The forum, ironically enough, is RealClear Science, and the author is Sarah Wild, a South African science journalist and author. It may help to know that she hails from Undark, an e-mag that purports to to “explore science in both light and shadow, and to bring that exploration to a broad, international audience.” Should I be suspicious of the magazine because Charles M. Blow is on its board? No…but I am.
The article is incompetent structurally because it doesn’t begin to explain exactly what the “murky ethics issues” are until about half way through a very long article, and it’s hard to read when one is asleep. Even after the issues are drip-drip-dripped out, it is never made clear by the author what established ethical principles are involved. The ethics issue of scientists taking bones of unidentified people from burial sites in other nations has always been, for me, an ick vs. ethics controversy. The original owners of the bones are not harmed in any way, and if those individuals’ families aren’t aware of the whereabouts of the remains and have taken no steps to assert control over them, they are not harmed either. Continue reading →
“Seinfeld” fans remember Jerry’s Uncle Leo, whose trademark was an over-enthusiastic, “Hel-LO!” The recurring character was played by the late Len Lesser, an obscure Hollywood bit player until the “Seinfeld” gig made him a familiar face. Well, I was watching “Bells Are Ringing,“ the 1960 film version of the hit Broadway musical known for the standards “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over” (one of my Mom’s favorite songs), on TCM. The film is a reminder of just how luminous Judy Holliday was; she had won the Tony for playing the musical’s starring role on Broadway, and attention should be paid. Tragically, his was her last movie—during filming she was fighting the cancer that eventually killed her —-and I don’t know if there has ever been a female musical comedy star of greater range and presence. Anyway, there’s a number in the film where Judy tells Dean Martin that New York’s grim mass of humanity during rush hours will thaw if strangers only say “hello” to each other. Dean is skeptical, but he tries it on a dour-looking man waiting in the mob, whose face instantly breaks into a brilliant smile at the greeting. “Hel-LO!” the man responds to a surprised Dino, and soon everyone is happily saying hello to each other. You guessed it: the dour-looking man was played by “Uncle Leo” himself, Len Lesser. His catch phrase in “Seinfeld” was a deliberate reference to that bit, one of the very few memorable moments in the elderly actor’s career.
This is really a long introduction to a different point: I get a lot of ethics ideas from watching old movies. For example, I watched 1967’s “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,“ one of schlockmeister Roger Corman’s few films with an A-list cast and a big budget. The film’s solemn narrator is uncredited, but he is obviously meant to make the casual audience member think it’s Orson Welles. It wasn’t Welles, however: it was master vocal artist Paul Frees, who had a great, and often used, Welles impression. I assume he was uncredited so no one would realize that the narrator wasn’t the weighty Welles, but the voice of Boris Badinov from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”
I don’t know how Corman got away with this.
1. Ah, the accurate, trustworthy news media. Reuters reports, “A South African military plane crash-landed on Thursday at the Goma airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a U.N. spokesman said….two sources at the airport, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there did not appear to be major damage to the plane.”
Here’s the plane:
2. Apparently the Democratic Party’s strategy regarding the economy is to just flagrantly lie about it. “The U.S. economy is working just fine for people like me. But it is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans,” Mike Bloomberg said this week. That counter-factual statement echoes Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders…pretty much the Democratic field, and it is demonstrably false.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s monthly Wage Growth Tracker shows that Americans in the lower wage brackets are making more money, and at a better rate than they have for a very long time. Here’s a graph: Continue reading →
People appear to be going nuts….in many cases, the exact same people who have, in the recent past, pressed Impeachment/Removal Plan E, ”Trump is mentally ill so this should trigger the 25th Amendment.” Ironic.
This week I stumbled across a comedy now playing on Netflix starring Stephen Yeun, most memorably seen on “The Walking Dead” with half his head caved in and his eyeball hanging out. The movie is called“Mayhem,”and is about a kind of flu that removes people’s impulse control, causing them to do and say whatever they feel like doing or saying, no matter how inappropriate or illegal. The illness strikes a BIgLaw firm, which is quarantined and locked down while its employees go bananas. It’s an excellent metaphor for what is going on right now, but much funnier.
And so far, at least, bloodier.
So far.
