Jill Biden’s Elder (And Former President) Abuse

What an awful human being...

This story is too awful to contemplate. If you have a soul, maybe you don’t want to read it.

Former President Joe Biden was planted in the audience this week at a New York City stop on his wife’s tour promoting “Dr.” Jill’s memoir, “View from the East Wing.” Whoopi Goldberg was moderating the Q and A segment (How’s that career going, Whoop?) when President Biden wandered up to the edge of the stage and said “I have a question.”

“Joe has a question? Like you couldn’t ask it later?” the distinguished author said. Oh, nice! If you didn’t want Joe to embarrass you or himself, why did you place a mentally declining old man in a position where he might do so? Or was he having another “stroke”?

Joe, as he has been for years now, was oblivious. “Who do you love most in the whole world?” what is left of Joe Biden asked. “I love you most, Joe. Was that it? Was that the answer he wanted?,” Jill said to the group, talking about him in the third person as if he were a toddler. The 46th President of the United States stood and blankly faced his wife.

The shell of Joe Biden then said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?,” whatever that means. At least he didn’t say “We beat Medicare.”

How Bonkers Is Woke America’s Obsession With Normalizing The Transgender Fad? This Bonkers:

How far gone does a fanatic have to be to have an event like this and not expect most people to conclude that the organizers are out of their minds? Menstrual equity? Free period underwear?

The event is scheduled for June 17 and supported by Boston Mayor Wu’s “Office of LGBTQ Advancement.” I am solely tempted to do a riff on this, but I’m going to resist. Mayor Wu, who is about as wokey as a human being can get, is really getting away with this somehow. Wow. Talk about pandering to a minority! This may be an all time record.

So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.

Accountability For Ethics Villain Dr. Fauci? It’s Complicated.

I’m proud to say that Ethics Alarms began identifying Dr. Anthony Fauci as the despicable liar and irresponsible hack that he was and is in December of 2020, during the societal lockdown that wrecked my business, helped kill my wife, hobbled children’s education, destroyed whole industries…well, but it let American elect a senile Democrat as President, so it wasn’t all bad, I guess.

In my December 2020 post titled “Ethics Dunce, Rogue And Fool To Be Held Up As An Example Forever More: Dr. Anthony Fauci”, I wrote in part,

“[L]ying is not an option for someone who has been held up for almost a year as the epitome of an expert representing “science,” who must be believed and slavishly obeyed by policymakers because, after all, scientists only convey cold hard facts. If that’s the basis for your authority, if that’s the reason the news media and the President-elect lecturing us about the virtues of obeying experts and following what the “science” says, no matter how difficult, painful and counter-intuitive it might be, then a high profile expert cannot, must not, and dare not announce later that he withheld facts for our own good. That’s not the role that we have been told anexpert fills. Not telling the public the truth for the greater good is a pubic servant’s tool, and one that is perilous to use at best. We do not expect politicians to always tell us the truth, and we even accept the troubling reality that sometimes they may be right not to tell us the truth. As Pelt, the character played by the late Richard Jordan in “The Hunt for the Red October” says,

Listen, I’m a politician, which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies, I’m stealing their lollipops, but it also means that I keep my options open.

“But scientists, we have been told, over and over again, regarding climate change and the pandemic just to name two of the most egregious examples, aren’t politicians. They deal in facts only. They have no agendas, they aren’t shading or outright hiding the truth to manipulate us. We are told this by people arrogantly treating us like children and fools. Oh, you poor ignorant dolts who a skeptical of what these learned, good men and women know!

“Right. Anthony Fauci, the current symbol of the integrity and reliability of science, lied to the public (and probably to policymakers: who can be sure?) by his own admission.

“He cannot be trusted. He can never be trusted. And, having been held up as the unimpeachable representative of experts and science generally, they can’t be trusted either.”

Well before that post, Ethics Alarms (and many commenters here) had taken the position that the lockdown of the schools and the economy was a near suicidal act made politically unavoidable by the teachers unions, the news media and the “experts” who were, like Fauci, asserting dire consequences as “science” when they were in fact only guesses or worse, deliberate lies to advance a partisan agenda. The mask nearly fell off when the same “experts” that insisted that white people avoid groups larger than five declared that there was an exception for George Floyd mobs because, see, racism is a public health threat.

It was, or should have been, so obvious what was going on, but Fauci played saintly doctor beautifully, bolstered by Axis propaganda like this

….to crush anyone who pointed out that shutting down the economy and the schools for a virus that was only more dangerous than the flu to people over 65 is insane.

Now, six years after that headline (I have never trusted The Atlantic since, and never will)—too late for all the millions of victims of the pandemic lies and experts malpractice—the walls may finally be closing in on Fauci.

May.

Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted this week and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded “gain of function” experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started. The five-year statute of limitations runs out on May 11.

“99% of this country has no idea who Morens is,” said Oversight Project President Mike Howell after the indictment was announced. “It’s Fauci that they will blame for one of the worst government catastrophes in history in America. And so the test is Fauci. The Morens indictment is great, and we applaud it. But there are a lot of people out there that want to see Fauci held to account for the damage he wrought. [Fauci] lied about one of the most damaging events in American history routinely and was behind a massive coverup of the key factors,” Howell said.

Verdict: true. The Ethics Villain may avoid accountability anyway, because on his final full day in office, President Joe Biden or whoever was operating his auto-pen issued a blanket pardon to Fauci for “any offenses” dating to 2014. After all, it was Fauci’s lockdown (and the questionable election security that it spawned) that made Biden President. A Fauci indictment would neatly set up a judicial determination if the pardon (and others “Biden” issued) is valid.

Now THAT’S An Unethical Surgeon…

“He eventually removed Mr. Bryan’s liver, thinking it was his spleen. The Health Department noted in its report that, in addition to being on different sides of the abdomen, “spleens and livers are anatomically distinct, have different consistencies, and are different colors.”

This might ssem funny, except that the patient, 70-year-old William Bryan, died. You can’t live without a liver.

The surgeon, Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, has been indicted for second-degree murder. Good! This medical version of a scene in a Marx Brothers movie took place at Ascension Sacred Heart of the Emerald Coast Hospital in Miramar Beach, Florida in August 2024. I must say, I don’t understand the story at all.

Poor Mr. Bryan underwent diagnostic imaging at the hospital on August 18, 2024 that indicated his spleen might be enlarged. There was blood in the membrane lining Mr. Bryan’s abdomen, but no signs of hemorrhaging. Dr. Shaknovsky told the patient that he needed to have his spleen removed, a minimally invasive procedure with a recovery time of up to six weeks. The doctor neglected to tell his patient that he couldn’t tell a spleen from a liver.

It Looks Like The Biden Administration May Have Killed My Wife…

I feel like Mrs. Kintner in “Jaws.”

A Senate investigation confirms that Biden administration officials at the FDA and CDC knew about a significant stroke risk tied to Pfizer’s bivalent Wuhan virus booster in people over 65. They decided not to let the public know about it….might make them hesitant to get the shot, after all. Can’t have that!

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a formal notification letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. along with about 2,000 pages of federal documents. “I am sharing my preliminary findings to provide HHS and the public with even more evidence of the Biden administration’s unsupported and unyielding devotion to a harmful vaccine at the expense of the public’s health,” Rep. Johnson begins.

The letter goes on to described how as early as Nov. 2022, the vaccine safety surveillance systems operated by Biden health officials began detecting statistically significant evidence of “ischemic stroke among individuals age 65 and older following injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster.” They did not issue a formal warning to the public. Instead, the Biden White House and HHS pushed to “increase uptake of the booster” for people 65 years and older. In Jan. 2023, a draft Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “communications plan” emphasized the Biden administration’s intention to “increase uptake of the booster.” White House edits buried the significance of the safety signal, for example, changing a sentence that stated that the “signal is moderately elevated” to the “signal is slightly elevated.”

Even as a safety surveillance system continued to detect a statistically significant safety signal for ischemic stroke, Biden health officials posted on the FDA website that “no change is recommended in COVID-19 vaccination practice.”  While Biden health officials continued to let the public believe the vaccine was safe, they initiated multiple studies and statistical analyses including a “Stroke Project” to investigate whether the vaccines really were safe for the population at risk, and the investigations continued through at least September 2025. 

On The Matter of a Murderer’s Insanity

Conservative pundits seem to be having a problem with the fact that Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., the homeless man who slaughtered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte subway as her fellow riders pretended they were under the sea or something, has been declared incapable of standing trial and prosecutors have delayed his competency hearing by six months.

A horrified conservative writes on PJ Media in part:

“….because soft-on-crime authorities in Charlotte ensured he was always released on cashless bail after his 14 prior arrests, he was free to thrust his knife into a stranger on the subway. Unfortunately, woke medical and legal professionals continue to treat Brown as if he were the victim, a pitiable, crazy man with no responsibility for his actions, rather than as a serial criminal and sadistic killer. The new assessment that Brown is incompetent to stand trial could prevent trying him for the death penalty….”

Ethics Alarms has barely touched on the question of whether not guilty by reason of insanity verdicts (NGBRI) are ethical or even sensible. That’s a big failing, because this is one of the major ethics questions in criminal law, and one that is still unsettled. It may be beyond settling.

“The Ethicist” Slaps Down Manipulative Parenting

I was stunned that this question made it into “The Ethicist” column, but who knows: maybe it was a week light on difficult ethical dilemmas.

