And now for something completely appalling! The Tiverton, Rhode Island eatery posted this meme to Facebook:
Now what?
What occurred after the meme went up was that a local talk radio host called to investigate. She says the restaurant owner told her that he thought the meme was funny and then cut off the call. The employee who posted the gag alleged that he didn’t know who the girl in the photo was.
After the post had been taken down by the restaurant, a contrite apology went up in its place:
Behold the newly painted traffic lines on a highway in Hollister, California.
No, there is no catch, excuse or hidden explanation. Just…morons.
Hollister Mayor Igancio Velzaquez was blunt, if not quite blunt enough, saying, “It just comes down to the contractor. Somebody didn’t read the plans correctly. It was not designed to look very odd.”
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Pointer: Boing-Boing
Time for my favorite way to greet the morning: it’s been a while...
My father had small cards that he handed out, sparingly, that read,
“One day as I sat musing, sad and lonely without a friend, a voice came to me from out of the gloom saying, ‘Cheer up. Things could be worse.’ So I cheered up and sure enough—things got worse.”
On the web, this quote is attributed to the author of a 1988 book, which is obviously wrong: my father had those cards in the Fifties. He liked the quote, first, because he liked the joke, but also because it expressed his philosophy of life in a sly way. He did not believe in feeling sorry for himself, and my father lived what was in many ways a traumatic life. Because he knew that things could always be worse than they were for him at the time—surviving battles in WWII will drive that point home forever– he never despaired, adopted the belief that it was great to be alive, and advised his son and daughter, when they faced setbacks and disappointments, not to wallow, weep or regret, but to move on, look ahead, and, as Winston Churchill, a depressive, would say, “Keep buggering on” without fear or hesitation.
There is always plenty to feel good about, even if, as it is for me today, all that comes to mind is a glorious moment in a movie musical when Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynold and Gene Kelly were all young, at the peak of their talents, and given the perfect vehicle to express in dance and song, for all time, what it feels like to be happy just to be alive.
1. “Linked” and our nasty, untrustworthy journalists. This headline—“Napping regularly linked to high blood pressure and stroke, study finds”-–was quickly picked up by other news sources that reported research showing that naps might kill you. That’s not what the study concluded. The study found that people who had various health maladies needed to nap because in many cases their issues caused them not to get enough sleep at night. “Although taking a nap itself is not harmful, many people who take naps may do so because of poor sleep at night. Poor sleep at night is associated with poorer health, and naps are not enough to make up for that,” one of the researchers, Michael Grandner, said in a statement.
Ah, yes, “linked.” Guilt by association. Our corrupt journalists gave “linked” a workout when it was trying every day to show that Donald Trump and his associates had conspired with Putin and Russia to steal the 2016 election. Any time you see “linked” in a headline about anything, your ethics alarms should start pinging.
As Ronald Reagan might say, “There they go again!” This White House and Democrats in general are addicted to the Orwellian technique of avoiding reality and gaslighting the public using the technique represented by Ethics Alarms Rationalization #64, Yoo’s Rationalization, or “It Isn’t What It Is.”
Orwell’s Big Brother reveled in mottos like “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The Democratic way for some time now, and it is natural that the Biden Administration would employ it, is to deal with facts it doesn’t care for by denying them, altering unpleasant reality by offering an alternate one to the gullible public, or, as in the current case, just changing the meanings of words so things are too muddled and confusing for anyone to be sure what’s happening.
Democracy dies in befuddlement.
All my adult life, I have read that economists view two consecutive quarters in which the economy has contracted as signifying a recession. Well, you know…economists. Nonetheless, I have lived through a lot of them, and never before have I seen the unfortunate wretches caught “holding the bag” when this damning diagnosis attaches have the chutzpah to do what the Bidenites have. The Bureau of Economic Analysis is set to release the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) numbers this week, and they are widely expected to show those two consecutive quarters of economic decline. So what have the Democrats cooked up? A definition of “recession” that will allow them—they hope—to avoid the “R” word.
That was blogger/lawyer/retired law professor Ann Althouse this morning on her esoteric blog.
Ethics Alarms has made this same point in various ways for many months. Of course, Ann is right.
British novelist William Golding, whom you probably know best as the author of “Lord of the Flies,” wrote a disturbing novel the year I was born called “Freefall.” It was on the reading list of a literature course I took as a college junior, and though it was easily the least well-known of the novels we studied (and is one of Golding’s least-known books as well), “Freefall” is the one that has most echoed back to me at various times over the decades.