1. And now for something completely stupid...Even after being warned at the Golen Globes by Ricky Gervais that they know nothing about the real world and should avoid making political pronouncements, Best Actor winner Joaquin Phoenix announced after the award show that in order to help save the planet from climate change, he would wear the same tux to all the awards shows this year. He really said that. No, seriously, he really did, and he was not engaging in satire (but if the Babylon Bee used that as a story, everyone would assume it was satire.) Then designer Stella McCartney company, also apparently seriously, tweeted (because that tux the actor will be wearing is one of theirs), “This man is a winner… wearing custom Stella because he chooses to make choices for the future of the planet. He has also chosen to wear this same Tux for the entire award season to reduce waste. I am proud to join forces with you.”
I’ve worn the same tux for ten years. Phoenix doesn’t even pay for his tuxes (I pay for mine!), like his female colleagues who get their designer gowns free. There have been some funny jokes about the actor’s ridiculous virtue signaling, many involving underwear, but never mind: what I want to know is, how can anyone take people who think like this seriously, or respect anyone who solemnly nods when they hear about such pompous nonsense, “Hey, right on, man. Save the planet”? Yet a substantial chunk of an entire political party appears to be this far gone.
2. Wait—are they trying to make our heads explode like those robots and computers that Captian Kirk would destroy by making them think about a contradictory statement? Is that their plan? I admit: I don’t understand this at all. A “Saved by the Bell” reboot, sequel, whatever you want to call it, is on the way. Starring original stars Mario Lopez (who now hosts celebrity gossip shows) and Elizabeth Berkley (whose career never recovered from her starring in the camp classic “Showgirls,” the plot sounds nauseatingly ‘woke,” as it involves now California Govetnor Zack Morris (the gown up character in the original played then by Mark Gosselaar, who actually has a career and doesn’t need to stoop this low) being criticized for closing too many low-income high schools, so he announces that the affected students will be sent to the highest-performing schools in the state, including his old stomping grounds, Bayside High. Hilarious! I smell a hit! But here’s the beauty part: playing the role of the cutest, most popular cheerleader at Bayside, the role originally played by Tiffany Amber Thiessen, will be played by Josie Totah, a transgender female ( transgender male? I’m still unsure of the right terminology. She began life as a male). Isn’t this just a stunt? On one hand, I’ll fight to the death for the right of any actor to play any role, wear any make-up, use any device, as long as the vehicle itself doesn’t suffer. On the other hand, by casting a transgender actress who has made a point of publicizing her biological origins, the production guarantees that nobody will be able to watch “Lexi” without thinking about things that have nothing to do with “Saved by the Bell.” Continue reading →
Track with me ,if you will, the fevered discourse of some poor social justice warrior named Stephen Galloway, who authored what apparently is intended as a serious critique in the Hollywood Reporter titled, “The Whiteness of ‘Toy Story 4.”
He begins,
Was there any movie this past year as exuberantly entertaining, as creatively conceived as Toy Story 4? Ever since the franchise was launched in 1995, it’s been a cornucopia of riches, from its indelible characters to its unparalleled animation…The picture … left me in awe.
Well, that’s the end of the matter, isn’t it? It should be. This was, the the other three films, a vehicle of entertainment. Virtually everyone who saw it was entertained, even me, and I found it the least of its three predecessors and annoying for its blatant pandering to feminists (Bo Peep suddenly morphed into Lara Croft).
But alas, no..
So why did a slightly bitter taste linger, a sense that something was naggingly wrong? Because in many ways TS4′s worldview seems like an Eisenhower-era fantasy, a vision of America that might have come from the most die-hard reactionary: lovely if you’re wealthy and white, but alarming if you’re black or brown or gay or a member of any other minority — in other words, more than half the U.S. population.