A mother who wanted to use Prof Appiah the way ethicists are often used in the consulting world—to back the client’s opinion after that individual has already made up his or her mind—wanted to be able to appeal to the professor’s authority in a family dispute. Her adult son is morbidly obese and she and her husband fear for his health. They want him to go on a chemical weight-loss regimen with Ozempic or the similar drugs, but he keeps getting fatter and fatter. Years ago, they bought a house for the son, and he is paying them back in monthly installments. Their plan is to waive the rest of the payments and give him the house now, but Big Boy’s father wants to condition their generosity on the son agreeing to use the drugs to lose weight.

An under-discussed sub-value on the Six Pillars of Character is autonomy, listed under the RESPECT pillar. That means allowing those we have contact with in out lives autonomy, and not using resources, power or emotional bonds to control the conduct and choices of others. To me, the answer to The Ethicist’s inquirer is an easy call, and I was pleased that his answer tracked with mine exactly.

Professor Appiah wrote,

Oh Canada! The Government Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia Slippery Slope…

@the.free.press

One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program. What’s even more shocking is how fast the deaths are approved.

♬ original sound – The Free Press – The Free Press

It is reassuring to know, at least for me, that the ethics issues EA has been most adamant about continue to inspire the same analysis from me. On the topic of legal human euthanasia (assisted suicide), the position here hasn’t changed since the policy, now legal in Illinois, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey,New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington first began to spread. Gee, I wonder what those states have in common? Oh…right. An ideology that devalues life: that’s today’s progressive movement and its Democratic Party.

This toxic and corrupting culture holds that individual life is not precious, but rather is subordinate to the needs of the many. Letting people kill themselves, or, if necessary, allowing their families and care-givers to let them be killed, costs a lot less than letting the old, sick, depressed and poor try to hold on to every last minute of existence. Masquerading as individual “choice,” the versatile word that encompasses letting mothers snuff out burgeoning young life in their wombs for their convenience and career advancement, the right to have the government kill you quickly metastasizes into a cultural norm where autonomy, courage, fortitude, individualism and reverence for life erodes in the interests of affording a nanny state.

Euthanasia is a straight violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; it also, in cases where the object of this kind of “palliative care” is forced on victims, as it frequently is in Canada, a Golden Rule breach. The only ethical system it can be squared with is Utilitarianism, but only of the most brutal kind that was used as the justification for the mass murders under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

I personally authorized the hospital pulling the plug on my 89-year-old mother when she lapsed into a coma after unsuccessful surgery. My father, who always told us that he would not be a financial or other kind of burden on his family, managed to die during a nap, also at 89, apparently by force of will. My ethical assessment of the Left’s fondness for assisted suicide has been aired frequently on Ethics Alarms, most thoroughly in a series of posts in September of 2019: The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”, and Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll.

In the first post, I wrote, “I believe that permitting an individual to kill another with the victim’s consent is so ripe for abuse—Dr. Kevorkian comes to mind—that it crosses an ethical line that should be thick, black, and forbidding.  The alleged consent of the doomed can too easily be coerced or manufactured for the convenience of others.” That position hasn’t changed one whit.

A Contrarian Ethics Take On “Body-Shaming” Performers

I guess I’ve read too many articles like “Country Star Issues Blunt Response After Being Criticized for Her Appearance: ‘I’m Seething’” Not that I’ve read a lot of articles about country singer Lauren Alaina, yet another star in that genre introduced to the world by “American Idol”: I’ve never heard her, or of her. But I have been reading and hearing performers, particularly women, going into high dudgeon about fans, movie-goers, concert ticket-buyers and others who criticize them regarding their physical appearance, particularly their weight. Apparently Lauren’s furious because a lot of people criticized her weight based on a recent video of her performing. The singer wrote on Instagram in part,

“I’m literally so mad right now. I’m seething…We’ve got to change the way we’re talking about women on social media. We need to retire the obsession with women’s bodies. If you care about the music…talk about the music. If you don’t…. well, that’s fine too.
But this culture of speculating about women’s bodies?
It’s tired. Do better.”

Alana went on to emote about the phenomenon later. “A few weeks ago, I saw a TikTok of me up on stage singing, and all of the comments were about my weight,” she sobbed. “People were saying that my tour needed to be sponsored by Ozempic and just horrible things. It really affected me,” she said. “I am in recovery from an eating disorder that I’ve battled for a very long time. This just really upset me…I have an 8-month-old daughter, and we can’t talk about women this way. This is bull crap. If you’re a woman out there and people are commenting on your body, and saying this, myself included, we’ve gotta ignore that, and we all need to be better. This is crazy.”

“Well allow me to retort!” I say, in my best Samuel L. Jackson impression. (No, I’m not going to shoot her.)