Have you heard about this? No? How is that possible? After all, we have so many news organizations that should be thrilled and eager to report that a planned school shooting was foiled because–wait for it!—everyone did what they were supposed to do.

The story: Someone driving past by the Walnut Park Elementary School in Gadsden, Alabama saw a man trying to get into the school and looking into cars. The citizen called the police to report what he saw. The man was aggressively trying to get into the school building, and went to several doors, all of which were locked, but the principal, once he was alerted to the threat, checked the doors to make sure. The school administrators then declared a lockdown and called the school resource officer, who called for back-up. The officer reportedly engaged the would-be invader, who allegedly attempted to break into a marked police vehicle and to take the officer’s gun. More police officers arrived on the scene and the individual was shot and killed.

Observations:

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Not just biased, mind you, but despicably biased.

If you log onto NYTimes.com now, and check above the fold, you will see a lovely story about the Jurassic Park cast and Kelly Clarkson’s performance. If you scroll down, down, down, down, down, you will find a story about the attempted assassination of a Justice. By my count, the Kavanaugh assassination attempt is perhaps the sixteenth most important news item of the day!

This revelation from last week didn’t come from the Gateway Pundit or Breitbart or another unreliable right-wing attack site avoided by Ethics Alarms. It was the observation of Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the President of the Harlan Institute. He was writing on the Volokh Conspiracy, which specializes in legal scholarship, and isn’t read much by Average Joe, because AJ usually can’t understand it and its articles require more than the attention span of puppy. And he was right.

Even consistently left-biased Five Thirty-Eight proprietor Nate Silver was critical…

…though tellingly equivocal: “it’s sorta crazy.” No, Nate, it’s fucking outrageous, signature significance, and a smoking gun. A genuine attempt on the life of a Supreme Court Justice after prominent Democrats and pro-fetus killing activists seeded efforts to intimidate the conservatives on the Court, and it barely makes it to the online equivalent of the Times front page? Ah, those wacky Times editors! Silver’s reaction to the Times’ abdication of responsible journalism is nearly as disgusting as the Times conduct itself. Continue reading →

Yes, I’m sorry I started this.

The original piece was too long, so the process of debunking and exposing it is also too long. There are other issues to cover, and sock drawers to organize. Still: this kind of irresponsible, dishonest mind-poison is published in respectable places every day, and they are hardly ever challenged in print. Someone like Wajahat Ali will issue this junk and then get welcomed onto MSNBC, where Joy Reid or another one of the anti-America, anti-white racists who bloviate there will cheer him on. I know I can’t do anything about it, or him, or her. Still, I can’t do nothing either.

Let’s finish this…

If Republicans take control of the political leadership of Congress, which seems likely, they will be beholden to an increasingly radicalized and weaponized base that is fine using violence to “take back their country.”

A leftist wacko inflamed by pundits like Ali and the Jan. 6 show trial just tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. I do not see how any Democrat can get away with calling Republican followers “radicalized” while their own allies convince pre-teens to change their gender, police are villified, cities like San Francisco are allowing thieves to run amuck, schools are being encouraged to teach that white America continues to oppress all minorities, children are being forced to grow up with half their faces covered, and the Democratic Party’s solution to students taking on more debt than they can afford is for the government to pay it off.

Meanwhile, Republicans refuse to move against white supremacist terrorism, which is the number domestic terror threat in the country. Instead their colleagues, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, openly attend conferences hosted by Nick Fuentes—a notorious antisemite and white nationalist. The hoods are off, and there’s no turning back for the GOP.

Shameless, don’t you think? This is an administration that called parents protesting anti-white propaganda in elementary schools “white supremacist terrorists.” Using two outlying, really bad, GOP House members as representative of the whole party is bold glass house stone-throwing for the supporter of a party where “The Squad”—speaking of anti-semites and wackos–has so much influence. Continue reading →

Continuing to slog through the obvious ethical, logical and journalistic horrors that infest pundit Wajahat Ali ‘s anti-US opinion piece “Is It Time for Me to Leave America?” (the previous installment is here):

“This is not a flippant or hyperbolic thought exercise, and I’m not the only one to increasingly ponder the question: “Where else can we go when this country turns on us?”

“I’m not the only one” is a rationalization, not a justification.

“Earlier this week, New York Times journalist Farnaz Fassihi was trolled and harassed on Twitter for simply stating the following: “I’m a child of immigrants. When I was a kid, everyone I knew wished they could raise their children in America, now, everyone I know wishes they could raise their children outside of America.” If you’ve traveled and talked to people over the past few years, her statement wasn’t extraordinary, it’s a sadly common utterance. 

Fassihi wasn’t “harassed” on Twitter (nobody’s forcing him to read critical tweets), and “trolled” means people simply pointed out what a stupid thing he had written, which is what Twitter does. “If everyone he knows” wishes they could raise the kids outside of America, then he lives in a bubble, and a really weird one. Why should anyone take a statement like that seriously? It reminds me of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously saying that “everyone she knew” supported George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential race. The response to that is, “You need to get out more, kid.” I’m not believing the comment is “sadly common” until I see some evidence.

