Government & Politics

How Jolly! The White House Has Figured Out That Virtue-Signaling Policies With No Tangible Benefits But Substantial Negative Consequences Are Not In The Nation’s Best Interests…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What an infuriating news item!

RealClear Energy informs us…

…the Department of Energy quietly released a report highlighting the positive economic benefits of developing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, an energy project canceled by President Biden in the hours following his inauguration….Released without a formal announcement, the DOE’s report points out that the pipeline would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had an economic benefit of between $3.4 and 9.6 billion….Yet with one stroke of his pen, Biden slashed the project and instead focused his efforts on costly “green energy” goals. As a result of his executive action, 11,000 pipeline workers were promptly laid off…

Now, everyone except hard-core climate change fanatics—and maybe poor Joe— knew that closing down the pipeline would have no salutary effects on global warming or conservation. The Obama administration had essentially admitted that shutting it down would be largely symbolic but otherwise pointless (like all climate change grandstanding). Never mind: the pipeline was killed anyway just as Biden had promised to do on “Day One” during the 2020 campaign.  If they could have voted, the 16-year-olds would have gone for Biden. Continue reading →

The Democrats’ “Leading Against White Supremacy Act”: So You Really Still Can’t Believe The Democratic Party Has Totalitarian Aspirations, Eh? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Oh, I know what you’re going to say: “That’s unfair, Jack! You know that the wacko bill is the brainchild of Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and she’s not like most Democrats!” It is true that Lee, whose Ethics Alarms dossier is as damning as any one could find on a current member of Congress with the possible exception of Nancy Pelosi, is a particularly awful member of Congress. She’s a fanatic supporter of reparations for slavery; she’s a knee-jerk race-baiter (any criticism of President Barack Obama, a serial bungler, was racist in her view). She’s one of those not very bright people who speak assertively and defiantly because they are laboring under the delusion that they are intelligent, thus fooling others who aren’t very smart either.

Lee once mixed up Wikileaks and Wikipedia in an interview. She has complained that the naming of storms is racist, because the names are “too white,” but we know that if we gave hurricanes names like “LaShonda” to hurricanes, she’d complain that blacks were being deliberately compared to destructive forces.

Nonetheless, you watch: House Democrats will overwhelmingly support Lee’s Leading Against White Supremacy Act, maybe even unanimously, despite the fact that it is unconstitutional, an attack on free speech and thought, and designed to let the government criminalize political positions it doesn’t like.

They will vote for it in part because it has no chance of passing. They also assume that their constituency is so ignorant of our rights it will see Republican opposition as more proof of racism.

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End Of Week Ethics Exegesis, 1/20/2023, SCOTUS Ineptitude, The Child Shooter’s Parents, A Coinkydink, And More…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

[NOTE: This was another one of those posts that I had to squeeze in and get up before I had a chance to do a careful proofing. Coming back to it hours later, it is so embarrassing to find all the irritating little typos: missing letters, transposed letters, words I thought I typed in but didn’t. Ugh. I’m sorry.]

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The mainstream media (and Democrats, but I repeat myself) is doing everything it can to try to make Lyin’ George Santos the big story rather than Joe’s Biden’s document scandal, which has nicely exposed Biden’s hypocrisy along with that of law enforcement and the Trump-Deranged. The Republicans have made it easier for them than it should be: Kevin McCarthy should have created a committee called “Shameless Lying Committee and placed only Santos on it, and made him chairman. Oh, maybe have Adam Schlitt on it to keep George company. McCarthy’s canned line about how Santos was elected to represent his district by voters and they deserve representation is worse than if he said nothing at all. Santos gets to vote on bills, and that’s all an incompetent, lazy, gullible district like his deserves. (If Santos says one more time that he’s done nothing wrong, I may jump out my office window.)

Back to the news media: This morning I watched CNN, Fox, News, and BBC all at once on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel. The experience would be depressing to anyone under the delusion that broadcast news is anything but a confederacy of dunces. As the abrasive and smug “Fox and Friends” kept repeating the same outrage about Joe’s stash of classified materials, CNN interviewed high school students in Santos’ district in an obviously carefully staged segment purporting to show that teens are more ethical and instinctively wise than their elected elders. (Hey, look at these kids! Let’s let 16-year-olds vote!) When one student said that Congress should vote to expel Santos, his grandstanding teacher didn’t point out that Congress can’t, probably because the teacher doesn’t know.

Neither CNN nor the teacher brought up Joe Biden’s career of making up credentials and experiences, which would have been an interesting counterpoint for the aspiring Democrats in the student group (there was one self-proclaimed future Republican, which doesn’t mean there weren’t others afarisd of getting wedgies) to ponder: the thrust of the segment was that Santos and the GOP acceptance of him pushed the students into the Blue.

