I had momentarily forgotten that the blog hits its non-holiday traffic nadir during the so-called “dog days of summer,” which officially occur between July 3 and August 11 every year. I am optimistic that the many looming issues out there along with EA’s loyal and alert commentariat can fight the tide a bit.
We shall see…
I’ve mentioned this toxic phenomenon before, but yesterday I was in Hell. While walking Spuds and driving I saw 14 pedestrians striding along staring at their phones. Three were walking their dogs, and paying no attention to them. One was pushing a baby carriage.
In contrast, I saw only nine adults who were not staring at their phones.
The phenomenon is one of many that is isolating members of society, crippling social skills, undermining the interaction between strangers and neighbors, and giving social media and remote communication an outsized influence over society and the culture. We paved the way for it with such developments as the Sony Walkman, now, if self-isolation and absorption in public isn’t a social norm, it is rapidly becoming one.
Is the conduct unethical? It is tempting to argue that it hurts no one but the phone screen addict, though that definitely doesn’t apply to those behaving like this while caring for dogs, babies and children (or crossing the street). The counter argument would be Kant’s Universality Principle: would we want a world where everyone walks through the world oblivious to everyone and everything but their phone? Well, that’s what we are on the way to creating.
The ABA Journal reports that Waco, Texas, Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley objects to performing same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs, and makes such couples seek to get hitched elsewhere. Now she is claiming that her stance is supported by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis. That one, I’m sure you recall, declared that it was “forced speech” and a violation of a web designer’s First Amendment rights to require her to create websites for same-sex weddings.
The Texas’ State Commission on Judicial Conduct slapped Hensley with a public warning for refusing to perform same-sex weddings. Hensley filed a lawsuit against the Commission in December 2019, but it was dismissed. Now she is appealing, using the new SCOTUS decision as her ammunition.
The coverage of the recent rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard almost universally created the impression that they were further attacks on democracy by a rogue Supreme Court, foiling the will of the people. In particular, these decisions blocking institutionalized institutional racist discrimination, which is what higher education affirmative action is, were assailed as creating disastrous hurdles to black Americans as they strive to succeed in this nation plagued by systemic racism.
Two recent polls show that this narrative was fake news from the news media and misinformation from the Left. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that 65% of “Likely U.S. Voters” approve of the rulings, with 49% approving “strongly”. Just 28% disapprove of the conclusion that the prohibition on discriminating by race means no discrimination by race. You can read how the questions were posed here. Another poll from YouGov/The Economist asked “Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action?” Both sexes, all races, every age group, and every level of income approved more than not. (See here.)
Yeah, I know: polls. In this case, however, these easily manipulated surveys perform a service. The Supreme Court’s function does not and should not involve following the mob, but appealing to mob emotions has been a central strategy by progressives as they seek to de-legitimize the one branch of the government they don’t control. An accompanying myth is that the Roberts Court is an obstacle to “the will of the people,” even when, as in this case, the will of the people is supported by the Constitution and our laws.
Even after a concerted and ongoing effort to inflict Marxist goals, racial quotas and “good” discrimination on the culture, our core values have stood up to the propaganda siege—so far.
There is hope.
Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.
Much as I hate to give attention to rule-breaking visitors here who get themselves banned, I need to clean this up.
Yesterday a former commenter who who was banned years ago returned with a semi-reasonable comment, and I, mixing up screen names, unwittingly welcomed him back thinking he had been AWOL rather than banned. That was my fault; I apologized upon discovering it, and in penance, left up the couple of comments he had left thinking that I had relented, here.
I also informed him—that’s “Chris”— that no further comments of his would remain on EA going forward. Nevertheless, he dumped more comments on other posts today, and also inspired a couple of other banned commenters to invade.