“Most people around the world aren’t rejoicing at America’s self-inflicted downfall, they’re looking at us with pity, sadness, and a desperate hope that we get our shit together. After all, the United States is still the most powerful and wealthy country in the world, and a doorstop against rising authoritarianism.”

“People around the world” need to get their own “shit together,” and one very popular way to do that is to come here.  Currently hey don’t live here, they don’t have our values or culture, they are unenlightened observers. This is the tell-tale whine of those who want the United States to be more like the rest of the world. Continue reading →

Three notable markers in ethics lore occurred on June 10. In 1752, Ben Franklin did something creative, inventive, bold and really, really stupid, flying a kite during a thunder storm to collect lightning in a jar. He pulled it off, too, because he was lucky, as usual. Ben just as easily could have been electrocuted, meaning that he would not have been around to add his considerable wisdom, negotiating skills and talents to the founding of our nation, which might not exist today if old Ben was a-moldering in the grave when they needed him in Philadelphia. A things turned out, Ben’s kite-flying experiment added to his fame, but it just as easily could have been an epic disaster for the world.

And that, my friends, is moral luck.

Another ethics landmark occurred on this date in 1692 in Salem Village the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Bridget Bishop, the first victim of the Salem witch trials, was hanged and 18 more innocent colonists were executed (none were burned) before the epic example of how fear, ignorance and political ruthlessness can turn good people into monsters. In 1976, a scientist published a paper arguing that the young girls’ weird behavior that triggered the witch trials may not have been caused, as “The Crucible” has it, by teenage rebellion, but by a hallucinogenic fungus that sometimes infects the type of grain the Salem colonists used for bread. The theory has substantial support in the scientific community if not so much among historians.

The witch trials are particularly relevant today, because of the Jan. 6 hearings…

Finally, on this date in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, two recovering alcoholics, founded Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, a 12-step rehabilitation and support group program that has helped millions of people worldwide (including many very close to me) battle a terrible and widespread disease that destroys lives, families, and businesses.

1. “A Nation of Assholes,” redux. As regular readers here know, I posted A Nation Of Assholes: The Ultimate, Undeniable And Crucial Reason Donald Trump Must Never Be President nearly seven years ago, and all has transpired as I predicted. Well, not exactly as I predicted: I assumed that the rising generations would have their language and civility corrupted by having an unrepentant vulgarian and boor in the White House, but I did not predict the adults who were his adversaries quickly adopting equally unethical habits, and in some cases, worse ones. I was reminded again of this phenomenon—which as far as I can tell, only Ethics Alarms flagged—yesterday when a controversy emerged over Boston Celtics fans chanting “Fuck you Draymond” at Warriors court thug Draymond Green during yesterday’s NBA Finals game at the Boston Garden. As a born-and bred Bostonian, I can testify that not all that long ago such sporting event crowd conduct would have been unimaginable in the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin. The critics of yesterday’s disgrace concentrated on a “Think of the children!” tactic, which misses the ethics point. Chanting “fuck” is disrespectful of everyone.

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I apologize for not posting anything in the last two days on the anniversary of D-Day. This past Memorial Day, Grace and I, and my sister were completely immersed in World War II as we honored my father, and I had watched “The Longest Day” again during the weekend. Somehow June 6 came up too fast this year. Even acknowledging its many flaws, my Dad liked that WWII movie far more than most, because all of the anecdotes (right out of Cornelius Ryan’s book, which is better than his screenplay) reminded him of his own weird experiences in combat. (Dad’s least favorite war movies? A tie between “The Battle of the Bulge—with barely any snow in evidence and Sherman tanks playing Tiger tanks, and “Saving Private Ryan.”)

D-Day also had a strange place in the Marshall family’s consciousness. Dad was scheduled to be an observer during the invasion, but was sidelined when an idiot in his platoon used the pin of a live hand-grenade to dig mud out of his boot, blowing up himself, two other soldiers and my father’s right foot, and sending Dad to a hospital for months. The surgeon who later fixed Ted Kennedy’s broken back rebuilt my father’s foot sufficiently that it could be stuffed in a boot to allow him to get back into the war during the Battle of the Bulge. But he liked to remind my sister and me that we probably owed our existence to D-Day, specifically the fact that he wasn’t killed “observing” it.

1. The arrogance of anti-gun zealots. I just inserted myself into a thread launched by a Facebook friend expressing horror that parents entering a pediatric hospital would (legally) carry their guns inside. One of the Facebook friend’s Facebook friends wrote “I’m sick of your rights” and another wrote,”No one needs a gun.” Signature significance in both cases, and I told them both why.

