1. Stop making me defend Nancy Pelosi! Many pundits on the left, notably the notoriously pro-China New York Times veteran Tom Friedman, declared that Speaker Pelosi, currently on an Asian tour, should heed China’s warnings and not visit Taiwan. Friedman’s column, headlined “Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless,” argued,
“Nothing good will come of it. Taiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit, and a lot of bad things could happen. These include a Chinese military response that could result in the U.S. being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time.”
The Biden administration, as usual, has been sending mixed and incoherent messages. Not Pelosi. She not only is visiting Taiwan, she is reaffirming what the Biden administration has been hesitating to state straight out. “Our visit reiterates that America stands with Taiwan: a robust, vibrant democracy and our important partner in the Indo-Pacific,” Pelosi said on Twitter. What her visit says is just as unequivocal: the United States of America doesn’t take orders from Chairman Xi, or any foreign despot. If there was any question whether Pelosi should land in Taiwan, it should have evaporated the second China started saber-rattling. And mirabile dictu, it did!
This was a strange day that kept me out of the office and Ethics Alarms from morn til dusk. Sorry: couldn’t be helped. It will stand in my memory as the day I was asked, in an official appearance as an ethicist in a bar deliberation over the fitness of a young man to be allowed into the august profession of “lawyer,” this question: “Do you believe character should be taught in law school?”
It might be the most bizarre question I have been asked by anyone over the age of 9 in my life. “Character” isn’t a subject or even a definable feature. If someone hasn’t developed character by the age of 21, I cannot imagine how a law school would teach it.
1. Quickly approaching “Julie Principle” territory is The Nation’s Elie Mystal, who has a long dossier at Ethics Alarms from the days before his mind snapped like a dry twig in the wind, leaving him a perpetually furious, racist, hatemongering fool. Yet that’s good enough for MSNBC, which would feature a drooling lunatic in a straitjacket if he or she spouted sufficiently venomous insults about Republicans (and Donald Trump, of course).
“It’s going to be a close election in Georgia because Walker has the backing of the Republicans. You ask why are Republicans backing this man who’s so clearly unintelligent, who so clearly doesn’t have independent thoughts, but that’s actually the reason. Walker is going do what he’s told, and that is what Republicans like. That’s what Republicans want from their Negroes: to do what they were told. And Walker presents exactly as a person who lacks independent thoughts, lacks an independent agenda, lacks an independent ability to grasp policies, and he’s just going to go in there and vote like Mitch McConnell tells them to vote.”
I am definitely not a Walker fan, but the denigrating “Negro” slur should have been flagged and reprimanded by the MSNBC host, except that it was Tiffany Cross, who is almost a female version of Elie. Moreover, it is hilarious for a Democrat to mock any Republican for “doing what he is told,” when the current Democrats in the House and Senate have voted in lockstep with their leaders’ demands almost without exception.
Cultural milestones turn up in the damnedest places, and from the most surprising people.Actress Nichelle Nichols, the African-American who was the communications officer on the original “Star Trek” and the first round of films based on the iconic TV sci-fi series, died yesterday at 89. She was more model than actress, and as her role developed, much to her disappointment, the part of “Uhura” became little more than set dressing. But she played one of the first black female characters on TV to have a non-subservient role, indeed Uhura was fourth in the “Enterprise” chain of command. (Whoopi Goldberg claimedthat when she was a teen and saw “Star Trek” for the firts time, she screamed to her family, “Come quick, come quick. There’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!”) In her autobiography, Nichols wrote that Martin Luther King told her that she was advancing civil rights objectives, and convinced her not to quit when William Shatner was getting too obnoxious. Her great moment of destiny came, however, in the 1968 episode, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” about a aliens who used mind control. At one point, they forced Kirk and Uhura, who were never romantically involved, to engage in a passionate kiss.
The legend, which is the version of the event now printed, is that the kiss caused great controversy and upheaval. I saw it: I don’t recall any negative reaction, or any reaction at all. It was a kiss that wasn’t genuine but forced: if the smooch was intended as a statement by show creator Gene Roddenberry, it was a very tepid one. Nevertheless, in the decades since, that moment on a forgettable episode of a cheesy and not very popular Sixties TV series has taken on the reputation of being a societal tipping point, and Nichelle Nichols died as a figure of far more cultural significance than her role as “glorified telephone operator in space” whose catch-phrase was “Hailing frequencies open, sir” would normally create.
You never know.
