Few days in American history set the trillions of marbles on the boundary-less billiard table rolling quite as wildly as this one, in 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon could start a chain reaction resulting in a rainstorm in Central Park, imagine what might be different today if the motorcade had taken a different route that sunny day in Dallas. The answer: anything and everything. It’s very likely that there would be no Ethics Alarms, for example, to pick a tiny example at random.

1. Continuing on that theme…a new study from the WeCount coalition, a pro-abortion organization, estimates that the number of abortions nationwide fell by 10,000 in the first two months following the Dobbs decision. According to The New York Times,WeCount found that 22,000 fewer induced abortions were performed in states with pro-life laws in July and August, compared with the baseline beginning in April, before Dobbs. In states where abortion-on-demand remained legal, abortions increased by roughly 12,000, leading to a net decline of 10,000. There were just under 7,400 fewer abortions in August than in June. Extrapolating that figure over 12 months, you nearly 90,000 fewer abortions per year.

What changes in our world, our lives and our future might those 90,000 human beings cause? A President could be among them, or several. A presidential assassin. The next Ted Bundy, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Thomas Edison, Tom Brady, Bobby Orr, Paul McCartney, Bill Russell or Martin Luther King. We don’t know, and will never know. [Pointer: The Federalist]

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No, the winner, and by a lot, was the blather spewed out by the head of the International Federation of Association Football, Gianni Infantino, to justify…well, to mitigate…well, to throw up so much dust that the general disgust at the World Cup being held in Qatar might be forgotten, or at least controlled.

All of the international sports organizations are corrupt, FIFA being among the worst. The soccer organization must have reaped quite a bonanza to take the World Cup to Qatar, which is a miserable human rights abuser, different but almost as despicable as China, where the Olympics allowed those champions of slavery, oppression and pandemic-launching to use the Games as a propaganda platform, just like Adolf in 1936. (The United States should have refused to “play” in both instances.) At a press conference last week, Infantino, defended Qatar against those condemning the Muslim nation for its treatment of immigrants, gays and women, with a flood of terrible analogies, excuses and rationalizations, saying in part:

Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker I feel this, all this, because what I’ve been seeing and what I’ve been told, since I don’t read, otherwise I would be depressed I think. Of course, I am not Qatari, Arab, gay or disabled. But I was the son of a migrant worker, saw their conditions. Not in Qatar, but Switzerland. What I’ve seen brings me back to my personal story. I am a son of migrant workers. My parents were working very very hard in difficult situations. I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. I was bullied for that…. We need to invest in education, to give them a better future, to give them hope. We should all educate ourselves. Reform and change takes time. It took hundreds of years in our countries in Europe. It takes time everywhere, the only way to get results is by engaging […] not by shouting…For what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years around the world we should be apologizing for [the] next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons.

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This is great huminahumina even for the President’s paid liar. Asked directly about growing evidence that President Biden and his family benefited financially from black sheep son Hunter’s influence peddling, Jean-Pierre blathered,

“So, look, uh, you know, um, there’s — there’s some — a little bit of, uh, interesting, uh, you know, kind of, on-brand, uh, thinking here, because, um, you know, congressional Republicans, uh, ran, uh, saying that they were going to fight inflation. Uh, they said they were gonna make that a priority. They were very clear about that these past, uh, several months, and instead, what they’re doing is they’re focusing, uh — you know, they’re focusing — they’re making their top, top priority — they get the majority, and their top priority is actually not focusing on the American families but focusing on the President’s family.”

Wow. It was such an obvious deflection that she might as well have begun by saying, “I’m now going to avoid this issue completely because I don’t have a good response for it.” It’s also an ineffective deflection. This is condign justice, and self-inflicted by Biden: the U.S. President who most desperately needed a competent, articulate, quick-thinking press secretary is burdened by the most inarticulate, dull-witted individual in the position ever. She was hired because she would be “historic”—first black, foreign-born lesbian, or something—but those features are completely irrelevant to the job. “Most flagrantly incompetent White House mouthpiece” is a genuine historic accomplishment, especially when one considers some of Karine’s predecessors like Sean Spicer and Joe Lockhart. I have a fertile imagination, but I cant conceive of how any press secretary could be worse than Karine. There are more articulate and persuasive mimes.

