These are the Senators—36 of them—who voted against a joint resolution to discontinue the Biden Administration’s cynical cynical pandemic emergency, which now only serves to allow the President to bypass usual checks and balances under the Constitution.
This is a pretty dark day for ethics, with the lowlight occurring in 1532, when Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, invited the Incan emperor, Atahualpa to a feast in his honor under the preetnse of peace and friendship. His force of less than 200 men then openeds fire on the unarmed Incans, killing over a thousand, After the massacre, the Spanish held Atahualpa, and forced him to convert to Christianity. Then Pizarro had him murdered anyway. This terrible episode in history did inspire the Broadway hit drama, “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” by Peter Schaefer of “Equus” and “Amadeus” fame. I guess that’s something.
Also on this date, in 1945, the U.S. made a devil’s bargain with 88 Nazi scientists, notably Werner von Braun (who Tom Lehrer famously sang about), as part of “Operation Paperclip,” aimed at speeding U.S. development of rocket technology. They cheerfully switched sides, as you would expect they would. Werner is buried less than 5 minutes from our Alexandria home, in a small church graveyard.
I have not visited his resting place.
1. The mainstream media is in some kind of an unethical headline orgy:
The Washington Post included in its coverage of the murderer of three UVA football players a story headlined, “Suspected U-Va. gunman had troubled childhood, but then flourished.” The shooter is black; I’m sure that has nothing to do with the weirdly sympathetic vibes of what reads like a puff piece except for that shooting spree detail. The Post took down the headline; the question remains of how it could have made it to the web at all. [Pointer: Willem Reese]
Here’s NPR, proudly displaying its Trump Derangement, with this headline: “Donald Trump, who tried to overturn Biden’s legitimate election, launches 2024 bid.” Stuffing unrelated negative commentary in a news story headline is truly barrel-bottom journalism. NPR managed to avoid the headline in 1979, “Ted Kennedy, who allowed a young woman to drown, launches 1980 bid.”
NBC News: “Trump, whose lies about the 2020 election inspired an insurrection, announces third White House bid.” No editorializing there!
Here’ he Washington Post again: “Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.”
This is CNBC’s headline, a classic example of the unethical tactic called “poisoning the well”: “Donald Trump, twice impeached and under FBI investigation, launches 2024 White House bid.”
Ann Althouse, whose pop culture literacy has some massive holes, is obsessed with Bob Dylan’s weird, self-indulgent book analyzing 66 pop recordings. (Not a single Beatles song on the list, among its many quirks.) One of the songs analyzed is the original recording of “Volare,” a fluky hit sung in Italian that virtually nobody understood. Apparently it’s about being painted blue, or something. The English version sung by Dean Martin and Bobby Rydell, among others, didn’t mention this at all. So what’s the point of analyzing lyrics that had nothing to do with the song’s popularity in the U.S.? It’s navel-gazing at an invisible navel. If the song wasn’t a U.S. hit, Dylan wouldn’t be writing about it, and the lyrics were irrelevant to its success.
Follow-up: President Biden’s border chief Chris Magnus finally resigned after all, thus agreeing to be the designated scapegoat for the Department of Homeland Security’s failure to secure the Southern border. He had no choice, but at least by initially refusing he made it clear what was really going on.
Has there ever been a less surprising scandal than the fall of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, and his crypto exchange FTX? Why would anyone trust crypto currency, much less the people promoting it? Amusingly, writer/actor Larry David, the template for George Costanza, ducked accountability for hyping this garbage in his well-received Super Bowl ad, in which he was portrayed through history pooh-poohing major advances in culture and technology (like fire). Naturally, he also pronounced FTX as a bad idea. That really meant it was a good idea, but holding Larry responsible for aiding and abetting a con requires too many mental gymnastics.
1. If this election doesn’t kill the credibility of pollsters, nothing will. Virtually every poll predicted a “red wave,” and if not, they didn’t predict any House balance this close. Most polls had Arizona Republican Kari Lake up double digits in the governor’s race, and it looks like she will lose. What good are they, other than to justify misleading news stories? Professional polling, as an industry, is officially unethical: untrustworthy, incompetent, and irresponsible. Naturally, 538 is now saying that the election validated the polls, because 538 is all about polling. “It isn’t what it is.”Continue reading →
(OK, it’s only tangentially related to the post, but I love this scene from “Ben-Hur,” the greatest horse scene in all of motion pictures.)