Oh, bite me. The characters are toys. Toys don’t have races. They don’t have sex. I wonder if a single child saw this film and spent one second wondering about why there wasn’t a gay or Hispanic toy, or thought about whether the Potato Heads are “of color,’ being brown, or if “Bunny,” voiced by African-American actor Jordan Peele, is “of color” because he’s blue. Nobody normal, of any age, thinks like that, unless they have been brain-washed into a miserable world view….like the author, who really complains that one of the new characters is “a very white fork.” Oh! Right! The second I saw “Forkie,” I thought, “Another white guy!” Continue reading →
Nobody seriously disputes the fact that Iran has been waging an undeclared war against the U.S. for many years, depending on American aversion to the short and long term results of a military response, particularly among the Left’s permanent anti-military lobby in the U.S. The apotheosis of this strategy was Obama’s virtual capitulation in 2015, in which Iran received seized assets and secret “pallets full of cash,” while the U.S. received hostages illegally held by Iran and a dubious promise not to prepare to nuke Israel for a while. Iran has been playing the role of a small child abusing a larger, stronger rival, confident that any retaliation would be seen as bullying.
The United States and the world is always safest when the man in the White House is deemed capable of using the arsenal within his command as the deterrent it was built to be. This is one reason why Ronald Reagan was able to win the Cold War. For all the Left’s criticism of the war in Afghanistan, the alternative to forcefully retaliating for the attacks of 2001 would have been confirmation that the United States was a “toothless tiger,” weak, and cowardly, unwilling to defend itself and its citizens. Such a perception would have been dangerous, encouraging more terrorism, and more attacks.
As General Petraeus explained,
“Suleimani was …responsible for providing explosives, projectiles, and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition and Iraqi partners just in Iraq, as well as in many other countries such as Syria…. [Trump’s] reasoning seems to be to show in the most significant way possible that the U.S. is just not going to allow the continued violence—the rocketing of our bases, the killing of an American contractor, the attacks on shipping, on unarmed drones—without a very significant response.”
Why yes, I’d say that’s a reasonable interpretation of what happened, and hallelulia for that! Iran has responded in a manner that reveals its essential madness and barbarism, putting a bounty on President Trump’s head, and doing its familiar “American Satan” routine that we have been treated to since President Jimmy Carter cowered inertly in the White House after Iran kidnapped 52 of our diplomats and embassy personnel more than 40 years ago. Continue reading →
Colin Kaepernick was metaphorically taking a knee on Twitter yesterday. He wrote, referring to the killing of Qassem Soleimani,
…and later…
Kaepernick’s words and conduct mark him as a narcissistic, ignorant, America-hating, race-baiting idiot. That’s what he is, other than a washed-up pro athlete whose erudition began and ended with a fake college degree (his major, amusingly, was business management) while he prepared to play pro football. His irresponsible kneeling stunt cost the NFL millions, launched multiple divisive offspring, denigrated the nation and its police, and accomplished nothing positive, in large part because it was incoherent.
Never mind: Nike, exhibiting the amoral and ethics-free motivations that have long characterized most corporations, pandered to the woke, hateful and dumb by making Kaepenick the face of its latest “Just do it!” campaign, a 30 year old slogan that was always stupid, even by corporate slogan standards. Admittedly, a stupid slogan is a good bet to appeal to the people who will pay ridiculous amounts of money for sneakers, but even so: Just do what? Just jump out a window? Just set your face on fire? Just sexually assault that attractive woman at work? Just shoot off your mouth about matters you are painfully ill-informed about? Continue reading →
Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam has begun the process of removing Virginia’s statue of Robert E. Lee from the U.S. Capitol, where each state has a statue of two state heroes. Ethics Alarms has been uncompromising in opposing the progressive movement to remove the statues of figures past generations admired and believed worthy of memorials and honors because of their achievements. The phenomenon is the essence of the deplorable “cancel culture,” where any transgression or past conduct viewed as repugnant in the light of “presentism” or political correctness is treated as justification to airbrush their lives out of our culture and history. Slaveholding has been the ultimate trigger for such airbrushing, even when the individuals being erased made crucial contributions to our nation. That criteria endangers our Founders like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, without whom our nation would not exist.
