“What’s Going On Here?” Is This Incident Just A Single Teenage Idiot In Love Or Does It Have Larger Cultural Significance?

The time is January 2024. A few minutes after a Carnival Sunrise cruise ship left the port of Miami, Florida for Jamaica, Carnival Cruise Lines received an anonymous email saying: “Hey, I think someone might have a bomb on your sunrise cruise ship.”  This triggered security protocols that involved both the US and Jamaican Coast Guard. More than 1,000 rooms on the ship had to be searched, and were. After a delay of many hours, the ship was ruled safe to sail and continued the cruise.

An investigation eventually traced the email to 19-year-old Joshua Darrell Lowe II of Bailey, Michigan. He confessed to making the false bomb threat, explaining that he was trying to prevent his girlfriend and her family from going on the cruise without him. Though Lowe could have been sentenced to five years in prison, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney this month sentenced him to only eight months behind bars. The judge was apparently impressed by the teen’s letter to the Judge taking full responsibility for his actions, expressing remorse, and apologizing profusely.

There is no question that such an act is unethical as well as potentially dangerous. I am interested in whether our political and popular culture sends messages to the young, impressionable and stupid that this kind of extreme conduct in the name of love or other passionate feelings is admirable.

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CNN Issues Perhaps the Dumbest Factcheck Ever!

Wow. CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez appeared on last night’s episode of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” and attempted to refute President Trump’s assessment of Harvard as a “cesspool of leftist thinking.” (Harvard is, in fact, a cesspool of leftist thinking.) Perez thought he had definitive proof that the representation was false.

“Now, what [the Trump administration] is asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”

Here comes Perez’s brilliant argument: wait for it….

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The Guardian’s Blue Origin Flight Critique: Into The Mind of America Haters, Where No One Rational Has Gone Before!

What a fascinating article from the British hard left tabloid “The Guardian!” Simultaneously taking aim at a legitimate target and exploding into a furious attack on the United States and Donald Trump, it is invaluable for plumbing the depths of how the extreme progressive Left takes in information, filtering it through a confirmation bias to reach false but—for them—comforting conclusions. Stephen Green nailed some of what’s wrong here, “writer Moira Donegan’s utter lack of self-awareness while decrying our lack of self-awareness.” She uses Blue Origin’s all-female passenger flight to as evidence of U.S. decline, but the too-obvious-to-mention reality is that the U.S. has more than one private company capable of putting humans into space, and the crumbling U.K. can’t come close to producing the same.

How can an essay be simultaneously astute and idiotic at the same time? Easy. Donegan accurately writes that for the most part, the high visibility female celebrities taking this expensive joy ride embarrassed themselves and their sex by acting like sorority girls exclaiming, “Like, omigawd! Stars!” Leaving out the gratuitous political shots, Donegan writes in part,

Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic….the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man….There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur…But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness. In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women…but mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said…“Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” “Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

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A Morning “Nelson”! Condign Justice For NY A.G. Letitia James

This story has so much delicious irony to it, I’m afraid to look in the mirror for fear that I have literally turned into Nelson Muntz, the “Simpsons” character who mocks everyone else’s misfortunes.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has referred New York Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice for alleged mortgage fraud. Bill Pulte, director of FHFA alerted U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in part,“Based on media reports, Ms. Letitia James has, in multiple instances falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms…This has potentially included 1) falsifying residence status for a Norfolk, Virginia-based home in order to secure a lower mortgage rate and 2) misrepresenting property descriptions to meet stringent requirements for government backed loans and government assistance.”

You can read the documents here and here. In one case, the Democratic Party hit-woman charged with executing the lawfare against Donald Trump so he couldn’t run for President received a lower mortgage rate by falsely swearing that a home in Norfolk, Virginia would be her “primary residence” when her job as New York’s Attorney General required her to live in that state. In the other, James misrepresented a five-unit property as a four-family unit to receive “a conforming loan through the Freddie Mae/Freddie Mac Form 3033,” which is only available for buildings with four or fewer units. Hilariously, this is the same woman who prosecuted Donald Trump for misleading financial statements, intoning that “No one is above the law.” Perfect!

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Can This “Democratic Norm” Be Saved?

