Thanks, Congresswoman! And I actually think you lapped Christina Khalilin the complete science ignoramus race, though you both are tied in the “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” competition.
I want to know who in Georgia voted for this silly, embarrassing woman. I want names and explanations. Maybe DNA. It’s my Congress too…
After that puny 4.8 magnitude earthquake tickled the tri-state area (no injuries, no damage) Greene sent out a tweet claiming that God had sent the earthquake has a “sign” for the United State to “repent.” She also claimed today’s eclipse is another sign from God that the country needs to ask for forgiveness. Greene seems to be in tune with primitive societies that were terrified during eclipses, believing that the moon was eating the sun, or something. People like her allowed Bing Crosby to be declared a wizard in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”
“[T]his display of the Vice President’s mental capacity and self-awareness is a warning that extends beyond basketball. It’s deeply disturbing…”
—Ann Althouse, assessing an epic Kamala Harris word salad so stunning that t set off even more ethics alarms than her inane babbling usually does
That’s what I get for giving Harris the benefit of The Julie Principle. I figured, hey, the poor woman is over her head, she’s obviously a dolt, she spews jabberwocky compulsively—what’s the point in complaining about what she can’t change? And then she goes and vomits up this Authentic Frontier Gibberish:
“Do you know — OK, a bit of a history lesson — do you know that the women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022? Think about that, and… talk about progress, you know, better late than never but progress. And what that has done, because of course — you know, I had a bracket, it’s not broken completely, but I won’t talk about my bracket. But you know what? How we love — we love March Madness, even just nowallowing the women to have brackets and what that does to encourage people to talk more about the women’s teams, to watch them, now they’re being covered. You know, this is the reality. People used to say, ‘Oh, women’s sports, who’s interested?’ Well if you can’t see it, you won’t be. But when you see it, you realize, Oh….”
You should remember: it was less than a month ago when I posted this Ethics Quiz with the question, “Should the government protect historic structures and artifacts that relate to dark events and less than admirable figures (by today’s values) in local and American history?” Something stupid is in the air, and that air has clearly reached Canada. For there is another controversy there about a couple wanting to erase all references to their historic home’s “less than admirable figure” by today’s [woke] values.”
Dr. Arnold Mahesan, a wealthy fertility specialist of Sri Lankan descent, and his wife, entrepreneur and former “Real Housewives of Toronto” actressRoxanne Earle, whose family comes from Pakistan, bought a house for $5 million in 2022 with a Toronto heritage designation in an affluent midtown Toronto neighborhood. The couple is adamant that the city should remove the heritage restriction from their home because, in their view, the original owner held racist opinions. Opinions.
Stapleton Pitt Caldecott, a former Toronto Board of Trade president, built the two-and-a-half story, 9,000-square foot house in 1906. He was opposed to immigration—the current residents of the home the descendants of immigrants, you will note—and also he believed immigrants should assimilate into their new country’s society and culture. Imagine that!
Oh-oh. I agree with that aspect of Caldecott’s beliefs. Well, there goes the prospects of 2707 Westminster Place being designated the “Jack Marshall House”!
“Stapleton Caldecott would’ve been appalled by us living in the house he commissioned,” Mahesan told a meeting of the Toronto Preservation Board, using a variation of Rationalization #32, “The Unethical Role Model.” He also complained that he and his wife only discovered that their home was a designated heritage property last year, when they decided that they wanted to modify the house’s steep stairway from the sidewalk. That fact means that they must have the city’s permission before making any major changes to the property. To this, I say: “Tough noogies!” (and old Arlington, Mass. playground expression). “Let the buyer beware” has some unreasonable applications, but not this one. They paid millions for a house without checking its history and legal status. That’s their misfortune.
I miswrote a few weeks back when I stated that an assertion by a DEI pimp that “studies show that diversity” makes organizations more successful and effective was a Big Lie, one of those “facts” (like the alleged percentage of women who are sexually molested, or women only making 76 cents for every dollar earned by men for the same job) that have gained currency by repetition by activists without solid evidence to support them. There are studies that purported to support the DEI contention, all from the same management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, carving out a profitable little niche for itself. Aside:I have worked for and with consulting companies. Consulting is a business, not a profession, and such companies strongly tend to give clients what they want to hear, thus making such firms popular and wealthy. Sadly, this is also true of ethics consulting firms and ethics consultants. I won’t provide an expert opinion crafted to make a client happy, and that is why I’m about three months from living in a cardboard box.
