I’m Charlie Brown in this analogy, not Snoopy.

1. There was a depressing question to the New York Times’ “The Ethicist Column.” What is depressing is that anyone would need to ask it. “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, gave the right (and obvious) answer, but it shouldn’t take an ethicist to know this. The inquirer wrote,

Nearly nine years ago, I befriended a woman at work who, as I learned over the years of our now strong friendship, is staunchly pro-life. For her, the argument is both scientific and religious: Life starts at conception, and abortion is murder (no exceptions). She is morally consistent, though, in also being against the death penalty and in seeking out stronger social programs for families, like paid parental leave. We no longer work together, but we remain close friends and frequently discuss our views on abortion (I am pro-choice). Having a stronger understanding of one pro-life ideology has, I feel, expanded my thinking. I believe she is a good person who cares about the world immensely.

Especially after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, though, I struggle with having a friend who supports what I think is a restriction of my rights to make my own choices about my body. I struggle, too, with what I think of as duplicitousness: She actively restricts who she tells about her pro-life views, because she fears it will hurt her advancement prospects and could end friendships. She hopes people will see her as a good person and not judge her first on her anti-abortion views. I cannot decide if this is lying. And while I disagree with her views, it is the potential lying that is most questionable to me.

Maybe it’s like being queer and choosing to stay in the closet, but there’s the issue of what is a choice and what is inherent. Is it right for her to withhold the truth, or even lie, to protect herself, for the sake of her reputation and friendships? Is it OK if people do not want to be friends with or work with someone who has views like hers? I struggle with the idea that she is able to protect herself from the fallout of people knowing she is anti-abortion when implementing her views would take away rights that many people see as vital to living a life with dignity.

What a biased, self-satisfied, arrogant, undemocratic and unethical person “Name Withheld is.” And more like this are being churned out by the Woke Factory every minute. Continue reading →

As Bill Maher would say: “New rule!” I am no longer tolerating rude, nasty, disrespectful clerks, waiters, or service providers of any kind. Gus McRae’s handling of an obnoxious bartender in the memorable scene above from “Lonesome Dove,” which I have come to regard as the best Western drama ever put on a screen, high praise from me, may be a bit extreme, but only a bit. The frequency of insolence and general surliness from such employees has increased wildly in recent years—theories welcome— and the only way to stop the unethical trend is to resolve to make as much trouble for such jerks as possible. a) Tell them off. b) Complain to their supervisors. c) Tell the story to online consumer resources. d) Write to headquarters, and e) Don’t give up (I am still fighting it out with CVS over a complaint I registered almost six months ago.) I just walked out of a Staples after not one but two employees treated me like a bug, and resolved never to let such conduct pass again.

1. The “Pity the poor murderer!” defense is unethical, and should be banned. Melisa McNeill, the lawyer for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nicholas Cruz, is making the standard defense argument for monsters who have no other plausible defenses. Cruz never had a chance, he has bad parents, he had various maladies, he couldn’t help himself. This is an appeal to emotion over law or reason, a direct offspring of Clarence Darrow’s position that it is cruel to punish any criminals because they had no free will. The obvious rebuttal to the disingenuous and desperate defense is that millions have grown to adulthood with as many disadvantages or more and not decided to massacre innocent children.

“Wounded and damaged people wound and damage other people because they’re in pain,”  McNeill told the jury in her  opening statement at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. “Nikolas was poisoned in the womb.”

Gee, there’s a “Make someone massacre high school students” poison? I did not know that!

This is no more nor less than prejudicing the jury. Once it is determined that a killer is legally sane, such defenses should be illegal.

2. I’m trying to think of the last time the District of Columbia didn’t have a ridiculous and incompetent mayor. It might be Marion Barry, who was sometimes ridiculous but never incompetent. Muriel Bowser might well be the most ridiculous and incompetent yet. Her requests for National Guard deployment to help the poor District, a “sanctuary city,” deal with the 7000 illegal immigrants Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) started busing the Capital in April show astounding hypocrisy, not to mention stupidity.  If the Pentagon granted her request, it could not avoid doing the same in the border states, which are often seeing more than 7000 illegals in a day. Continue reading →