When I spam banned commenters’ attempts to sneak back on, any replies legitimate commenter make to them vanish as well. I know it is easy to miss the ban announcements, as I can’t place them on every post. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Now back to work…
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politico that the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? And it’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
Baseball legend and Cincinnati Reds icon Johnny Bench was in attendance over the weekend at a Reds news conference announcing that former Reds general manager Gabe Paul, among others, was being inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame. Paul, who died in 1998, was represented by his daughter, Jennie Paul. As part of the event, Pete Rose alluded to his first contract negotiation with Paul when Rose was just out of high school.”Gabe Paul signed me to a contract for 400 bucks a month,” Pete recalled, prompting Jennie Paul to say, “That cheap? Never mind!”
Rose’s long-time team mate Bench then shouted out, “He was Jewish!” (Gabe Paul was, indeed, Jewish.) The next day, Bench apologized, saying “I recognize my comment was insensitive. I apologized to Jennie for taking away from her father the full attention he deserves. Gabe Paul earned his place in the Reds Hall of Fame, same as the others who stood on that stage, I am sorry that some of the focus is on my inappropriate remark instead of solely on Gabe’s achievement.”
For her part, Paul’s daughter said she hadn’t heard Bench’s gaffe.
I’ve been thinking about when Bench’s comment would have been appropriate, if ever. If he were Jewish it would have been an insider self-mocking joke: would it be acceptible than? If Paul were alive, in the room, and surrounded by nothing but close friends accustomed to “busting each others’ chops,” like Clint Eastwood’s character in “Gran Torino” when he’s trading ethnic insults with his pal the barber, would it be acceptable? Clearly Johnny’s outburst in the actual situation must have been one of those things that pops out of one’s mouth and you immediately want to stuff it back in again.
Should anyone think less of Bench because of this incident?
[In the original version of this post I confused readers by forgetting to erase pieces of the source article that I had pasted to the draft to save me the time of jumping back and forth between screens. My fault. Then I compounded the problem by leaving out the link. Fixed. It was all my fault; can’t blame WordPress this time.]
What a moron.
But then if criminals were smart, we’d be in even more trouble than we are…
Lady Gaga promised to pay a $500,0000 reward for the return of her two kidnapped French Bulldogs Gustav and Koji (two of the three above: sorry, I don’t know which). The pop icon’s dogwalker was shot and injured during the theft. Emulating the plot twist in the Mel Gibson thriller “Ransom,” however, one of the participants in the kidnapping scheme decided to collect the reward, arguing that because Gaga had said she would pay for the dogs’ return “no questions asked,” she was obligated even to pay someone who was involved in the crime.
Seeking the outlandish reward, Jennifer McBride was arrested when she turned in the dogs at a police station. She pleaded no contest to knowingly receiving stolen property and was sentenced to probation. I suppose the scheme was to have her collect the reward and split it with the dognappers.
After Lady Gaga warbled, “You’ve got to be kidding!’ when McBride asked for the money, McBride sued her for breach of contract.
Uh, no.
In rejecting the claim, Judge Hollie J. Fujie of Los Angeles Superior Court cited the ancient “unclean hands doctrine,” which holds that a litigant cannot benefit from a situation he or she deliberately helped to bring about by illegal or unethical conduct.
“The unclean hands doctrine demands that a plaintiff act fairly in the matter for which he seeks a remedy,” Fujie wrote, adding that the UHD “is an equitable rationale for refusing a plaintiff relief where principles of fairness dictate that the plaintiff should not recover, regardless of the merits of their claim.”
Yes, those are “the Seven Dwarfs” of “Snow White and” fame, according to our national steward of childhood fantasy and iconic fables, the Disney Corporation. That photo is smoking gun evidence of insanity, a production shot from the upcoming live action version of the 1937 movie that made Walt Disney’s artistic vision a cultural force, now retitled “Snow White.” Of course Snow White is going to be Snow Of Color, as the actress playing the German fairy tale princess is Latina Rachel Zegler, who has already embraced the company’s current “screw tradition, common sense and legacy” attitude by tweeting, “Yes I am Snow White; no, I am not bleaching my skin for the role.”
You do recall why Snow White was called Snow White, right?
Ethics Alarms 