Back when I accepted gigs to do training in “diversity” for bar associations, there were no such studies, and because the diversity virtue-signaling fad was already galloping along then, I carelessly assumed that some enterprising “researchers” hadn’t manufactured “science” to support what was already conventional wisdom in the years since I decided that I couldn’t in good faith keep accepting money to teach politically correct nonsense. The McKinsey & Company studies, all claiming to “prove” the value of “diversity,” were published in 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023, thus giving the private sector, government, the military, the professions and academia something to justify their woke crusades.
Christina Khalil is the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senator in New Jersey. Here is her campaign bio that sits on her website:
Christina Anna Khalil (she/her/hers) is a native of New Jersey, and she grew up in foster care where she overcame many trials and tribulations throughout her childhood and adult life. Christina has her B.A. in psychology and her Master’s in Social Work both from Ramapo College, which were both major accomplishments for her, and Christina believes that one of the true keys to freedom lies in education. In her free time Christina has avidly volunteered for community organizations doing important work, such as (BCLA) Bergen County LGBTQ+ Alliance.While obtaining her Master’s Degree, Christina worked on the front lines during the height of the pandemic at a medical detox facility and never quit school, while also volunteering at Hackensack High School. While working in the medical and substance abuse field, Christina noticed that our current elected leaders appeared detached from the reality of the current struggles that citizens of New Jersey face and made a vow to herself that when it washer time to step up and work towards change, she would do just that.
Christina’s leadership and resiliency are unmatched, and she is the leader that New Jersey needs to fight to make the New Jersey citizens’ quality of life better.
Impressive! What a pity she’s an idiot. Here’s proof, her tweet yesterday:
Yes, the Green Party has nominated someone who thinks climate change causes earthquakes. Her biography claims that “our current elected leaders appeared detached from the reality.” One can’t get much more detached from reality than believing the movement of tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust are affected by the climate. This woman has a Master’s Degree, and has the critical thinking skills of a pangolin. Score another one for America education.
She exemplifies the people advising Joe Biden, arguing for the banning of gas stoves, air conditioning and gasoline-powered cars while wasting billions of dollars in the process. Some New Jersey residents will vote for her, maybe thousands. How such people get through the day without stabbing themselves in the eye with forks is a mystery.
Here’s Christina…
…she looks nice enough, though I think I see the sky shining through her eyes from the back of her head. She is truly a dolt, and it is unethical for dolts to run for elective office.
Note: WordPress says I should tag this post “art,” “poetry” and “music.” So apparently their bot is affected by climate change too…
OK, maybe I just telegraphed my personal bias in reaction to this quiz, so I’ll keep my opinion to myself until the commentariat weighs in. I’ll try, anyway.
New York City has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed in a 2018 class-action lawsuit by Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz, two Muslim women who claimed their rights were violated when police forced them to remove their hijabs for the police to take their “mug shots.”
The financial settlement requires approval by Judge Analisa Torres of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and I fervently hope…never mind! My mouth is zipped!
Biden called for an “immediate ceasefire” yesterday in a phone call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him that “strikes on humanitarian workers” and “the overall humanitarian situation” are “unacceptable.” Biden also, we are told, “U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action” and on steps to “address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.”
By pure accident, the first thing I saw was Pentagon spokesman John Kirby (he’s the smart and competent one of the two primary White House paid liars) gaslight the press when asked how the U.S. policy toward the support of Israel in the war could be “unwavering” (as described by officials) and yet the Administration is also saying that it is considering changing that policy in light of the civilian casualties in Gaza. Kirby, with a straight face. said that the two statements were not inconsistent, prompting incredulity from his questioner. Of course they are inconsistent; in fact, they are contradictory. This is one more example of Democrats deliberately playing to the ignorant and uncritical voter.
Branding all critics and opponents racists has been a standard progressive and Democratic Party ploy for a long time, though it shifted into high gear when that was the primary argument used to deflect legitimate observations that Barack Obama was poor POTUS with a great PR machine. Then it shifted into higher gear as the “Get Trump!” effort became an ongoing crusade. Trump didn’t oppose letting illegals cross the border with impunity because it was, you know, insane policy for any nation; his opposition was based in racism. The tactic is dishonest, unfair, divisive, despicable and indefensible, but as the late Harry Reid—forwarding address: Hell—explained cheerily as he defended the Big Lie he circulated about Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, it works.
I am now noticing that the Race Card has been designated as the Axis’s official counter to the looming GOP recycling of Ronald Reagan’s effective question during the 1980 campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” By almost every objective measure, as with Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidency, the unavoidable answer today is “Are you kidding? NO!” It’s a powerful weapon. So the Axis has declared it to be racist.