Yesterday, walking Spuds, I was on a path temporarily blocked on one side by the fencing for a school toddler play area. I glanced over into that area, and suddenly, bearing down on us, was tall young man jogging hard and apparently prepared to run at us. Bad idea: on the leash, Spuds is protective unless he knows an individual or that individual’s dog. I literally had no place to go to avoid this guy. I assumed he would break to my left, but couldn’t be sure; if he kept going, I would have to pull Spuds left, and I wasn’t sure there would be time to get him far enough away to prevent his interacting with the jogger. Literally at the last moment, the jogger veered to go around us. Spuds lunged, and I just barely was able to keep him off this jerk by throwing all of my weight into the leash. I’d estimate that Spuds was within an inch of nipping him…and he would have deserved it. The jogger just happily ran on, never saying a word. Spuds, who had never been charged by a stranger like that before, was upset. I was more upset. I have long considered the great majority of joggers self-absorbed, inconsiderate and anti-social creeps who treat the rest of the world as an afterthought. This was only the latest proof of my thesis.

1. Bias makes you stupid, but it can’t make you this stupid, can it? Chris Isidore claimed  in a  CNN Business article that the drop in gasoline prices from their earlier high is like a “$100-a-month tax cut. Or a maybe $100-a-month raise.” This is challenger for most audacious cherry-picking of all-time. “The steady drop in gas prices over the last few months has turned into an unexpected form of economic stimulus, coming at a time when the Federal Reserve is trying to cool the economy and battle rising prices with higher interest rates,” this alleged journalist “explains.” But contrary to Isidore’s shameless and dishonest spin, economists estimate that Americans are  spending  an extra $5,200 in 2022 just to buy the same things they bought in 2021. Another calculation put the extra cost at $460 extra each month, or more than $5,500 this year.

CNN trying to frame this as a boon for consumers because of a drop in price of a single commodity is–what? What do you call it? Is it better or worse than Biden and media propagandists claiming that an 8.5 percent inflation increase is actually “zero,” or that two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth indicates a depression this time as it always has before (except for the strange year of 1947)? In truth, it’s all the same: a biased and corrupt media that sees its job as not informing the public, but to misinform them to ensure that they keep voting Democrat. [Pointer and Source: The Federalist] Continue reading →

A few words on “diversity” (this will save me a rant later):

I just turned on PBS while having lunch, and was told that the network appreciated “all the diverse communities” that they serve. Gack/Blechh!/Yuck! And what about those non-diverse communities? What are they? Bigots? Evil, Un-American? And what kind of diversity counts, on the PBS scorecard? This is just rote virtue-signaling with a little indoctrination and brain-washing thrown in. Human beings are diverse, even within homogeneous groups. Prioritizing one kind of “diversity” over another is an ideological edict.

The program that followed was John Williams conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in his various famous compositions last year. There was nary a black or brown visage anywhere to be seen among the musicians. Should I care? Should anyone? All that ought to matter is whether the orchestra sounds as good as possible, correct? Or should a proper orchestra be judged on the basis of its EEOC categories as well as its musical excellence?

I would not be surprised if the local PBS outlet here gets complaints from contributors “of color” that the concert should not have been broadcast, since the orchestra did not “look like us.”

This is madness, and people of all colors, ethnicities and creeds must have the integrity and courage to step forward and say, “Just stop. Now.”

1. Did you know President Trump lied all the time? Last March, the current, always honest President said, in order to brush off complaints about the number of illegal immigrants streaming across our borders,

“It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter.” 

That was calculated malarkey then, when the numbers of illegals crossing the border were higher than during other winters, and it really looks like malarkey now, as the winter level never dropped off, and is headed to record territory.

But these denials of what is open and undeniable, habitual Jumbos, are now the predictable MO of President Biden and his party. Inflation is transitory! High gas prices are a good thing! There is no recession! The public has to be gullible, ignorant and stupid for this cynical strategy to work, and part of it is to make the public as gullible, ignorant and stupid as possible. Continue reading →

Handling oneself in moments of defeat, failure and embarrassment is a core life competence that few of us have mastered. Consider, for a wild, random, out of the blue example, Liz Cheney, whose approach to a landslide loss was to frame it as a badge of honor.

On this week’s “America’s Got Talent,” the live show was filling time by having a previous season’s finalist, Jon Dorenbos, work his magic—literally, since Dorenbos is a professional NFL player turned professional magician. The illusion required judges Simon Cowell, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, and Sofia Vergara to pick random numbers out of a box and letters (signifying colors) off a board. The wondrous effect was to be that he would then reveal four football jerseys secretly already hanging in four onstage gym lockers, each jersey with the judge’s name and bearing the color and number he or she had chosen. The jerseys in the lockers for Cowell, Mandel and Vergara were properly amazing, but when Heidi Klum showed her number (8), the magician knew he was sunk. Although the Klum jersey’s color, red, matched the letter she had picked voluntarily, the number was not 8, but 20.