The first-person narrator is a miserable and depressed man, an artist, imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II and awaiting torture in a small, dark store room. In fear and isolation, he finds his mind reviewing the minutiae of his life, as he searches for the exact moment when his life went horribly and irretrievably wrong and he lost control. In flashbacks, he constantly stops, sometimes after re-living what seems to be the most trivial event, and asks “Was this it? Was this the moment?’
I thought about “Freefall” once again this morning, as I tried to process a series of absurd and incomprehensible recent occurrences and statements. “Is this it?” I found myself wondering, like Golding’s pathetic hero, “Is this it? Is this the moment The Great Stupid completely obliterates all reason and leaves the United States public wandering around aimlessly moaning like the zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’?”
No, it’s not a particularly momentous chain of events, just one that can’t happen anywhere that has sturdy values, trustworthy leadership, and functioning ethics alarms.
While watching Eddie Izzard’s most recent movie on Netflix, 2020’s “Six Minutes to Midnight,” I decided to check out the details of the stand-up comic/ actor’s career. Imagine my surprise to find that the Wikipedia biography of Izzard refers to Eddie as “she” and “her.” This, despite the fact that the performer is and has always been biologically male. By the au currant definition of “transgender,” Izzard would now qualify for the UPenn women’s swim team (if he or she could swim, that is.)
Wikipedia calls Eddie by female pronouns because at various times the versatile performer has said that he wanted to be referred to as “she,” that “he and she” were his preferred pronouns, that he is “genderfluid,” and that he is a heterosexual and transvestite. Izzard is prone to describing himself in such varying terms as “somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish,””a lesbian trapped in a man’s body,” “a complete boy plus half girl,” and says “she” uses “transgender” as an umbrella term, whatever that means. Izzard has “explained,” “If I am in boy mode, then ‘he’, or girl mode, ‘she'”. In 2020, when “she” played the serious role of a male British spy in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” which “she” wrote, Izzard said announced being “based in girl mode from now on”.
Either Eddie Izzard doesn’t know what he wants or is, or the whole thing is an extended put-on. Either way, this behavior does nothing for the transgender cause except make it appear silly and confused.
1. Is it unethical for a publication to pretend that something is in doubt when it obviously isn’t? Here’s a feature headline from the Boston Globe Magazine: “Can poetry possibly matter in a time like this?” The writer consults a former U.S. poet laureate, whose response is as predictable as it is useless. Of course the answer is “no” regardless of what you think “like this” means, and the answer has been no for at least 80 years. Poetry has negligible influence of the culture.
Quick: what’s the most recent poem that you can quote a substantial part of from memory? (Lyrics don’t count.) Continue reading
…and it’s this one, from an Arizona 25-year-old who had been looking forward to a “hot girl” summer:
Amazingly, this isn’t the dumbest or even necessarily most offensive of the quotes from those interviewed in “Sorry, Summer,” an outrageously contrived lament authored by Times reporter
Continue reading
I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand how intelligent officials—and by “intelligent” here I only mean “smart enough to put their socks on before their shoes”—-can possibly convince themselves that ignoring common sense and the collected wisdom of centuries as well as the acquired knowledge of recent decades will have anything but disastrous results. But here we stand:
Is being transgender a mental disorder? A lot of news and controversies around the suddenly militant minority seems to compel honest consideration of the question. It is definitely not a formal disorder, but that doesn’t deal with the issue. The medical profession, which is, as has been periodically documented on Ethics Alarms, is now politically-driven and in the directing of progressive positions and agendas.
Up until 2012, transgenderism was labeled a mental disorder; that year, the American Psychiatric Association revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and struck transgenderism from the list. Now, woke institutions like the Cleveland Clinic state outright, “Being transgender is not a mental illness. But people who are transgender face unique challenges, such as gender dysphoria and discrimination, which can affect their mental health….” The Clinic then adopts whole cloth the familiar transgender narrative, uncritically, as if it is scientific fact rather than an ideological position:
Healthcare providers assign a baby a sex at birth. Babies may be assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB) based on their external physical genitalia. The term “cisgender” describes people who identify as the gender that matches their assigned sex. (For example, if you’re born biologically female and you identify as female, then you’re cisgender.) But for some people, as they grow up and understand themselves better, they find that their gender doesn’t match their assigned, biological sex.
Ethics Alarms 