Federal law requires each government department and agency to submit a list to the State Department of gifts over $415 received from officials of foreign governments. “The measure is intended to ensure that foreign governments do not gain undue influence over American officials,” says the New York Times, but that’s silly: there are a thousand ways that foreign nations can and do try to insert quid pro quos into relations with our government officials that don’t involve jewel-encrusted scimitars, busts of Winston Churchill or pairs of golden marmosets. Gifts are ham-handed way to bribe anyone, but never mind: the law addresses that old “appearance of impropriety” thingy.
So I pronounce myself shocked–shocked!—to learn that the Trump administration left office without providing the State Department with an accounting of the gifts former President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials received from foreign governments in 2020. Continue reading →
This sign was apparent seen on the Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis campus.
What’s going on here?
Is Purdue taking a stand against the miserable treatment of free speech on so many other campuses? Is this a student prank? Is it satire? Should we find it depressing or encouraging? If it is the work of students, will Purdue remove it? If it is a statement by the school, will students or faculty protest?
This screenshot, which is really from MSNBC, isn’t directly related to the post but certainly relevant, and besides, I couldn’t resist…
Usually when I see things like the CNN banner that I am about to discuss, I mentally file them away for the next warm-up, round-up, potpourri or whatever. Then I forget about them. This item annoyed me sufficiently that I’m preserving it on the record before I forget.
Rounding the news channels in desperate hope of finding any discussing something other than Ukraine or Will Smith, I saw this full caption under a report on CNN: Ala. Governor Signs “Don’t Say Gay” Bill.” This is the network Chris Wallace fled to because Fox News “question[ed] the truth”?
Here’s the bill. The word “gay” isn’t mentioned. Nothing in it contains an edict about “not saying” anything. Like the Florida law it resembles, all the law does (besides the reasonable requirement that students should use the bathroom designated for the sex that is on their birth certificates) is direct teachers not to cover the issue of sexual orientation or gender identity “to students in kindergarten through the fifth grade at a public K-12 school” or “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Terming that bill “Don’t Say Gay” is a flat-out adoption by the news media of a false characterization created by LGBTQ activists. It is per se partisan and political.
This is so outrageous that even after three cups of coffee I don’t know what to call it. Pathological hypocrisy? Playing with metaphorical matches in a kerosene factory? Prime Great Stupid? Help me out here.
In reaction to a relatively obscure 5-4 Supreme Court decisionyesterday, numerous woke journalists and pundits went bonkers and argued that President Biden should just defy the ruling, you know, like Andrew Jackson did when he supposedly said, after the Court (correctly) ruled against his position in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
More about that later.
The Supreme Court yesterday temporarily reinstated a Trump environmental policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could cause water pollution. The opinion, on the so-called “emergency docket” that allows the Court to rule on urgent matters without hearing an oral argument, was unsigned and without any written explanation (so much for Justice Barrett’s “Read the opinion” remarks) prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to join the court’s three left-leaning justices in criticizing the majority’s use of the emergency docket, or as critics call it, the shadow docket.” The particulars of the case don’t matter; what does matter is the Left’s nascent totalitarians in the news media calling for direct defiance.
Michael West’s Comment of the Day was less a commentary on a post than an observation triggered by it. There’s been a lot of lawyer-style analysis around here of late, so it’s high time for an engineer’s perspective—in some respects the reverse of the legal problem-solving method– to be highlighted, in reaction to the post, “Observations On The Unethical Tweet Of The Month.”
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Science is a wonderful thing. The rise of empiricism as a practiced discipline by professionals from it’s rudimentary roots in ancient philosophy has allowed mankind the ability to learn beyond his superstitious ancestor’s imaginations. And combined with that human imagination – the knowledge gained by science has empowered us to manipulate, to engineer, incredible solutions to direct problems as well as reduce mere inconveniences and discomforts to non-entities.
Scientists and engineers, by merely studying a problem, determining predictable laws that govern the interactions within problems and using that knowledge to develop a solution, opened up the power of man’s intellect.
But therein lies another problem. We think we can engineer, we can manipulate our way to solve everything. We think we’ve studied the factors going into a problem so thoroughly that we know the right solution. I’m an architect, and we have a saying – “A problem thoroughly defined is more that half-solved”. By “defined”, we mean, researched, studied, determined our constraints and our opportunities. Very rapidly, in the design process – the more we spend in studying the problem the more our options are narrowed down to one or two appropriate solutions. Soon, the solution presents itself. Continue reading →
No ethics warm-up for two straight days leaves me with a big pile of stinking undiscussed and aging issues and events….