Lee, of course, is the fulcrum of this battle. The Confederate icon has long been admired for his character, loyalty and courage, as well as his brilliance as a military strategist. As the Confederacy has increasingly been regarded as fighting for slavery by modern historians (though it’s more complicated than that), Lee’s own sin of owning slaves is increasingly see as being compounded by his role in fighting to preserve the process, and committing treason to do it. Continue reading →
I don’t know about you, but I feel like everything’s been one big, holiday/stress/disruption blur since I enlivened Thanksgiving dinner by keeling over. There should be law preventing Christmas and New Years from falling on Wednesdays, which effectively kills two full weeks. I’m behind on everything, and I don’t know what I could have done to avoid it…
1. Sigh. This is what we have to look forward to in 2020…Ezra Klein, the Left-biased Washington Post journalist who founded Vox, which he then staffed with all Left-biased journalists, tweeted out the link a nine-month-old Post article stating as fact that counties hosting Trump rallies saw massive spikes in hate crimes compared to counties that didn’t host Trump rallies. By Wednesday afternoon, Klein’s tweet had been re-tweeted more than 7,000 times and had more than 14,000 likes. It also polluted many Facebook feeds.
Klein didn’t tell his 2.5 million followers that the article relied on a study that had been debunked months ago by Harvard University researchers Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton. “The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway,” they revealed in in Reason magazine four months ago. That’s four. 4. IV. F-O-U-R.
Lilley and Wheaton tried to replicate the original study—if a study is valid, you can do that. They discovered that “adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate crimes to vanish. “Given how little scrutiny was required to reveal the flaws in the thesis that Trump rallies cause hate incidents, one cannot help but wonder whether its viral status was aided by journalists predisposed to believe its message,” the researchers noted.
Ya think?
Klein’s tweet is still up. It’s false and inflammatory, but it advances one of the key Big Lies (that would be #4), so he is running with it anyway. Do you wonder why those on opposite sides of the partisan divide have different views of reality? This kind of thing is a primary reason.
Enemy of the people.
2. The first “I don’t understand this story at ALL” of 2020:
In July 2018, Michael J. Reynolds. a New York City police officer, was in Nashville for a three-night bachelor-party trip with six other officers. At one point in the festivities, Reynolds, who is white, kicked in a black woman’s door in a drunken rage, threatening her (“I’ll break every bone in your neck…”) and her sons while calling them “niggers” and showering them with obscenities. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 15 days in jail with three years’ probation after pleading no contest to four misdemeanors, court records show. Nevertheless, he remains an employee of the N.Y.P.D. More than 10,000 people signed an online petition demanding his dismissal and supporting the woman whose home he invaded.
Theories? Never mind unions, due process and mandatory investigations: the incident took place a full year and a half ago. There is no excuse for this. Reynolds apologized and said that he was so drunk he doesn’t remember the episode. Oh! Then that’s OK, Officer! Let’s all forget the whole thing!
As it habitually does, the New York Times reached a false analogy, writing,
The case of Officer Reynolds is again focusing scrutiny on the pace of the Police Department’s disciplinary process. In a prominent example of how it can drag on, five years passed before Officer Daniel Pantaleo, whose use of a prohibited chokehold contributed to the 2014 death in police custody of Eric Garner, was fired and stripped of his pension benefits in August.
Ridiculous. There were legitimate issues involved in Pantaleo’s case that made the proper discipline in his case complicated and controversial. There are no reasons for controversy here. Continue reading →
“The people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing.”
South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg in 2011, disgracing himself and betraying the trust of the a group of students who trusted him to tell them the truth. Instead, he made them ignorant while encouraging disrespect and distrust of the Founders, an especially sinister component of the Democratic effort to undermine the Constitution and to “remake” America.
I reluctantly concluded that Buttigieg was, to be indelicate, an asshole almost exactly a month ago, after he returned the contributions of two lawyers who represented Justice Kavanaugh when Buttigieg’s party was attempting to destroy him using an unsubstantiated and conveniently recalled alleged episode when he was in high school. With Buttigieg, unlike, say, Joe Biden, I assume he is educated and intelligent, and thus I knew that this was dishonest grandstanding. Mayor Pete knows that lawyers do not personally endorse those they represent, even if much of the public does not. Worse, in justifying his actions, Buttigeig’s campaign declared that Justice Kavanaugh was guilty of sexual assault. I wrote,
Buttigieg rejects fairness, due process, logic and decency to declare a Supreme Court Justice with a history of impeccable professional and personal conduct guilty of a crime without evidence, and further impugns the lawyers who helped protect him from a vicious political attack, all to suck up to the worst elements of the Democratic base. This issignature significance. Pete Buttigieg is an asshole. Good to know.