As I wrote in an earlier post, I’m backed up in excellent comments, so I’m going to try a new feature, using Saturday, when EA is seeing its streets more occupied with tumbleweeds than readers to honor the comments of the past week that I didn’t get up as Comments of the Day. These will usually come in reverse order, because it’s easier for me to track them down that way.
I don’t think there’s any obligation to change the name. The intention behind the horse’s name is clear, and intention is crucial.
I disagree with your assessment of the little girl. She said that if her horse’s name meant something bad, she wanted it to mean something good. I think that shows an intelligent child who is aware of the discord in the world around her, and instead of capitulating to the negative pressure, she wants to use her tiny platform to turn something ugly into something positive..
Professor Turley frequently says that instead of censorship, we should strive to “combat bad speech with better speech”, and I agree. Part of that is letting go of the notion that every word that might be construed as a slur IS a slur. It means the concept that schools named after historic figures (people once revered who are now torn apart for simply being a man/woman of their era) or sports teams whose names reflect something once acceptable that’s now taboo, etc.,,need to immediately change their name/logo/mascot and repent.
If we yield to every criticism by every person who claims offense to a name, an expression, a job, an idea, etc., half the world won’t be able to say/write a single word, out of fear of retribution, and when people cannot communicate freely they cannot communicate effectively, and everything from education to workplace relations to social /intimate relationships break down completely.
Where would that leave us all?
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(I’m sorry: WordPress was being weird, and I had to re-post this, losing the comments already made.)
Haven’t heard from Gene, Donald and Debbie for a while. It was time. And I need them this morning…
1. Laws? What laws?This is GOOD racism… Black Minneapolis native and entrepreneur Jesse Ross is spending $3.8 million as part of his “Wealth Redistribution Project to establish a 68,000-square-foot facility to house 15 to 20 businesses, and those with white owners need not apply. There will also be even space for weddings and conferences; its unclear how or if Ross will discriminate regarding these as well. His plan is illegal, after all. One of the results of all the “diversity, equity and inclusion” virtue-signaling is that a lot of people have forgotten what illegal racial discrimination is. Ross is clearly in this category, and so are the local corporations the always ethically clueless city of Minneapolis,which have provided him with cash grants to discriminate against whites.
The news media is doing its part too. In its story about this exercise in compensatory racism, NBC’s KARE 11 says, inspirationally, that the project is “an investment reaching far beyond dreams once thought unattainable.” It IS unattainable, you fools, unless he’s allowed to break the law.
But to be fair, this basically follows the same logic as Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness EO.
I wonder if KFC is planning a cheesy chicken promotion for Armistice Day…that’s today, you know. On this date in 1918, the Great War, the War to End All Wars, ended when Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. Nine million soldiers had died and 21 million were wounded. Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Great Britain each lost a million or more lives. At least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure. The war, now known as World War I, also traumatized a generation, helped spread the Spanish flu pandemic (which took 50 million or more lives), and led directly to World War II.
Yes, the War to End All Wars was substantially responsible for starting the worst war of them all.
Yet not one in a hundred—a thousand?—Americans can explain coherently what the war was all about, why the U.S. entered it, and what were the major events that defined it. It is barely mentioned in schools. There has been a WWI memorial on the D.C. Mall for decades, and it is largely ignored by tourists. Do you know what it looks like? Here it is…
Then, last year, a new one was unveiled on Pennsylvania Ave, with so little publicity that I missed it. Here it is:
Meanwhile, Armistice Day, once a holiday to mark the end of this human-made cataclysm, was eliminated, with Veteran’s Day taking its place in 1954. There’s nothing in the commemoration of Veteran’s Day that even references The Great War.
1. Who couldn’t see this coming? Two historically black churches in Jackson, Mississippi, were deliberately set ablaze on Election Day morning. There were five other suspected arson cases all seven in the area of Jackson State University, a historically black public university. Obviously, this was the work of those racist, white supremacist Republicans, or so Democrats were quick to declare. Mississippi Democrat congressional candidate Shuwaski Young pounced, releasing a statement calling the fires acts of “terrorism,” saying, “We will not allow domestic terrorists to suppress our right to vote. I ask all Mississippians to GO VOTE regardless of this decades-old intimidation tactic to suppress our votes today. Just go VOTE.” (For him, of course) Commenters on his post chimed in about the dire threat of white supremacy.
