Lots of bad stuff has happened on April 19, but at dawn on this date in 1776, just about 20 minutes from where I grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, 700 British troops on the way to capture Sam Adams and John Hancock and snuff out the rebellion of the colonists, marched into Lexington. Just 77 minutemen were gathered on the town’s common, Lexington Green, to stop them, having been warned that night by Paul Revere and William Dawes. The Patriots lost the battle, of course, but the Revolution had begun, and the world should be grateful for it. The Green is still there, but it is in the middle of a traffic circle now; it’s hard to imagine that the great American experiment, a nation created to embody ethical values, started in such a place.

1. Madness! Rice is a main food source for about 3.5 billion people, but some of the climate change cultists want it banned. The AFP News Agency posted a video on Twitter that argued, “Rice is to blame for around 10 percent of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades, traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Scientists say that if the world wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rice cannot be ignored.” This is, of course, bonkers, though whether it is more or less bonkers than the climate change fanatics insisting that we stop eating meat and start learning to like bugs is a matter of, uh, taste. After Legal Insurrection flagged the video, those who thought it would be persuasive propaganda had second thoughts, and this is all that remains today:

Remember: this is a cult. Causing a famine and widespread death and suffering to “save the planet” is a necessary trade-off to such fanatics.

2. Someone needs to explain to Biden Administration “historic” and “diversity” hires that they still can’t get away with embarrassing the government. Well, they can’t count on it, anyway. Kayla Denker is a transgender activist who U.S. Forest Service and tweeted a video showing her with a gun accompanied by the message, “While advocating for trans people to ‘arm ourselves’ is not any kind of a solution to the genocide we are facing, I do want to say that if any of you transphobes do try to come for me I am taking a few of you with me.” Then a trans ex-student shot up a Nashville Christian grade school, and the tweet went “viral.”

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“Some arguments aren’t worth engaging with, and quite frankly are dangerous for even existing. ..The burden is not on us to talk our mouths dry and educate others, and frankly it is past the point of being an intellectual challenge. It’s an insult to our personhood, experience and rights to have to hold some of these “debates.” …Abort the conversation.”

—Yale Daily News columnist Bianca Nan, in her essay rejecting the concept of civil discourse and debate among students on issues she has made up her mind regarding what the “right” answer is.

20 years old, after nearly three years of education at one of the nation’s elite institutions of higher learning, and this is what Bianca Nan has learned. Not only is she and her ideological clones right about a wide range of political and social issues, but it is a waste of time to even listen to differing views and debate their validity, because such points of view are inherently dangerous and not worthy of debate.

What issues does she consider so settled and self-evident to right-thinking people that her virtuous and superior viewpoint cannot and should not be challenged? Not just abortion, though that is certainly one: she writes,

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April 15 is one of the more momentous dates in history, and not just history, but ethics history:

• Abraham Lincoln died in the early morning hours of April 15, 1865, after being shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth.
• ” The Titanic” sank in 1912, killing more than 1500 passengers and crew, with almost too many ethics-related episodes to count, from the head of the White Star lines grabbing a seat in a lifeboat while many of America’s rich and famous stayed on board to allow “women and children first,” to the negligence and hubris that led the ship’s owners and captain to allow an inadequate number of life boats, to the so-called “mystery ship” that ignored the “Titanic’s” calls for help while the captain of the “Carpathia” risked his own vessel to race to pick up survivors, and much more, the disaster is one of the richest subjects for ethics discussions of all.
• The Boston Marathon bombing occurred in 2013, as two Muslim brothers planted pipe bombs that killed three of the assembled spectators while injuring 260, many of whom lost limbs. The young men acted, it is now believed, entirely on their own, motivated by “extreme Islamic beliefs.”

The greatest ethical impact of all on this date, however, may have come from Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s apartheid in 1947 by stepping onto Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn and ending 50 years of discrimination in the sport, while establishing an advance in civil rights generally that propelled the crucial movement forward. You know all about Jackie, don’t you? You should; so should your kids, grandchildren, sisters, cousins and aunts. He’s enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and also in the Ethics Alarms Hall of Heroes as an Ethics Hero Emeritus.

Today was Jackie Robinson Day around the MLB ballparks, with every player wearing Robinson’s retired uniform number, 42.

1. What the heck is going on at Newton North High School? Last month, as discussed here, the once-celebrated Boston area high school, got caught racially segregating auditions for the school play, telling white students that their talents were not needed. This month, the same school hosted “Missy Steak,” a drag queen, as she spoke to and sang to students in a 30-minute assembly celebrating of “Transgender Bisexual Gay and Lesbian Awareness Day.” The Boston news media seems to think it is decisive that more supporters of promoting non-conventional sexual behavior in school showed up than protesters. After all, ethics is based on “majority rules,” right?

I see no competent or responsible argument for any sexual behavior to be promoted as part of public education, other than essential law and ethics.

2. What? Justice Alito didn’t automatically side with the radical, loose cannon judge trying to ban abortion pills approved by the FDA? The New York Times reports:

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued an order on Friday temporarily ensuring that a common abortion pill would remain widely available while the Supreme Court considered whether to grant the Biden administration’s emergency request to preserve the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug.

The order was meant to maintain the status quo while the justices studied the briefs and lower court rulings, and it did not forecast how the court would ultimately rule in the most important case about access to abortion since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade last June.

Justice Alito set a brisk schedule for the court’s consideration of the case. His order, an administrative stay, instructed the groups challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of the abortion drug, mifepristone, to file their brief by Tuesday at noon.

The stay itself is set to expire on Wednesday at midnight, meaning the court is very likely to act before then and could in the coming days further curtail access to abortion, even in states where it is legal.

Justice Alito did this because, though he is probably the most conservative member of the Supreme Court who shouldn’t have resigned by now, he still is a competent jurist who knows garbage judging when he sees it. There is no way that Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk‘s unethical ruling will stand; nevertheless, Times SCOTUS reporter Adam Liptak couldn’t resist implying that a judicial restriction on abortion is in the wind. This is pure fear-mongering and partisan manipulation of public opinion.

3. Speaking of the Honorable Judge Kacsmaryk, the Washington Post revealed that as his Senate confirmation hearings for Federal judge approached, he had his name scrubbed from a law review article he had submitted. As part of the confirmation process, Kacsmaryk was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.” The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a conservative legal journal that Kacsmaryk had edited as a law student at the University of Texas. But he did not l list the article for the Senate, obviously feeling his views in it might endanger his confirmation.

He should resign too.