2. Ethics Alarms Thread of the Year. I spent a long time trying to choose which of the uniformly excellent comments on the post Update: The Great Stupid Meets The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, and decided that there were just too many. I therefore declare the whole thread Comment of the Day-worthy, something I’ve never done before, but, looking back, probably should have. Some highlights to send you over there:

• “Remember that the people pushing for gun control laws are the same people pushing for restorative justice.”
• “Forty percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and fifty percent think UFOs are alien spacecraft. Let’s not start making policy based on what people believe, especially the dim bulbs who answer phone surveys.”
• “Wait! Are Democrats okay with convicted felons and the mentally ill being discriminated against? What’s up with that? Didn’t Terry McAuliffe get felons the right to vote in Virginia (because felons evidently always vote Democrat)? And the mentally ill are a protected group. They are allowed to live on the street and do whatever they want wherever they want to. Who’s really in favor of them not having the rights of all other people? Will the felon lobby and the mentally ill lobby stand for this?”
• “It seems to be legal for the mentally ill to stab or beat people to death in one on one situations on the street. That results in a stern warning not to do it again. It also seems to be legal for the mentally ill to break into homes and kill people, even via gun violence. It is only when the mentally ill break into schools and commit mass murder that anyone cares, and even then you aren’t allowed to point out that untreated mental illness was the root cause…”
• “Regarding “priorities”… there’s millions and millions of brains in this country. I’d be surprised if we can’t figure out five problems at once….”

And many more: those are just examples, not necessarily the highlights. Continue reading →

The most famous event that occurred on this day in U.S. history was the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. Assassinations are unethical, of course, though Bobby Kennedy was quite likely a dangerous man to have in the White House, as he was perhaps even more of a sociopath than the typical Kennedy, such as Jack and Teddy. Less dissonant as an ethical landmark is George Marshall’s 1947 speech planting the seeds of the Marshall Plan—the name has a certain ring to it, somehow!—by calling on the United States to aid in the economic recovery of postwar Europe, which it did by sending billions of dollars to Western Europe to rebuild the war-torn countries. This was not altruism, however, but pragmatism: there was a quite legitimate fear that the contagion of Communism was in the air and likely to spread. The Marshall Plan was a Cold War strategy, and nobody can say whether it “worked” or not. Western Europe was able to resist communism, but that might have just been moral luck.

A notable unethical historical episode was the work of President Grover Cleveland, known as “Grover the Good.” The name “Grover the Mixed Bag” would be more accurate. This time, in 1888 (as Jack The Ripper was getting ready to murder his first victim in Whitechapel). Johanna Loewinger’s Civil War veteran husband died 14 years after being discharged from the army. Upon his death in 1876, his pension was discontinued. Johanna, applied for a widow’s pension, but was denied since her husband died from suicide by cutting his own throat rather from wounds suffered while fighting for the Union. (He had been discharged for chronic diarrhea.)  His widow claimed that the war had driven him mad and was the reason for his death. After she failed to get the pension she felt she was owed, Johanna appealed to a member of Congress to petition the President. Grover denied the widow’s petition.

1. I don’t even know what to say about this. Here are Burger King Austria’s special Pride Month Whoppers, with two bottom rolls or two tops. I thought it was a joke. It’s not.

2. Who does he think he is, Ricky Gervais? David Weigel, who covers politics for the Washington Post, retweeted a tweet that said,: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” His colleague Felicia Sonmez, who also covers politics, wrote: “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Allowed! I agree that the tweet was inappropriate in a workplace setting, but the proper response would be a little reminder from the brass.  Weigel, however, felt it necessary to grovel, and tweeted, “I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke. I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm.”  Washington Post COO Kris Coratti Kelly announced, “Editors have made clear to the staff that the tweet was reprehensible and demeaning language or actions like that will not be tolerated.”

The action was a joke. It had the form of a joke, and was intended as a joke. If I cared enough and my sock drawer weren’t a mess, I’d do some research into the kinds of jokes about men, Republicans, President Trump and his supporters Post staff have retweeted. I’m pretty sure what I’d find. Like everything else, satirical humor goes in only one direction in D.C., and the reverse “will not be tolerated.”

3. Speaking of bias..Take the New York Times. Please! I have a Facebook friend who really and truly announced that he was a fan of Times op-edderess Michelle Goldberg. She is biased as well as intellectually dishonest, and does not deserve a regular platform in the Poughkeepsie Weekle Packet, much less the New York Times. Her continued existence there is signature significance, so I felt vindicated to see this column last week:  “The Amber Heard Verdict Was a Travesty. Others Will Follow.”It began, “The verdict in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard is difficult to explain logically.” Difficult to explain logically to whom? Heard got the Washington Post to publish her op-ed that made defamatory accusations against Depp that she couldn’t back up, statements that alleged as fact matters that could not be shown to be fact, which is the essence of libel. Not only that, she promised the ACLU a large contribution in exchange for assisting in writing the piece, and the organization testified that she stiffed them, not that they didn’t deserve being stiffed, since taking sides in celebrity domestic disputes is not exactly in the organization’s mission statement. Heard was unequivocally exposed as a serial liar, but never mind: Goldberg makes it clear Heard should have won the suit because other women have been abused by powerful men, and because “Believe all women” must be the norm. The jury should have rejected Depp’s defamation claim because his victory hurt the cause. “Even if Heard lied about everything during the trial — even if she’d never suffered domestic abuse — she still would have represented it,” Goldberg writes. Continue reading →