prospect of having both parents locked up until she’s out of high school, after being raised by a family that already spawned one killer, and is stuck with some problematic material from the gene pool. Memories of “It’s Alive” are creeping through my fertile but twisted brain.
Still, you never know: where there is life, there is hope. Some remarkable people have been born under less promising conditions. I think.
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Pointer: JutGory
A Nelson For All The Progressives, Democrats and Trump-Haters Freaking Out Over Biden’s Pardoning His Son
Didn’t everyone know that Joe would eventually pardon Hunter? The fact that they didn’t shows the depth of Woke-World’s delusions.
EA had an Ethics Quiz on this topic yesterday but the point was to determine what Biden’s most ethical course was, not to suggest that it wasn’t obvious what he would do despite all of his “promises.” I stated that for me the ethical course was clear: the President has an obligation to do what is in the best interests of the nation regardless of its effects on his family or himself. Just as I was preparing a post on how the EA ethics decision-making systems would help the President to the right thing, I heard about the pardon, rendering the issue moot, or at least too moot to justify an hour of my time.
The Axis really exposed its stupidity on this one. Here’s a supercut of the Left’s propaganda merchants praising Biden’s integrity for promising not to pardon his son..
Ethics Quiz: Biden’s Hunter Dilemma
No background is needed for this one, presumably…
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..
Which is more ethical: for President Biden to pardon his black sheep son Hunter, or for him to let Hinter be sentenced to prison?
By that wording you can tell that I regard this not as an ethical dilemma but rather an ethics conflict. In the latter variety of ethics problem, two separate ethical principles dictate diametrically opposed solutions. This same ethics conflict has been explored in too many novels, movies and TV episodes to list. “Blue Bloods,” Tom Selleck’s ethics-obsessed cop show revisits the problem regularly: does loyalty to family always trump professional duties and obligations, and if not, when?
The Presidential pardon power is absolute, and many have opined, “Why wouldn’t Biden pardon Hunter?” Other Presidents have pardoned friends, benefactors (Gerald Ford pardoned the man who made him President), donors and supporters. Ann Althouse weighed in with this cynical rant…
Museum Ethics: The Draft-Dodging Playboy and the Wright Bros. Plane
The old TV show “Naked City” used to intone at the end of every episode, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” There are far more than eight million ethics stories in our country’s rich and surprising history. This is one of those, and I pass it along to you.
The Franklin Institute, a museum in Philadelphia inspired by the work of Ben Franklin and dedicated to the study of science, exhibits a plane built in 1911 by the Wright brothers. It was, they say, a gift from Grover C. Bergdoll, a strange man with a strange history who was once an infamous national figure but who is now forgotten.
He was a wealthy playboy who was heir to a Philadelphia beer brewing fortune. He dodged the Great War draft in 1917, failing to report for military service. He was already known for his irresponsible conduct, taking flying lessons from Orville Wright and buying a plane from the Wright brothers that he used to buzz buildings among other stunts. He had multiple accidents and traffic violations in automobile as a teenager, and served two months in jail after a head-on crash in 1913. Since he was rich and well known, the government decided to an example of him to discourage draft-dodgers, It distributing wanted posters with his face and name, and when the soldier who supposedly was drafted to take Bergdoll’s place died in combat, the New York had a front page headline, “Died Hero in Battle in Bergdoll’s Place.”
The story gets stranger. Bergdoll was finally captured in 1920 after an ongoing manhunt, and sentenced to prison for five years. He escaped after less than a year. He convinced authorities to temporarily release him from prison to help them find a “pot of gold” that he claimed to have buried. Bergdahl escaped while his two U.S. Army escorts became distracted (they were playing pool at his family mansion), fleeing in his chauffeur-driven car to Canada, from which he travelled to Germany. He married there, but often returned secretly to the United States. Reported sightings of Grover were headlines news.
Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks [Repaired]
“It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”
1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?
2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)
Ethics Hero: Some Rich Person In Idaho
The holiday-appropriate heart-warming tale is told in this video I can’t embed here. Apparently a wealthy “Secret Santa” is giving $1 million to “deserving people in eastern Idaho,” and the East Idaho News is publicizing the plan with daily surprise visit to the lucky recipient. “Brenda in Blackfoot”is first up. From the News: “She is a single mom with eight adopted children who all have special needs. She works from 4:30 a.m. to approximately 1 p.m. every day to support her children… She has really struggled… In May, they experienced a small house fire, which caused a lot of damage to her home….Googling the repairs for instructions , [Brenda] did all of the repairs herself. Her family also had a flood in their home about six weeks ago….Brenda went through cancer treatment last year as well…”
Ethics Villain: Ryan Borgwardt
In “Double Jeopardy,” a 1999 thriller co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd plays a woman whose apparently loving husband fakes his own death while on a romantic yachting trip with her, leaving behind manufactured evidence that gets Ashley convicted of murdering him. To be fair, Wisconsin resident Ryan Borgwardt wasn’t quite that diabolical. He just faked his death while pretending to be on kayaking fishing trip and fled the country. Then again, Ashley Judd’s husband only inflicted his plot on his wife and a single child, while Borgwalt has three kids.
On August 12, Watertown, Wisconsin’s big news was the disappearance of devoted family man, Borgwardt, 44. An emergency search found his capsized kayak on Green Lake and his vehicle and trailer parked nearby. A local fishermen found Ryan’s fishing rod and a tacklebox containing his wallet and other belongings. Such a tragedy!
But Borgwalt was not as clever as the husband in “Double Jeopardy,” however, so an investigation eventually uncovered evidence that he was alive and had crossed into Canada. Border authorities confirmed that they had checked his passport a day after his “drowning.” After that, Borgwardt’s elaborate plot to abandon his family, apparently to begin a new life with another woman (this was also the motive of Ashley’s evil spouse), began to come into focus.
Ethics Verdict: The Trump-Deranged Harris Voters Are The Most Infantile Losers In US. Political History
There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…
Comment of the Day: “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…”
Time for a Trump Derangement report Comment of the Day. This admirable job by AM Golden fills the bill nicely, especially since I had almost the exact same conversation with my own “not unintelligent” relative who has been a raging, drooling, Trump Derangement victim getting progressively (double meaning, there) worse (Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, now 5, and I suspect Stage 6 is terminal) for almost a decade. There is a viral social media tale with video about a woman who interrupted a conversation between two black Trump supporters to start screaming about how he was a criminal who wants Liz Cheney to be put in front of a 9-person “firing squad.” This lunatic also claimed to be well-informed, though she must only frequent MSNBC and other propaganda outlets that haven’t thoroughly debunked this most recent desperate lie. (All you have to do is read what Trump said.) There may be a new one by now; I haven’t checked.
I am going to depart from the usual format with COTDs here and follow AM’s post with some supplemental analysis of my own.
In the meantime, here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…,” which is a follow-up to this earlier post regarding the unforgivable “Trump threatened Cheney” AXIS hit.
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Trying to convince people that what Trump said is being misrepresented, and deliberately so, by the Democrats and their media advocates is like pulling teeth.
Ethics Alarms 