1. Free the Peshawar tree! Here is a flagrant example of unethical treatment of vegetation. 125 years ago, an inebriated British officer, James Squid, was staggering toward a tree in Landi Kotal, a town near the Torkhan border of Pakistan. Convinced that it was the tree that was moving rather than him as he tried to lean on it for support, Squid declared the tree under arrest. It was then duly chained to the ground, and the chains remain to this day. This plaque tells the tragic tale:
2. Moving on to humans, Greta Thunberg, who just turned 21 and no longer can claim the credulity of extreme youth to excuse her demagoguery, quietly took down her tweet from 2018 quoting a distinguished scientist’s conclusion that the human race was doomed if global warming wasn’t shut down in five years.
3. Is THIS a frivolous law suit? Jonathan Turley thinks so, but I have my doubts. Frustrated New York City Major Eric Adams, beside himself over his charge actually having to live up to its proud status as a “sanctuary city,” announced this week that he is suing bus companies, seeking $700 million in damages for their carrying illegal immigrants into the Big Apple. Turley reminds us that the Biden Administration is flyingthe same scofflaws to New York.
In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,
…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.
Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.
Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”
Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.
Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”
I don’t think so, because I don’t think they are that smart. But if it is deliberate, I have to admit that it’s pretty slick. Unethical, despicable and dangerous, but slick.
Let’s start with Biden’s speech yesterday, described as his first campaign speech of 2024. The Democrats are really going to do it; they really are going to base their whole campaign on Big Lies (and smaller lies) and fearmongering. Biden’s speech was basically “Soul of the Nation” (aka. “The Reichstag Speech”)II. The first time around, it was already the most irresponsible, unfair, and dangerous speech a President of the U.S. has ever delivered. I wrote that the speech signaled the “complete corruption of the Democratic Party for anyone to see who isn’t in an ethics coma.” That was a correct analysis. Nevertheless, Biden, his party and progressives think it “worked,” so now we’ll be hearing it over and over again.
The speech cites “the soul of the nation” almost immediately. It is riddled with lies, familiar ones, like calling the January 6 rioting an “insurrection” (thus telling the legally ignorant that the Supreme Court should obviously allow Democrats to block Trump from running) and saying “Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.” The Bidens attended exactly one such funeral, and it has been reported over and over again that officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke days after the riot, and that there was no indication that his death was related to the events of the 6th. The New York Times issued a false story that they had to retract, and Biden has been citing the misinformation for almost four years.
The whole speech is an attack on Donald Trump and his supporters, massaging and distorting Trumps words repeatedly. Of course we got the spin that Trump said “he’d be a dictator on day one.” That’s pure deceit, as we’ve discussed. Biden said: ”He called and I quote, the terminate, quote, this is a quote, the termination of all the rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the U.S. Constitution should be terminated if it fits his will. Even found in the Constitution, he could terminate.” (That’s a “quote,” mind you!) Here’s the actual quote, from one of Trump’s typical rants on Truth Social a year ago:
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
It was an especially stupid outburst even for Trump, and it begged to be weaponized by the Democrats, but the post was not an assertion that Trump as President could or would “terminate” the Constitution.
“Family, friends, colleagues, students and postdocs, alumni, distinguished guests” [ Gay, C., Harvard Inaugural Address, 2023] and Ethics Alarms readers: “My hope is that” [Gay,C. ‘It’s not my fault!’ op-ed, New York Times, 1/4/23] this open forum will reflect “your own commitment….to the common cause of” [Gay, C., Harvard Inaugural Address, 2023] ethics consideration and exploration, and that “any temptation to use” [ Ormsby, J.; Translator’s Introduction to “Don Quixote” (Project Gutenberg, 1997.] anyone else’s ideas or wording will ” be resisted” [Ibid.] today. Our goal here, after all, is to”question the world as it is and imagine and make a better one” [Gay, C., Harvard Inaugural Address,op.cit.] as we inspire “a new birth of” [Lincoln, A; “Gettysburg Address,” 1863] ethics awareness in our culture.
I’m going to begin this examination of the disgraced ex-Harvard president’s reprehensible op-ed in the Times by arguably “poisoning the well.” I am stating up front that her essay, titled “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” is one of the most self-damning public statements I have ever encountered. Right now I can think of only two examples from the past that even approach it: Richard Nixon’s angry and pitiful “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more” attack on the press when he lost his 1962 bid to become Governor of California, and Hillary Clinton’s deliberate disinformation in defense of her lying husband, when she told Today’s Matt Lauer in 1998 that the Lewinsky scandal was the fault of a “politically motivated” prosecutor allied with a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But Gay’s op-ed is worse, far worse, than either of those. Just a few days ago, I felt sorry for Gay: I imagined her stunning fall to feel like Jackie Robinson would have felt if he had become the trailblazing black man who broke through baseball’s apartheid, only bat .176 and field so poorly that the Dodgers shipped him to the low minor leagues. Gay’s op-ed, however, in its attempt to claim victim and martyr status and to refuse to accept personal responsibility, is the equivalent of that alternate-reality Jackie claiming that the umpires, fans and sportswriters conspired against him. It stands as a decisive indictment not just of her own poor character, but of the ideology and the movement she represents. I have no sympathy with her at all, and Harvard’s selection of her is decisively proven irresponsible and incompetent by her own words.