Commenter Dr. Emilio Lizardo revealed this morning in the comments to “At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor” that the policy at issue had already been reversed by the time I wrote about it:
“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”
So Ethics Alarms can’t claim even a smidgen of credit for the reversal. Nonetheless, the lesson here, as we have already seen elsewhere, is that when organizations and institutions install discriminatory and self-evidently unethical procedures and policies in the name of wokeness, political correctness, aspiring fascism of the far left, DEI or other perversions of core American principles and are quickly exposed, assailed and embarrassed, they usually back down. (Usually.)
A further lesson is that the organizations and institutions know that what they are doing is indefensible except from the “by any means necessary” perspective driving the Left in its crusade to re-make America. They know it, but they try anyway, hoping that any single instance will fly under the metaphorical radar long enough to become institutionalized. When they get caught, their reaction is, “OK, too soon. We’ll hold off on this one for now.”
Their assumption, and it is, frighteningly, probably correct, that the current DEI, Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate change hysteria, anti-free speech…freedom of association…equal treatment under the law and due process wack-a-mole contest it has forced our society into playing will inevitably result in a slow, steady ratcheting-up of anti-democratic practices that become accepted as norms. This is how the public education system became an indoctrination process. It is how the initially admirable goals of affirmative action became the racist practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It is how journalism in the US. became partisan propaganda.
The fact that only conservative publications and news sources treated the Princeton story as “fit to print” and necessary illumination to stop democracy from “dying in darkness” is also significant. This doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t important or objectively worth reporting on. The conduct of the mainstream media in ignoring it proves that its purpose is not to keep the public informed, but to assist the Far Left in laying waste to America’s traditional interpretation of democracy. The Princeton story is important, and the fact that only conservative sources publicized it (only Fox News among the news networks picked it up) doesn’t prove their bias. It proves the sinister, deliberate complicity of the mainstream media as it attempts to keep Americans from realizing what is going on right under their noses until it is too late.
The Princetonian wrote that a debate over the policy arose only after “headlines of national right-wing publications” exposed it. If the story sparked a debate, it means it was a story worth reporting. The MSM didn’t report on the story because the Far Left doesn’t want any debate. In an honest debate they lose, just as they lose on abortion, illegal immigration, and so many other issues. If they felt they could win on the merits, then they would want debate. Instead, their media tries to bury the facts. This isn’t a conservative “conspiracy theory.” It is reality.
Finally, the club’s claim that “the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny” is another damning piece of evidence. Gaslighting, denial, “Jumbo”-ism and “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization,” #64) mania have become such reflex tools of the Left that comparisons with “1984” are unavoidable. The border is secure. Bidenomics is a success. Inflation isn’t a problem. The President didn’t extol the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter. He’s as sharp as a tack. The Trump prosecutions aren’t political. January 6 was an insurrection. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The Princeton student club episode is an important one for American to understand. They can only understand it if they know about it.
Boy I wish I knew how to get the readership here back on the rising curve it seemed to be on in 2016...
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tried to speak at the University of Maryland at the end of last month on the topic of “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” He was not permitted to get into the text of his speech, however. Raskin is one of the foolish Hamas-enabling, having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too Democrats who wants to make Israel stop its existentially necessary war effort to end the “violence and pervasive suffering in Gaza” and “provide for a massive surge in humanitarian aid”—to the region the U.S. is supposedly supporting the Israeli attacks on. Brilliant!…but I digress.
“Progress in history requires not just reasoning, which is certainly necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because it also requires the addition of the pro-social emotions, as the psychologists call it, of solidarity, empathy, love and the political virtues of justice and equality and freedom,” Raskin began. Then pro-Palestine protesters began shouting at Raskin, accusing him of being “complicit in genocide.” You know: morons. Student morons.
The progressive congressman pleaded with the pro-Hamas mob to have a dialogue with him rather than “heckling,” and that tactic worked as well as it always does. Raskin stopped his speech, pivoting to a spontaneous question and answer format, but the protesters’ chants and jeers made that approach impossible too.
University of Maryland President Darryll Pines (seen grinning above) stepped in and declared the event over as Raskin was effectively silenced. Pines then issued a disgraceful statement to the media, representing the shouting down of a member of Congress as a good thing, either because he was terrified of criticizing the far left on his campus, or because he’s an unethical fool. I suspect the latter.
Ethics Alarms 