One of the most hackneyed attacks on President Trump is that he violates “traditional democratic norms.” Of course, this is another Democratic Party double standards play: most assertive Presidents ignore some “traditional norms” while forging new ones, and the last Democrati in the White House crushed some surprising traditional norms I thought were secure, like the norm of enforcing immigration laws, and the norm of selecting Cabinet members on the basis of their abilities rather than their EEOC categories, the norm of holding press conferences, the norm of having the elected President actually be the President, and the norm of not dropping out of a re-election campaign once it has begun so the party can install a more promising replacement without the formality of primaries and a democratic nominating process.

A democratic norm that is definitely on death’s door in the Trump Administration is the traditional respect the President has extended to reporters and journalists. Yesterday, President Trump was openly hostile and insulting to CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins when she questioned him in the Oval Office on the deportation of El Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He called her a “low-rated anchor” while insulting her employer, CNN. Passing a question off to Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the President sniped, “Can you just also respond to that question because you know it’s asked by CNN and they always ask it with a slant because they’re totally slanted because they don’t know what’s happening. That’s why nobody’s watching them.” Ouchie! Later in the session, Trump responded to another question about Garcia from Collins by saying, “How long do we have to answer this question? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country’? Why can’t you just say that? Why do you go over and over …and that’s why nobody watches you anymore! You have no credibility.”

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Ethics Villain Taylor Lorenz

“You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”

—–The infamous Ethics Villain Taylor Lorenz, on CNN yesterday, saying (again) how admirable cold-blooded murderer Luigi Mangione is for killing  UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by shooting him in the back.

Ethics Alarms has paid little attention to the unethical rantings of Lorenz, who was fired from the New York Times for publishing slanderous material, hired by the Washington Pots (which has no ethical standards), and now is on her own. The Times once described her as a “talented journalist,” which also tells you all you need to know about The Times. I have put Lorenz in the same metaphorical isolation cell with perpetually unethical pundits like Elie Mystal, Jot Reid and Jimmy Kimmel, “Julie Principle” cases so obviously devoid of decency that 1) they aren’t worth criticizing and 2) they serve as useful markers of a friend’s lack of standards: if he or she can listen to or read what these awful people spew into public discourse without thinking, “Wow, what a lunatic!” said friend is beyond ethics rehab efforts.

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Ethics Quiz: Pronouns Again

The New York Times says that reporters who contact Trump Administration officials to request statements or quotes on significant events or policies do not get a response to their emails if their signature includes their “preferred pronouns.” This has not been officially confirmed as administration policy, but Trump press spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the paper that policy it is, saying, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios. Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.” Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and spokeswoman for the Department of Government Efficiency, answered an inquiry on the topic, “As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts.” Trump’s presidential campaign account on X also claimed, “It is official White House policy to IGNORE reporters’ emails with pronouns in the signature.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is that policy, if that is the policy, fair and ethical?

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Yes, I’d Say Having Sex With a Dead Man on a Subway Train Is Unethical…

A friend who knows me too well sent me this headline. I find the sub-head as fascinating as the main headline. What’s the debate over? If someone can’t even die in New York City without risking being robbed and raped by a stranger, how much more “out of control” can a city be?

Of course, the dead man may have given consent for the suspect to to take his valuable and use him as a blow-up doll as his dying wish. Ya never know…it is New York, after all.

According to the Times report, a man boarded an R train in a Manhattan subway station and at some point died, though the cause and exact time of death are unclear. Another man boarded the same train car at around 11 p.m. n the Financial District, saw the fresh corpse, and began going through the dead commuter’s pockets. Then he began to have sex with the body in, uh, various ways. The scene was captured on surveillance cameras inside the train car. After the romantic liaison was complete, the man got off the train, perhaps because it would have been illegal to enjoy a post-coital cigarette in the car. The corpse reported feeling cheap and abandoned.

Okay, I was fooling about that last part….

Hit it, Blue-Eyes!

Ethics Verdict: The President’s Executive Orders On Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor

This is easy: irresponsible, petty and stupid.

President Trump signed a pair of executive orders directing that there be federal investigations and other sanctions against high-profile administration critics from his first term. The first is former homeland security official Miles Taylor. He’s the jerk who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 boasting about how he and others were working behind the scenes to sabotage the first Trump term. describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who worked to oppose Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and “stolen,” and was was subsequently fired.

In the case of Taylor, the President implied in his remarks that he engaged in “treason,” which is a stretch, to put it lightly. Krebs was fired: that should have been punishment enough. In either case, Trump has bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes, and these orders do nothing to advance his agenda.

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Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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