It’s also good to know that my assessment in November was accurate, as this re-surfaced episode confirms, and that the mayor didn’t just recently become an asshole as he pursued the Presidency (an occupational hazard) but has been one all along.
[This is the successor to a completed post that WordPress, for some reason, deleted beyond recovery when I hit “publish” at about 6:30 am today, thus robbing me of 90 minutes of my life and nearly my sanity. My inclination was to let it stay in cyber-hell and forget the whole thing, especially since the viewership here has similarly vanished lately and I feel like I could be more productively catching up on my “Everybody loves Raymond” episodes, but that would be petulant.]
There are a lot of dots to connect, but it shouldn’t be hard for the unbiased and attentive. I know they are out there, even if the Democratic Party is certain they are not.
So here are the dots…Let’s begin with the attack against a group of Jews celebrating Hanukkah at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York over the weekend. Grafton Thomas used a machete-like blade, and stabbed five celebrants.
The attack, which officials said began after 10 p.m. this past Saturday, was the 13th anti-Semitic incident in three weeks in the state and the most recent in a string of violence targeting local Jewish communities in the region.
On Friday the 27th, the day before the Monsey attack, Tiffany Harris, like Thomas an African American, was arrested for punching and cursing three Orthodox women awhile shouting, ‘Fuck you you, Jews.’
Harris then was released on her own recognizance, and a day later arrested for another attack.
NYC’s Democrat mayor Bill de Blasio immediately shifted blame and accountability to…well, guess.
You’re RIGHT! He told Fox News, “An atmosphere of hate has been developing in this country over the last few years. A lot of it is emanating from Washington and it’s having an effect on all of us.. Not just the President — I’m saying, but we have to be clear. We need a different tone starting in Washington.”
OK, let’s be clear. The members of “The Squad,” Rep. Tlaib, Rep. Omar, and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, have been making anti-Jewish pronouncements since they were elected in 2018. Many member of the Congressional Black Caucus, including the recent co-chair of the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, have had friendly ties with Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, who regularly refers to Jews as vermin. Maxine Waters has openly greeted Farrakhan with hugs. New York Democrat Thomas Lopez-Pierre’s campaign slogan was stopping “Greedy Jewish Landlords.” A black Trenton, New Jersey City Council Chair used the phrase “Jew me down;” a black Jersey City School board member opined in the wake of the kosher market massacre that Jews for were at fault for living in that neighborhood. The “Women’s Marches,” “resistance” protests all, had the endorsement of Farrakhan, and at one of them speaker Tamika Mallory referred to him as the “Greatest of All Time.”
Demonization of Israel on the left has also contributed to whipping up the people who would ultimately commit these attacks. BDS, a movement calling for Israel’s destruction, is essentially letting people know that Jews have no right to self-determination and as a result, no right to live.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo released this boilerplate:
Nice. Of course, that “zero-tolerance thingy was somewhat undercut by the release of Tiffany Harris into the community. The Governor also has not been a practitioner of inclusion and diversity himself, raising the question of what he means when he uses these words. For example, this year he said in part, “These extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay…if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.” In a similar vein, Cuomo has said that those who do not support same-sex marriage don’t belong in his diverse, inclusive state.
Orthodox Jews do not support same sex marriage.
Finally, an NBC fact-checker tweeted,
This is, I repeat, a fact-checker. Rationalizations are not facts. From the Ethics Alarms list:46.The Abuser’s License: “It’s Complicated”…”The implication is that “yes, this looks bad, but if you knew all of the details, history and considerations, you would understand..If [an act] was unethical, it is important to say so, to make certain that nobody labors under the misconception that it was the right thing to do when they face similar decisions. “It’s complicated” is also lazy…. Complexity doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of seeking the right approach to these matters. “It’s complicated” is an ethics cop-out.
After she was roundly condemned on Twitter, the fact-checker buried the fact of her own bias, taking down the tweet, making her account private, and finally taking down her account.
Observant Americans should be able to connect these dots, though the mainstream media and politicians, counting on the public’s own biases and certain that they can fool all of the people all of the time, will try mightily to spin, obscure, bury and otherwise interfere with accurate perception.
Ethics Alarms 