MSNBC, as usual, was even more flagrant in its bias, and also funnier. It had—get this—Al Sharpton and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele discussing how corrupt and incompetent Republican House members were. Michael Steele calling anyone incompetent is like, well, Sharpton calling anyone corrupt. Steele is now a Never-Trump talking head for MSNBC in the Ana Navarro mold, because his flip-flop was the only way anyone would hire him to give his opinion on anything. He was a disaster as RNC head, embarrassing the party by such stunts as okaying a fundraising mailing that intentionally masqueraded as a census document—while the census was underway. Congress passed a bi-partisan law making such chicanery illegal.

Mostly Steele is just an idiot. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it should be flashed up on the screen any time this dolt tries to be a pundit. When he was running to be re-elected RNC head (he lost), Steele was asked during the one debate among the contenders to name his favorite book. The other hacks (like Reince Priebus, the eventual winner) said that a Ronald Reagan’s biography was their favorite book, but Steele, trying to seem erudite, said “War and Peace.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he quoted (from “A Tale of Two Cities”), causing questioner Tucker Carlson to facepalm.

1. The SCOTUS Dobbs leak can’t be found. That’s bad enough. Equally bad were the stunning revelations of sloppy procedures at the Court, probably long the status quo, that nonetheless made this scandal inevitable. From the 20-page report

1. Too many personnel have access to certain Court-sensitive documents. The current distribution mechanisms result in too many people having access to highly sensitive information and the inability to actively track who is handling and accessing these documents. Distribution should be more tailored and the use of hard copies for sensitive documents should be minimized and tightly controlled.

2. Aside from the Court’s clear confidentiality policies and the federal statutes outlined above, there is no universal written policy or guidance on the mechanics of handling and safeguarding draft opinions and Court-sensitive documents, and practices vary widely throughout the Court. A universal policy should be established and all personnel should receive training on the requirements.

3. The Court’s current method of destroying Court-sensitive documents has vulnerabilities that should be addressed.

4. The Court’s information security policies are outdated and need to be clarified and updated. The existing platform for case-related documents appears to be out of date and in need of an overhaul.

5. There are inadequate safeguards in place to track the printing and copying of sensitive documents. The Court should institute tracking mechanisms using technology that is currently available for this purpose.

6. Many personnel appear not to have properly understood the Court’s policies on confidentiality. There should be more emphasis on training so that all personnel fully understand the policies.

7. Bills were introduced in the last Congress which would expressly prohibit the disclosure of the Supreme Court’s non-public case-related information to anyone outside the Court. Consideration should be given to supporting such legislation.

Summary: The Court’;s security has been incompetent and inexcusable.

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KABOOM! I Just Read AGAIN The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Website Section On “Whiteness”….How Can That Racist Offal Still Be Up? [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The official position of the Smithsonian Institution is apparently that white people are a blight on humanity. My head exploded after the first time I became aware of this, in a post that generated a lot of excellent comments in 2020. Like a fool, I assumed the outrageous text (and the chart that earlier post focused on) had been removed. I was wrong.

It’s time to revisit the issue, especially since my head just exploded again.

Here’s a sample of the woke, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, “1619”-style racist drivel (and libel) that appears on the website of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the “Nation’s Attic’s” most recent major addition. I know most attics have creepy , smelly stuff in them, but this should not be tolerated.The page headlined, “Whiteness” reads in part,

Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.

This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized. 

Thinking about race is very different for nonwhite persons living in America. People of color must always consider their racial identity, whatever the situation, due to the systemic and interpersonal racism that still exists.  

Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color. Acts of microaggressions include verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites. Whether intentional or not, these attitudes communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages.

Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept – but it is true. If you are white in America, you have benefited from the color of your skin….

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2022 Worst of Ethics Awards: Most Unethical Mayor And Unethical Rationalization Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That video that I saw today on the Federalist site clinched two 2022 Worst of Ethics Awards for me, not that either was a tough call.

Unethical Rationalization of the Year: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”

Frankly,Rationalization #64 would won this award in each of the past three years, which is pretty amazing for such a late addition to the list.