Here’s Delvin McLaurin, the man who was arrested as the likely arsonist:
I’m sorry: I haven’t sorted through all of the recent Comment of the Day candidates, and there are a lot of them. I expect that today’s open forum will add to the list. In general, my recognition of outstanding commentary is too haphazard, and I will try to do better. It is helpful when commenters flag responses that they think are COTD worthy.
One note from me: I really missed not receiving any loyal progressive or Democratic defenses of the Left’s “Democracy is on the ballot” fearmongering. I did find in personal conversations that even the smartest Democrat apologists had a problem fending off even mild rebuttals. For example, I asked one hysteric how she could excuse her party pouring millions into the campaigns of the very “election deniers” they claimed were clear and present threats to the Republic. The query shorted her out like one of the rogue computers or robots Captain Kirk used to make blow up on “Star Trek” by posing an internally contradictory question that overloaded the machine’s circuits.
The frustrating thing about ethics is that the best and most ethical decision can, though what my father called “the vicissitudes of existence,” result in very bad consequences, and, similarly, unethical conduct can have results that benefit us all. This is what gulls human beings into consequentialism, or the natural tendency to judge the rightness and virtue of human actions according how events turn out.
Democrats are cheering, even gloating, about the fact that the “Red Wave,” almost universally predicted to sweep their party far from the levers of power in the House and Senate, and render Joe Biden the crippled duck he ought to be, never materialized. Nobody seems to agree why; I’ve read many theories. Republicans are dispirited and disillusioned, even though their “Red Ripple” will surely be enough to eject Nancy Pelosi from the Speaker’s chair. Still, surely they did something wrong to fail to meet all historical precedents for mid-term elections when a President is in the dumps, and the economy as well.
But here’s the funny part: the GOP disappointment may have solved a massive problem for the party and the country that just a little while ago appeared beyond a solution. The election results are being widely, and I think fairly, blamed on Donald Trump. His hand-picked candidates lost races that should have been won. His endorsements were generally toxic. He allowed the Democrats and the media to make the election about him when it should have been about President Biden. Worst of all, he couldn’t restrain himself from slipping into bully mode to attack Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most likely rival for the 2024 Presidential nomination, right before the election. Then DeSantis answered by scoring the biggest victory of the night.
Now that (most of) the results are in, it several things are clear that perhaps should have been clear much earlier.
I have always thought that lowering the voting age to 18 was foolish and illogical (the fact that one’s body is mature enough to fight does not prove that one’s mind is mature enough to be civically responsible), but some Democrats have recently been advocating a lower age yet. This election showed why. Progressive ideology is ultimately rooted in the ethics of childhood (that is to say, not ethics at all): no consequences, no accountability, being taken care of by an authority figure, pleasure without pain. Fortunately, a large proportion of infantile progressives grow out of their delusions once they have to pay mortgages and support a family, but increasing numbers don’t. This is substantially due to our society ignoring the steady accumulation and eventual domination of socialists and communists in our educational institutions from pre-school all the way to the graduate schools.
The practical effect on elections of this trend has been minimized, to a great extent, by the fact that the voting age citizens from 18-25 generally have more pressing concerns that paying attention to politics, inflation, the supply chain, free speech, racial discrimination, immigration and such trivial matters. (My son has painless dealt with gas prices by using his motorcycle more often.) A large number of them live in their parents’ guest houses and basements, so their fiscal realities are skewed. If the usual level of younger voter apathy had been in play this year, the Republican “Red Wave” would have materialized as predicted.
I liked actor James Woods as an actor for several reasons; among them that he always made interesting choices within a narrow range, had great energy, and even when he was playing his most repellent characters (Woods’ specialty), managed to find humor in them. I get a kick out of him as a personality because he is one of those actors who resembles in real life his on -screen image, and doesn’t apologize for it. He’s smart (unlike, say, Robert DeNiro), not afraid of controversy, and doesn’t take any crap without giving back as good as he gets, or better. Because Woods is an unapologetic political conservative and past the age where he can credibly play hit-men and pimps, he also has been forcibly retired by Hollywood and hasn’t had a role in almost a decade. Well, that’s OK; I’m sure he’s well off financially, which is why he can spend so much time infuriating progressives on Twitter.
Recently, Wood was chided by a Twitter follower who complained about his “vulgarity” in some posts and announced that he was “unfollowing” Woods’ Twitter feed. Woods’ reply:
I’m sure you’re not expecting a response, but I am willing to address your concerns. And you may be further surprised that I hear your point. Vulgarity is beneath all of us, if we truly wish to “hear” the “other side.” Unfortunately for you, I don’t.
Ethics Alarms 