1. So much of “in sickness or in health”...Baseball Hall of Fame lock Albert Pujols, recently signed to another multi-million dollar contract to be the St. Louis Cardinals designated hitter, waited a couple of days after his wife Deidre underwent surgery removing a brain tumor to announce he was divorcing her. “I realize this is not the most opportune time with Opening Day approaching and other family events that have recently taken place. These situations are never easy and isn’t something that just happened overnight,” he wrote in part. Yeah, I’d put the baseball stuff after the family stuff, Albert. I’m sure this came as no surprise to his wife (at least I hope so), and whatever part of the $344 million he has been paid through the years will definitely help, but especially with five children, letting his wife at least recuperate from a traumatic operation before dumping her would seem to be the more ethical course. Pujols’ reputation is one of being a nice guy; you know, like Will Smith.
2. Watching free speech get “chilled” in real time...at the Grammys—who watches the Grammys?—host Trevor Noah began by promising that the he would be keeping “people’s names out of [his] mouth,” referring to Smith’s shouted demand after he went slap-happy. And he did. Today the New York Times critic approved of Noah not taking “meanspirited swipes.” If Chris Rock’s mild joke about a woman choosing to shave her head for a public appearance is now “mean-spirited,” the Left’s attempt to shut-down all comedy (except meanspirited swipes at men, whites and Republicans, of course, is nearing success.
3. Calling the Humane Society and the ASPCA! Martha Stewart announced that her four dogs killed her cat when they “mistook her for an interloper and killed her defenseless little self.” Did the dogs sign a statement to that effect? Her four dogs constituted a pack, and making a cat try to coexist with a pack of dogs is irresponsible. What really happened, I’s surmise, is that the cat and one of the dogs had what would have normally been a brief altercation, and the pack instinct kicked in for the other three. Continue reading →
Existentialist warrior and unique Ethics Alarms commenter Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post about the NFL’s requirement that all teams hire a “minority” assistant offensive coach in the pursuit of “diversity, equity and inclusion” marked the first mention here of the Matthew Effect, often loosely summarized to explain why, as the song says, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Although I agree with most of the sentiment, I should clarify something about this point: Jack wrote:
“In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.”
Highly competitive fields such as sports, entertainment, business…–okay, basically all fields on this inhospitable planet–are subject to the Matthew effect. . With multiple stages of competition, extra opportunities early on lead to exponentially more opportunities at each subsequent stage, due to the greater experience and exposure attracting more mentors and benefactors.
If you’ve read Freakonomics, you may be familiar with how hockey players’ birthdays are all around the same time of year. Based on the birthdate cutoffs for when they started school, they would have been the oldest students and therefore the biggest and strongest, and therefore they received preferential treatment from coaches looking to build competitive teams. Each year their greater experience and skill due to the previous year’s preferential treatment led to more preferential treatment, et cetera. These advantages added up over the years until they became professional athletes.
If we assume that a person’s minority status prevented them from getting any breaks early on, it makes sense that people would want to give them preferential treatment after the fact to make up for it. Those people would not assume that their current lack of skill represents an innate lack of talent. Continue reading →
“This is the poisonous heart of CRT: that white people, by virtue of merely existing, are all morally problematic and always will be. Even if all the systems have been repealed. Even if you’d never racially discriminate yourself. Even if you spent your life fighting racism. That is why Bond called the Abolitionist movement indistinguishable in terms of its racism from the KKK! Why? Because whites are only ever whites…Absorb that for a moment. This foul race essentialism, this view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others. It’s being used to make even more money for rich white people, to provide some elite whites with a weapon to destroy their career rivals, and to help build a new racial spoils system that leaves any notion of colorblindness or individual rights behind.”
—Blogger Andrew Sullivan, after being metaphorically mugged on comic Jon Stewart’s new TV show on an episode titled “The Problem With White People,” where Stewart and another guest called him a white supremacist.