The reason, I think, is that the American public either has behaved so gullible and stpudly, or the political class and journalists have concluded that it is so gullible and stupid that the strategy of calling night day, day  night,good bad, bad good and failure success has become too attractive to resist. 2022 was the zenith of this revolting development so far, but there is no reason to think 2023 won’t be worse. We’re hardly started, and there is Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that the White House is being transparent about Joe’s confidential documents stash while she refuses to answer questions about it. Last year, the administration line about the chaos at the border was that the border was secure. LGBTQ+ activists looked us right in our eyes and told us that a man became a woman simply by deciding he was, and sports leaders announced that biological men who were now trans women had no advantage over natural-born women in athletic competitions while it was obvious that they did. Meanwhile runaway inflation wasn’t runaway inflation, Twitter’s partisan censorship wasn’t partisan censorship. John Fetterman was not cognitively impaired by his stroke. The January 6 House inquiry was unbiased and fair, with no partisan objectives. And when Joe Biden gave his Reichstag, he sounded and looked like a Nazi while accusing Republicans of being Nazis. There’s lots more. I’ve never seen anything like it. Continue reading →

In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

My mother stole a piece of the Parthenon. She was Greek, my father and she were visiting Athens, and when no one was looking (including my father) she scooped up a 1 x 8 inch chuck of white marble by the ruins and smuggled it home, where she displayed it on her fireplace mantle. My sister and I were horrified when we learned what the piece was, and plotted various ways to have it returned without getting our aged mother prosecuted. When they moved from Arlington, Mass. to Arlington, Va, the item just vanished, or so Mom said. (We didn’t believe her.) It was never seen again.

I think about this family scandal whenever I think of the seemingly endless dispute over the Elgin Marbles.

In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls. The “Elgin Marbles” were sold to the British government and became among the most valued artifacts in the collection of the British Museum in London. As my mother’s son, I know they were among my top three favorite exhibits when I first visited, along with the Rosetta Stone and Paul McCartney’s handwritten draft of the lyrics for “Yesterday.”

Well, Greece has been asking for the Elgin Marbles back for over two centuries now, and if the museum has a leg to stand on in keeping them, it pretty much comes down to that hoary (and not exactly true) line, “possession is 9/10s of the law.” However, recent decades have seen a cultural shift as Western colonization and imperialism have acquired a bad reputation. Many museums are returning such looted treasures to where they were created and, I believe, belong. Why, then, haven’t the Elgin Marbles been sent back to Greece as its government demands, urges, and begs?

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John Kerry’s Comments At The World Economic Forum Show How Irresponsible And Incompetent US Climate Change Policy Is

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

To be clear, the fact that John Kerry, a proven dim bulb, is allowed to address any group at all as the representative of the U.S. government (he’s the U.S. special presidential “envoy for climate”) also shows how irresponsible and incompetent the Biden administration is. Kerry, a college grad of even less distinction than Al Gore and with no science training, is as qualified to speak about the complex details of climate change as Greta Thunberg. Nonetheless, his fatuous presentation this week in Davos, Switzerland is revealing for anyone not blinded by climate change propaganda, talking points and doomsday scenarios.

Here are some of the fake Irish politician’s astute observations:

  • “I’m convinced we will get to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy — we’re going to get there because we have to.

We can do it because we have to. Now there’s persuasive logic, at least to someone like Kerry. This would be talking down to an audience and patronizing them, if Kerry himself wasn’t likely to believe such rubbish. We’ll reduce the National Debt—because we have to! We’ll eliminate gun violence—because we have to!  We’ll end war and racism—because we have to!

  • “I am not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis.”

According to the past predictions of those same scientists, we should have already seen coastal cities under water, snow a  distant memory, and the polar bears keeping company with passenger pigeons….not that John Kerry being “convinced” of anything related to science should carry any weight whatsoever. He’s just mouthing what cherry-picked “experts” say in highly simplified, politically slanted summaries.

  • “And those worst consequences are going to affect millions of people all around the world, [in] Africa and other places. Of the 20 most affected countries in the world from [the] climate crisis, 17 are in Africa.”

Ironically, it is exactly those same developing countries that most need to employ fossil fuels to advance economically—you know, like the United States did.

  • “So, how do we get there? Well, the lesson I’ve learned in the last years and I learned it as secretary [of State] and I’ve learned it since, reinforced in spades, is: money, money, money, money, money, money, money.”

That’s the Democratic way, all right: throw money at any problem whether you know what you’re doing or not. And if there’s one thing the United States has, with its National Debt of 31 trillion dollars, it’s money. The federal government  borrowed $4 billion a day in 2022.

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A Black Columnist Employed By The Washington Post Just Revealed Herself As Not Only A Racist, But An Especially Incompetent One….Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is seldom that a writer for a prestigious publication spontaneously performs the equivalent of placing a neon “I am a racist moron who should never be taken seriously again!” sign on her head, but that’s what Karen Attiah has done. She’s a columnist for The Washington Post “on issues relating to race, gender and international politics, with a special interest in Africa”—naturally, she minored in Black Studies at Columbia, giving her anti-white racist urges just the boost they needed. One benefit of the disastrous Martin Luther King memorial unveiled this week in Boston is that it has caused lots of pundits, critics and others to reveal things about themselves (hypocrisy, bad taste) that the public needs to know—in Attiah’s case, that she is afflicted by the worst kind of racist hate and paranoia.