I’m going to go through the entire, ugly thing, making observations as I try to keep my gorge down. Ready or not, here it comes…
In the wake of Harvard’s DEI president having to resign in disgrace, conservatives are taking a victory lap, progressives are whining or making asses of themselves, and Harvard’s students are breathing a sigh if relief, as their future degrees were being devalued like bitcoin. But before we get to all that, let’s make Barack Obama put his money where is mouth is…
Let’s draft Barack Obama to take over Harvard. Does Obama have the courage of his convictions? Does he possess loyalty to the people and institution who got him where he is today? Is he capable of embarrassment? We can determine all of this and more if the clamor for Obama to be Claudine Gay’s successor becomes loud enough to attract media attention.
Obama has this job for the asking. The Harvard Corporation, which now is seeing its DEI aspirations crumbling before their eyes, is in ethics zugzwang. Their own credibility is shot, as their much-ballyhooed appointment of Gay, already a dean at Harvard, as the first black president there and only the second woman, now looks careless and incompetent. She almost immediately proved that the promotion was the Peter Principle in action, and worse, Harvard’s blue ribbon search committee never vetted her scholarship, which was paltry, inadequate, and sloppy. She is a serial plagiarist. Yesterday it was not only clear that the students were turning against her (and they are a least as leftist as their university overseers), but those mean conservatives at the Washington Free Beacon published evidence of even more plagiarism by Gay after Harvard’s leadership had taken a “Harvard presidents can get away with plagiarism that students can’t” position that was both cowardly and dishonest.
So Gay resigned, proving herself to be an unethical hack in the process by virtually ignoring the academic misconduct issue and blaming her self-fueled ejection on racism. The Harvard leadership then provided an amusing “It isn’t what it is” coda, saying goodbye with a letter calling her all the things she clearly wasn’t, like an effective leader.
Back to the ethics zugzwang: Who can Harvard recruit to succeed Gay that won’t cause more controversy and criticism? Essentially nobody. Harvard faces a challenge to its woke priorities (ideological indoctrination, not superior education, is its mission now, as Ethics Alarms has been pointing for years) flowing from the Supreme Court finding that Old Ivy was discriminating against whites and Asians, so it is almost forced to find another diversity hire like Gay to fight the good fight. Marc Lamont Hill, himself a diversity hire but with the wrong chromosomes, made this clear with a tweet any legitimate scholar would be embarrassed to post (5.5 thousand followers loved it, the morons):
Yet any black woman who is appointed to succeed Gay will look even more like someone hired because of race and gender than Gay did, and worse, she will also be tarred with the rank of second best—to a bad choice. If Harvard appoints a white academic or established leader…
…or, heaven forbid, a Jewish one, Harvard will be seen as a traitor to the cause.
There is only one way out of this mess, and it is delicious: the new Harvard president has to be Barack Obama. Hear me out, now.
The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.
The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.
Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.
Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.
You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.
Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.
In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.
New Year’s is the one holiday that has a single ethics song permanently associated with it: “Auld Lang Syne,” despite the fact that almost nobody knows what the words mean if they know all the words at all. One problem is the title and the phrase, which is best translated as “old time’s sake.” The other is that it shares a text-setting flaw with the National Anthem, beginning with a question. Nothing in the music makes the line “Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?” resonate as a question; if fact, I’m ashamed to admit, for a long time I thought “should” was used in the sense of “if.”
I was stunned to learn recently that singing the song on New Year’s Eve is not an ancient tradition. In fact, the practice as a tradition began in 1929, when bandleader Guy Lombardo needed something to play at the stroke of midnight and chose “Auld Lang Syne” because it had a sentimental vibe and the band knew it. Then Lombardo’s (somewhat whiney, annoying version) continued to be a staple on New Year’s Eve TV broadcast as long as Guy was still kicking.
The full poem, usually attributed to the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) but probably with other contributors, reads,
1. Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
Chorus:
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
2. And surely you’ll have your pint cup! and surely I’ll have mine!
And we’ll drink a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
Chorus:
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
3. We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne.
Chorus:
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
4. We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared since auld lang syne.
Chorus:
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
5. And there’s a hand my trusty friend! And give us a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.
Chorus:
For old times since, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
6. Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne!
The song tells us to remember the good times and not to forget that in the end it is human relationships, good will and kindness that matter most. We should sing in the new year with confidence that whatever happens and whatever it brings, we can endure if only we can keep our priorities straight.
Ethics Alarms 