1. We have freedom of speech. They don’t. And here, many progressives would love to take a lot of it away. Here’s an example of what gets you punished in Great Britain, for example:
Darren Brady, 51, was arrested Hampshire Police and placed in handcuffs at his home in Aldershot for sharing the graphic above, a swastika assembled out of four LGBT pride flags. On the video of the arrest, shot on a mobile phone, Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: “Why am I in cuffs?” An officer replies, “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.” Continue reading →
The statement appears in today’s article, “How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83?” as if it’s the most natural observation in the world. Before reading the whole story, you should know that “Ms. Leyton” is a murder victim whose dismembered body was found inside a shopping cart in East New York, stuffed in a bag. The “Ms. Harvey” referred to is the individual charged with her murder, since investigators found a bloody mop, a tub full of towels and a box for an electric saw in the alleged killer’s apartment.
A homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.
I owe my outlook on life to Saturday morning cartoons. How sad isthat?
I also note that last year on this date, Ethics Alarms included this in the warm-up:
[On] “This Day in History,” the headline on a note reads, “1976: Caitlyn Jenner wins Olympic decathlon.” That may be politically correct, but it’s cowardly (would the trans activist mob pounce if the event was stated straight?) and absurd on its face. Bruce Jenner won the Olympic decathlon, and it was a men’s event. Caitlyn was, as far as we know, not even a twinkle in his eye. Bruce fathered children after winning the gold; the event and the other events in his life when he was a he were not magically altered by his later transgender journey, like “Back to the Future.”
Wow, I thought that was crazy. Look how far the trans madness and the “It isn’t what it is!” mania have progressed in just a year!
In related developments, I noticed yesterday that my gay Facebook friends are aggressively (and often ignorantly) attacking the Dobbs decision with canned abortion activist talking points and obnoxious memes. I find their knee-jerk abortion support damning, especially since they know that if it were medically possible to determine if a fetus was going to develop into a gay adult, many of them would have been snuffed out n the womb just like many Down Syndrome children. I don’t think they are thinking very hard about the issue; I think they are just deciding on their position based on whose “team” they have joined. Progressives include LGBTQ rights on their ideological agenda as well as abortion on demand, so my gay friends are just voting a straight ticket, metaphorically speaking.
What a lazy and irresponsible way to make up one’s mind on a controversy involving the lives of millions of people…
1. Two—TWO!—two fearmongering and irresponsible predictions in one headline! The clickbait is “Shark Week Hysteria” meets “Climate Change Hysteria, just like “Dracula Meets the Wolf Man”! UPI’s headline: “Shark sightings in the Midwest could become more common, experts say.” It wouldn’t be hard for such sightings to be more common, since they virtually never happen at all. But bull sharks swimming down Chicago streets are a real possibility, “experts” say, because “summers could warm by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century due to climate change.”
At the end of last year, CBS’s “48 Hours” broadcast an update of a horrifying episode from two decades ago. I missed both programs, but I stumbled upon a rerun of the December 2021 follow-up last night. The tale is a true ethics train wreck that, incredibly, had a happy ending, making it also an abject lesson in moral luck.
The story had special resonance for me because it involved the aftermath of an American couple adopting of a Russian orphan, a process my wife and I went through as well. In 1997, Crystal and Jesse were a young married couple who had tried and failed to conceive. They fund Russian adoption agency’s website and were smitten by a photo of a beautiful 9-year-old girl. The couple began the adoption process. The child’s medical records from the adoption agency, were concerning, though: they described developmental problems.
CBS made a big deal about this, but essentially all older Russian orphans have developmental issues. Crystal told CBS that the “were assured that this child was healthy and that in a good home … with the best doctors in America helping her with the developmental issues, that she should be fine.” That was accurate advice (and she and her husband should have known that by doing responsible research before deciding to adopt a Russian orphan). I should also mention here that Russian medical records regarding orphans are notoriously unreliable. Our son, who has been freakishly healthy, came with ten pages of supposedly serious medical problems. Our pediatrician literally laughed at the document. Continue reading →
I’ve been intending to write about “Billions,” the Showtime ethics drama finally streaming on Amazon Prime, but an irritating moment in the third season has disrupted my thinking about the show. All the characters are pop culture trivia buffs, especially pre-90s movies. (It’s as if all the writers are over 70.) In a major scene in Season 3, Chuck Roades (Paul Giamatti), the Assistant US Attorney who is the show’s corrupted and conflicted protagonist, is trying to convince a target of his prosecution to plead guilty. Roades gives a long analogy that he says comes from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which he claims he knows backwards and forwards.
He describes the last scene, as Butch and Sundance prepare to shoot their way out their final predicament in Bolivia, not knowing that the whole Bolivian army is outside and that they are doomed. Rhoades says they really think they will prevail as they always have before, so the two charge out, guns blazing, and thus “die with honor,” because they never realized that their courage would be futile and that the foe they faced was unbeatable.