Attiah launched into a Twitter rant this week about how the “Embrace” sculpture (above) is a perfect example of how evil whites still distort the legacy of Dr. King as part of the structural racism and vile white supremacy America thrives on…

Boston’s Embrace statue perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK. Cherry-picking quotes about love and non-violence. While ignoring his radicalism, anti-capitalism, his fierce critiques of white moderates. MLK- in his fullness– is still too much for them...And yes, I’ll say it. From another angle, the statue for real looks like one person is performing disembodied oral sex. No matter how much I try, I can’t unsee it. I don’t think MLK would have wanted us to be thinking about cunnilingus on his birthday. Thanks, Boston.…There is nothing radical about the disembodied, de-racialized Embrace statue. It is sending a whitewashed, multi-million dollar message — that MLK and Coretta overcame structural racism and systematic injustice with love– interpersonal, colorblind love….Anyway, since the statue has been revealed, have we been talking about it, or MLK? No. We’ve been talking all weekend about horribly racist/ anti-Black Boston has been– and continues to be. Mission accomplished…? This is what happens when white America tries to grossly distort what MLK really stood for… and ultimately.. what they murdered him for. In making MLK a whitewashed symbol of love, the Embrace statue is both safe AND grotesque. Says little about the man, a lot about America….To have a dismembered statue of a Black man and woman, in a country that killed and destroyed so many Black people, will never sit right with me. MLK Jr. was also murdered by white America. It’s giving -“We are so grateful for Black people’s noble sacrifice” – energy.

Oops! Here’s that virulent white supremacist artist who created “Embrace”:

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Ha! And You Thought The Left In New York, Chicago And Portland Had Gone Completely Bonkers…The City Across The Bay Says “Hold My Beer”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The official proposal from San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the existence of which itself is evidence of psychosis, is finally out, and The Great Stupid has reached a new benchmark.

In December, Ethics Alarms reported that California’s Task Force to Study and Recommend Reparations Proposals for African Americans was about to submit a recommendation that the state hand over $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California as a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers will be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget. I concluded that “it was just one more indicator of how the entire state had lost its collective mind, that The Great Stupid knows no bounds.” Well, I was right about that, and San Francisco’s panel apparently decided to show the USA that its home state was relatively reasonable.

The committee, after much thought, study and debate, has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” And that’s not all! The committee also proposes cancelling all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households, and supplementing lower-income recipients’ income for the next 250 years. After all, the report points out, “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

They do not, apparently, have to be feasible, responsible, reasonable or constitutional, but then, the city has been working up to clinical insanity for quite some time. We shouldn’t be too surprised.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: As The Founders Roll Over In Their Graves”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This was one of those times that a last minute addition to a post attracted more commentary than the main topic. Discussing a city ordinance permitting animal sacrifices for religious purposes, I asked, “Is circumcision the slippery slope that brought us to this ridiculous point of cultural confusion?” This sparked extensive discussion. “Male circumcision” has been a tag on two EA articles,  but the blog has neglected the issue, for reasons too painful to go into. Humble Talent, in a discussion with Ryan Harkins, remedied that failing with gusto, in two successive comments that I’m stitching together here as a single Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: As The Founders Roll Over In Their Graves”:

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“Most of those men have to then have a circumcision, and as an adult, it is far more painful than as a baby.” [Ryan Harkins]

This is not true. It’s actually more painful for the baby. At the normal point in development the procedure occurs, the foreskin is adhered to the tip of the penis by the same kind of connective tissue that holds fingernails to nailbeds. If left, that tissue eventually breaks down, but the reality is that for babies, you’re doing something on par with pulling a fingernail out before doing the exact same thing that adult men who experience circumcision call extremely painful.

It’s the exact same pain, except in children it’s usually conducted without anesthesia. You just don’t remember it.

“Circumcision is often performed on infants without anesthetic or with a local anesthetic that is ineffective at substantially reducing pain (Lander et al., 1997). In a study by Lander and colleagues (1997), a control group of infants who received no anesthesia was used as a baseline to measure the effectiveness of different types of anesthesia during circumcision. The control group babies were in so much pain—some began choking and one even had a seizure—they decided it was unethical to continue. It is important to also consider the effects of post-operative pain in circumcised infants (regardless of whether anesthesia is used), which is described as “severe” and “persistent” (Howard et al., 1994). ”

But while you might not remember, your body does. Continue reading →