If Sullivan’s substack newsletter were Ethics Alarms, his intense post called “The Trouble With Jon Stewart” would be tagged as a “Popeye,” as in “That’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”
Andrew is at heart a moderate conservative and an intellectual. He started playing a progressive on TV when he decided to elevate being gay above all of his other priorities and values, but he wore the mask uncomfortably. A wonderful writer, Sullivan had never aimed both barrels of his solid knowledge and logic at the George Floyd Freakout and the resulting rush to embrace anti-white racism in the schools, private sector and government, but apparently his mugging at the hands of Stewart, and especially Stewart’s woke guest Lisa Bond, a white woman who runs an organization called Race2Dinner that charges other white women $2,500 per dinner to be harangued for their racism, was a tipping point. (You gotta admire her entrepreneurial brilliance for that one! P.T. Barnum would be proud of her.)
As Bruce Willis would have said to Sullivan in the actor’s better days, “Welcome to the party, pal!” Continue reading →
There is nothing discriminatory, bigoted, ant-gay, anti-trans or unethical in the “Parental Rights in Education Bill’ signed into law by Florida Governor Jim DeSantis. Have you read it, or just relied on the hysterical and dishonest characterizations of the bill by the news media and woke activists like the three Oscar co-hosts, who chanted “Gay, gay,gay, gay!’ like four-year-olds in supposed bold and hilarious defiance of what progressives have been calling the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Read the law. It doesn’t prohibit saying “gay” at all (the word doesn’t appear in the law), and as unfortunately vague as the wording sometimes is, no fair interpretation would find that it inhibits free speech.
Here is the closest wording in the bill to an “anti-LGBTQ” provision, in Section 3, page 4:
3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
The Horror. Only the most committed and unhinged gay activist could find that provision problematic, and the fact that so many progressives do is signature significance: they lave lost touch with common sense and reality. The law isn’t anti-gay, it’s pro-parent (and student). Any parents who really think their 4-8 year olds need to be trained in human sexuality are welcome to do it themselves. I would not want my child introduced to those topic by kindergarten through third grade teachers, even if I had the opportunity to closely examine the teachers’ qualifications for doing so and the way it would be done. This is not their job, and no, I wouldn’t trust them to take it on if it were. They have a hard enough time teaching language, arts, math, science and history. I don’t trust them to teach ethics. Continue reading →
Yes, Rob Reiner, son of the late, great Carl and director of some of my favorite movies (“The Princess Bride,” “Stand By Me”…) as well as a serviceable character actor when he’s got good material, and one of the most combative and seemingly immune from reality of all Hollywood progressives, tweeted that today.
I was, earlier today as I watched the chaos at the border start exploding again, saw the latest price of coffee at the CVS, and reflected on Joe Biden’s sage recommendation to deal with the gas prices that he is at least partly responsible for (get a $60,000 electric car) going to again express my amazement on Ethics Alarms regarding the people on my Facebook feed, in polls, and a few other locales where Facts Don’t Matter, who still adamantly claim that President Biden is doing a wonderful job. At what? What is it they are so pleased with? The crime? The inflation? The worsening societal divisions? The government’s embrace of sexualizing and racializing education below the age of 12? His government using agents in the private sector to chill free speech and the freedom of association? The looming nuclear war? The mask mandates? The casual racial and sexual discrimination? The exploding national debt? Something else? Which?
And then I saw “The Meathead’s” tweet, as well as the 52.7 “loves” it attracted, and all I could think of was poor Dana..
This is April 1. The tweet would be a deft April Fool’s joke, except that the tweeter is Reiner, who never says a cross word about any Democrat (except Senators Manshin and Sinema, whom he views as traitors), especially Joe Biden. Do those “loves” come from people who think he’s being satirical, and thus slyly critical? Do they come from people who actually agree that Biden is having a successful—SUCCESSFUL??—Presidency? (You know…Morons.)
All I could hear was Wilford Brimley’s voice echoing through my brain, in his iconic scene from “Absence of Malice”: “Mr. Gallagher, are you that smart?” Except in this case, it’s “Mr. Reiner.” Is he so smart that he sent off this tweet knowing that could plausibly claim it was an April Fools joke if someone made the easy case that the tweet was idiotic, and made many of the people who read it even dumber than they are, yet at the same time he could pander to the hopelessly biased knee-jerk partisans in Hollywood and elsewhere who will cheer anything Biden does, thus maintaining Carl’s son’s woke credentials?
Could he possibly be that smart?
I don’t think so. I think he’s a deluded, Trump-deranged, fool.
