It remains to be seen whether the Stanford Law students’ “heckler’s veto” of invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan will be a tipping point in national recognition of how far our educational institutions are drifting away from liberal principles like freedom of speech, or whether the mainstream media’s now routine efforts to suppress any news event that threatens the woke agenda will smother the disgraceful story in its metaphorical crib. Incredibly, The New York Times didn’t cover the story at all, as of this morning. Over at the Washington Post there was also no news coverage, but now-irrelevant pundit George Will got an op-ed out titled “Expensively credentialed, negligibly educated Stanford brats threw a tantrum.” That’s pretty safe: the Woke, meaning most of the Post’s readers, never read Will, and since he threw a tantrum and began supporting the Democratic Party because the aging, bowtie-wearing elitist thinks Donald Trump is an unmannerly cur, a lot of conservatives no longer read him either. Since the frightening ethics debacle of law students at an esteemed law school showing contempt for a federal judge and the schools DEI administrator cheering them on, there have been many newsworthy developments and reactions, even if our Leftist propaganda machine (aka the mainstream media) doesn’t want us to know about it….such as:

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“Republicans pounced” on the discovery that aging juvenile climate scold Greta Thunberg had deleted the above tweet since, you may have noticed, either humanity has not been wiped out five years after her warning, or, if doom is imminent, we might as well be comfy and have fun while we wait for the inevitable. No, it’s not a “gotcha!”; it’s a mandatory “you’re a demagogue, a fake dealing, you traffic in fraudulent science and hysteria, and we’re on to you” statement that is long overdue.

This is an example of the kind of ethics-related items that get lost when I go too long without warm-ups and similar collection posts. Last week I inadvertently deleted a file of topics on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, and I’ve been trying to reconstitute the file since.

Jane Fonda, who now sports pink hair as befits her finally unmasked little old lady status, provided another nearly-missed item, when she told the fawning idiots of “The View” that her solution to the proliferation of anti-abortion laws around the country”, the communist, anti-American activist declared that “does involve murder,” in addition to “marching and protesting.” After it appeared that some people, even from the progressive camps, had a problem with this, Jane resorted to Rationalization #55,The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!” Whether she was kidding or not (the women on “The View’s” panel weren’t laughing) similar “jokes” aimed at progressive policy-makers have been used to justify censorship and even criminal investigations. I think her earlier comment in the segment was even more telling, when she said,

“We have experienced many decades now of having agency over our body, of being able to determine when and how many children to have. We know what that feels like. We know what that’s done for our lives. We’re not going back. I don’t care what the laws are. We’re not going back. It’s true. It’s the truth. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to fight.”

Talk about insurrections! When hard-liners on gay marriage like Mike Huckabee suggested that “God’s law” dictated defiance of the Supreme Court, critics (like me) correctly condemned that approach. On “The View,” Fonda’s unethical rejection of  the judicial system prompted Sunny Hostin to say that Fonda was set to “get a Nobel Prize very, very soon.” The frightening thing is that the way the Nobel Peace Prize is deteriorating, she could be right.

If “The View” was a legitimate public interest news show and not a coven of biased dim-bulbs, someone should have asked Fonda to clarify her position. Is she saying that “agency” over her body justified taking an innocent human life? If not, is it that she regards unborn children as not human, or not lives? Or does her advocacy of “murder” to reinstate that “agency”apply to the unborn? Anyone making extreme statements like Fonda’s must be required to defend them, but they seldom are.

1. While we are on the topic of “insurrections”: I noted yesterday that the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences choosing smug leftist asshole Jimmy Kimmel as the Oscars host contradicted the stated goal of avoiding political polarization and luring the alienated half of the country back to the broadcast after years of insulting it. I read that Kimmel had been sternly instructed to go light on politics—you know, because he’s such a trustworthy guy. Predictably, this ass went ahead and snarked anyway, in his introduction to the Best Editing category, “Anyone who has ever received a text message from their father knows how important editing is.  Editors do amazing things. Editors can turn 44,000 hours of violent insurrection footage into a respectful sight-seeing tour of the Capitol. Their work is underappreciated.” Not to belabor the obvious, but in an actual insurrection, the man designated by the judge at sentencing as its symbol won’t be found in any footage being led around by police. Continue reading →

Some slick lawyers somehow talked some dumb and greedy jocks into launching a class action suit against Ivy League colleges because—get this-–they don’t have athletic scholarships. The Hail Mary lawsuit argues that Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell Universities, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania have illegally conspired to limit financial aid by banning athletic scholarships.

They also ban chess scholarships, Gilbert & Sullivan scholarships, and cooking scholarships, incidentally.

“Regardless of whether considered as a restraint on the price of education, the value of financial aid, the price of athletic services, or the level of compensation to Ivy League athletes, the Ivy League Agreement is per se illegal,” the lawsuit states.

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Interesting.

I don’t know about you, but I sure am sick of abortion advocates refusing to deal with the core issue of whether an unborn child is a human life and an individual with a right to that life no matter how much it may inconvenience the people who brought it into existence, or just “part of the mother’s body” that she has the right to choose to remove, like a tumor, wart or bad tooth. The mainstream news media has been four-square in favor of the latter convenient boot-strapping argument with all of its intellectual dishonesty.

So how does CBS explain referring to the death of an “unborn child” as a murder? If it is murder to kill an unborn child, all other murder statutes hold that it is murder no matter who does the killing, since the UBC cannot consent to its own death. One can’t use violence as the distinction, because to the aborted unborn child, abortion is violence. There is a legitimate distinction to be made regarding when it is fair, honest and just to regard an unborn child as a human being with the right to have a chance at life, but CBS has skipped over that issue completely.

I want to hear the CBS explanation for how it can support killing unborn children when Democrats, progressives and feminists call for it, but call the act murder when it’s done in a shooting in Germany.

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This made my head explode. It’s still exploding.

The New York Times has a poignant article today headlined, “With Its Future at Stake, the Academy Tries to Fix the Oscars (Again).” It begins, “The awards telecast has been losing viewers for years. New leadership wants to reverse that starting Sunday, and ensure the financial well-being of the organization.” The article goes on to explain how new leadership at the Academy realizes that desperate measures need to be taken to regain the interest and trust of the audience. It goes on to say,

To secure a distribution contract of similar value when its deal with ABC expires, the academy must reverse viewership declines. A less lucrative deal could imperil some of the organization’s year-round activities, including film restoration. “This is so important to the livelihood and future of the organization that we better confront it,” Ms. Yang said….

The academy is hopeful that Nielsen’s ratings meters for the Oscars will tick upward on Sunday. Big musical stars, including Rihanna, are scheduled to perform their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz will perform during the “In Memoriam” segment. Lady Gaga will be absent, though, with Oscars producers saying on Wednesday that she was too busy filming a movie to perform her nominated song from “Top Gun: Maverick.”

The nominee pool for best picture has never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there are two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. The front-runner for best picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” generated $104 million in ticket sales. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)…“It should be about unity and celebrating this industry,” Mr. Kramer said. “People are still consuming movies. People love movies. Perhaps they’re doing it on streaming more than they did a few years ago. But our art form is as relevant as ever.”

Oh…the article casually drops in this bit of information, almost as an afterthought:

Jimmy Kimmel will return as the host on Sunday…

KABOOM!

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