All magicians have illusions go wrong occasionally. (I once did the old “bake a cake in a hat” bit with a fedora belonging to my parents’ guest, and ended up filling the hat with milk because the trick pitcher malfunctioned.) However, TV magic is almost always pre-recorded, so having a magician’s botched routine make it to broadcast is extremely rare: I’ve never seen it happen. It is also a possible career-wrecker.

Here is how Dorenbos dealt with his humialation on live TV, saying,

I thought you were going to pick 20. That’s OK! Sometimes in life it’s OK to be off by one, because guess what, baby? Every time I take this stage, you all make me feel like a rock star! Being part of the AGT team, I love every second. Whether it’s in the locker room or my life, I try to be the best teammate I can be and also bring my A-game, baby. May we all make the decision to be the best teammate we can be in this world!

Your Special Ethics Alarms Life Competence Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was the magician’s response to failure competent?

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Come on in!

Speak up!

Spuds is feeling needy, or something, and though he usually sleeps on the sofa in the breakfast room, he decided to creep up to our bedroom and slam himself against me. Even though I’m exhausted after a three-hour legal ethics seminar last evening, I just can’t get to sleep, and don’t want to kick him out: something’s troubling him. So here I am in the office…

Because of all the prep yesterday for that seminar, which was not only brand new but also covered a lot of complicated issues, I missed an ethics milestone that Ethics Alarms cannot ignore. I started my first ethics website, The Ethics Scoreboard, in disgust at the ethically ignorant and inert commentary by the news media regarding Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Something must have been lurking in my brain, because I alluded to Clinton’s practiced deceit in last might’s program, describing a lawyer’s technical excuse for unethical conduct as “Clintonian.”

On August 17, 1998, President Clinton becames the first sitting president to testify as the subject of a grand-jury investigation. His testimony came after a four-year investigation into Clinton and his wife Hillary’s alleged involvement in several scandals. One could argue with some fairness that Clinton was the first President targeted with a long prosecutorial fishing expedition by partisan foes determined “get him” one way or another.

The independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr,  uncovered an affair between Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, as well as evidence that it had been covered up by a coordinated effort.  Clinton famously denied that he “had sex with that woman,”, which prompted Starr to charge the him with perjury and obstruction of justice. After his August 17 testimony, Clinton addressed the nation on live television. He admitted to an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky—it was, in fact, sexual harassment under the terms defined by Clinton’s own feminist supporters— but insisted that he had given “legally accurate” answers in his testimony. Later the President claimed that while he had not been “helpful” to the grand jury, he hadn’t lied.

Balderdash.

1 How can supporters of the Democratic Party look at themselves in the mirror? CNN correspondent John Harwood, as openly partisan a reporter as one can find, admitted this week that the “Inflation Reduction Act” title to the massive tax and spending bill just signed into law by President Biden was a “marketing device” designed to gull Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) into supporting the bill. “No, it doesn’t live up to its name,” Harwood said on CNN’s “New Day.” “Let’s be real: They called it the Inflation Reduction Act as a marketing device, in part to lock down the vote of Joe Manchin or to reassure Joe Manchin that they were focused on his issue.” “It is going to have a negligible effect on inflation,” Harwood said, now, after the trick had worked. “If it does anything, it might reduce inflation a tiny, tiny bit, but that’s not what it’s about.”

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Wow. Yeah, this Washington Post article isn’t biased or anything. Here’s how Isaac Arnsdorf, a Post “national political reporter,” starts, after warning readers that something strange and sinister is afoot:

He promises a break from American history if elected, with a federal government stacked with loyalists and unleashed to harm his perceived enemies.

There has never been a potential candidate like Trump: a defeated former president whose followers attacked the Capitol, who still insists he never lost, and who openly pledges revenge on those he views as having wronged him.

Imagine: the Post employs this guy as a reporter, and he doesn’t even try to hide his extreme bias. “Trump’s supporters” didn’t attack the Capitol, a couple hundred of his most deranged whackos went inside and trashed the place. Would the post allow a reporter to write, “Democrats rioted across the country demanding that police departments be defunded”?

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