It’s wonderful, don’t you think, that the President can’t possibly fire her? Continue reading →

On this date in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the most famous speech in U.S. history, authored by him, in a remarkable burst of historical and ethical clarity. Dedicating the military cemetery on the battlefield with rotting bodies still covering the ground after what we now know was the turning point in the Civil War, Lincoln captured the mission of this nation as it was while redefining it going forward:

 Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

How he missed the fact that the United States was really founded to protect slavery and was dedicated to being a scourge of human rights, we’ll never know.

I wonder how many of the “experts” who now train our children to be good citizens include the Gettysburg Address in their curriculum. To be fair, there may not be time, given the importance of imparting critical race theory and joys of transgenderism.

It is also worth noting that Abraham Lincoln developed the critical thinking and rhetorical skills that produced his masterpiece without any formal education. He just read many of those books by the same dead white men who are now considered the heralds of white supremacy.

I suppose three arch statements in a row are excessive on an ethics blog….

1. Another confirmation bias classic: A typical New York Times reader writes, “Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to step down from her leadership position was timely and astute. A good leader knows when it is time to go. Moreover, her speech was extraordinary in spirit, wisdom, humility, grace and gratitude….”

Nobody should care what Pelosi said, or says. She already showed us her spirit, wisdom, humility and grace many times, over many years. She was a consistently toxic and divisive feature of American politics, and her party and her nation are much diminished because of her.

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My wife and I are now in the throes of a painful ethics dilemma for any parent of an adult. Our son unexpectedly broke up with his long-time live-in girl friend, apparently ending a relationship that seemed serious, loving, and built to last. We both love his now ex-, a wonderfully candid, gentle, courageous young woman who has overcome a lot of tragedy in her life, and whom we know loves our son passionately. (She is also arguably Spud’s favorite human being on Earth.) Our son keeps his own counsel and always has; he gave us the news in his usual unadorned, unrevealing, terse manner. He did not ask for advice or counsel, and we know him well enough to understand that he would not appreciate our offering any; indeed, his trademark is taking the opposite course of that suggested by anyone other than him. So we will do the ethical thing, which in this case is also the only option available to us: mind our own business.

1. Speaking of my dog, Spuds-like dogs will continued to be cruelly and stupidly discriminated against in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that outlaws the possession or sale of “pit bulls.” That’s in quotes because it is clear that the ignorant dog bigots who passed the law have no clue what a pit bull is: the law defines the “dangerous breed” as “any dog that is an American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier,” or any dog with a majority of the physical traits of one or more of those breeds. In other words, the law adopts the cretinous terms of the anti-pit bull breeds website Dogsbite.com, which says that “if it looks like a pit bull, it’s a pit bull.”

Owners of pit bulls sued the city in federal court, claiming the ordinance violates their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. A U.S. District judge dismissed the suit on summary judgment, which the dog owners appealed.

A three-judge panel of the S Eighth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling, holding that the dog owners had the burden of negating every conceivable basis that might support the ordinance.

“The record here does not negate every conceivable basis for the Ordinance’s rationality,” U.S. Circuit Judge Duane Benton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote for the unanimous panel. “While the resulting ordinance may be an imperfect fit, this court cannot second guess or judge the fairness of legislative choices on rational basis review.”

2. And speaking of vicious persecution and bad faith vendettas, The Washington Post, burying the lede, reports that it seems likely now that Donald Trump had no nefarious purpose in holding classified documents, that there were no nuclear secrets contained in them as speculated, and that the former President was probably keeping them as souvenirs he felt he had a right to:

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