Well, this is a flat out misinterpretation of the scene. I know that film well too: I’ve lectured on it. The great thing about the final scene is that Butch and Sundance know it’s all over for them. Both are badly wounded. Sundance has to tie a gun to Butch’s wounded hand. They engage in bravado about where they will go next, knowing that there is no “next;” they bicker like they always have, each keeping up the fantasy that there’s no reason to give up or to despair, faking hope so the other will remain strong. In this ritual they demonstrate their love for each other. (The scene chokes me up every time; it did just now, dammit!) When they charge out shooting, it is noble, but because they know there’s no hope, and they decide that they might as well go down fighting, since they are going down one way or the other. It’s the Alamo.
Why would a show that makes such a fetish about movies let a main character, a smart and literate character, a character who normally makes perceptive references to classic films, miss the point of a movie he purports to love? This is both a breach of the show’s integrity, but deliberate misinformation. I assume lots of younger viewers haven’t seen the George Roy Hill classic Western, and they have come to trust the show’s authority regarding old movies. Now they have been taught the wrong message of the ending….and it’s a great ending.
1. More on the media helping the Biden administration recession cover-up. Here’s how the New York Times begins its story on the fact that GDP fell for the second straight quarter, the long-standing traditional definition of a recession.
Gross domestic product fell by 0.2 percent in the second quarter, after a 0.4 percent decline in the first, fueling fears that a recession may have already begun.
Yes, that’s like saying, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor yesterday, fueling fears that Japan was now hostile to the United States.” And the media gets away with this. Sometimes, they even succeed in redefining something even when it makes no sense. My favorite: the Democratic Party allied media went all in arguing that Bill Clinton wasn’t lying when he said that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky, because oral sex isn’t really sex. That convenient (and absurd) rationalization was instantly adopted by teens across the country. Now there was a variety of sex that wasn’t “technically” sex. A President said so!
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the only prominent black public servant who is unable (and unwilling) to use an accusation of “racism” to shield himself from criticism, will not teach a Constitutional Law Seminar this fall, as was announced in an email addressed to students by Judge Gregory Maggs, who has co-taught the course with Thomas since 2011. Justice Thomas, Maggs wrote, is “unavailable” to co-teach the course in the fall. Now Thomas is no longer listed as a lecturer on GW Law’s course list.
Thomas’ withdrawal from the course certainly appears to be a reaction to a protest petition signed by 11,000 GW students and community members demanding his removal from the university’s faculty in the wake of the Dobbs ruling and Thomas’ controversial concurring opinion. George Washington officials promptly rejected the demand, but Thomas faced likely protests and disruptions to his class if he stayed on.
On this date in 1974, the last truly bi-partisan, Constitutionally solid Presidential impeachment was sought by the House of Representatives after bi-partisan House Judiciary Committee voted an impeachment resolution out for the entire House to consider. The first Article of Impeachment passed the House on the 27th; two more, one for abuse of power another for contempt of Congress, passed on July 29 and 30. When August 5 saw Nixon complying with a Supreme Court ruling requiring that he provide transcripts of crucial White House tapes, he was undeniably implicated him in the cover up of the Watergate break-in. Three days later, President Nixon announced his resignation.
That, of course, is how it’s supposed to work and how the Founders envisioned the process. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was turned, by Clinton, into a purely partisan process despite very valid charges against him. Then Democrats destroyed the procedure by all time in their fervor to crush President Donald Trump, essentially voting for two impeachments on flimsy pretenses, the second one without even sufficient hearings, because they had the votes to do so. This both debased the process and unethically transformed it from a rare and emergency fail-safe to remove criminal President, into an ideological weapon without credibility or teeth. Ironically, this short-sighted, unethical and undemocratic blunder, the result of Speaker Nancy Pelosi caving to the whims of her party’s most extreme elements, both strengthened the office of the Presidency (when his party has a majority in the House) and weakened it (when his party dominates the House and Senate.)
1. Now THAT’S Incompetence! “Leave It To Beaver” star Tony Dow’s representatives announced on his Facebook page yesterday that the sitcom star (he was “The Beev’s” older brother, and unlike Jerry Mathers, could act) had died after being so informed by Dow’s wife. This was immediately picked up by most media outlets, and obituaries appeared. Brother Wally, however, was still breathing. The representatives then posted an “URGENT UPDATE” on the Facebook page, writing, “This morning Tony’s wife Lauren, who was very distraught, had notified us that Tony had passed and asked that we notify all his fans. As we are sure you can understand, this has been a very trying time for her. We have since received a call from Tony’s daughter-in-law saying that while Tony is not doing well, he has not yet passed. Tony’s son Christopher and his daughter-in-law Melissa have also been by his side comforting him, and we will keep you posted on any future updates.”
I don’t care how distraught Mrs. Dow is: how hard is it to tell if her husband is dead or not? There’s the old mirror trick, for example. If she’s so “distraught,” why did Dow’s representatives not seek conformation of their client’s death before announcing it to the world? I recall many instances where the news media jumped the gun with a premature death announcement, but I’ve never heard of a celebrity’s family announcing the End by mistake.
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