Yesterday the New York Times tried to weasel out of the major embarrassment, described here, by printing a correction on its front page. That’s obviously not good enough. The episode was emblematic of how far into the ethics abyss journalism has sunk. The Times getting the name of NATO wrong was more than a mistake, it was a mistake that should have been publicized in every other news source, but it wasn’t. Mostly conservative platforms informed the public about the fact that the supposed bulwark of American journalism proved that it is staffed with incompetents, propagandists, boobs and hacks by making an error that literally was impossible unless the Times… is staffed with incompetents, propagandists, boobs and hacks.

Also yesterday, a friend—Trump Deranged (of course) and a politically active Democrat—told me that President Trump had been secretly checked into Walter Reed Hospital and might be seriously ill or dead. This information came from the same sources that convinced another freind that Israel PM Netanyahu had been killed in an Iran missile strike. Then, this morning, here is how the Daily Beast reported on that fake story: “White House Forced to Address Claims of Trump Health Crisis.” See? The evil White House was “forced” to come clean about something that wasn’t true in the first place. Americans are now in the position that they have to seek out the “news” source most likely to support their wishes and world view because there is literally not a single one that is objective and trustworthy.

Wonderful.

Meanwhile…

1. The Times is full of empathy for Representative LaMonica McIver, Democrat of New Jersey, who is engaged in a “lonely legal fight,” it says, to avoid accountability for physically interfering with immigration agents outside an ICE detention facility in Newark. For her illegal grandstanding last May, McIver was charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding” federal officials after she was filmed getting involved in the confrontation. She has refused to take a plea deal. and is seeking to have the case against her thrown out, arguing that the Constitution’s “speech-or-debate clause” protects members of Congress from legal liability when they are conducting legislative business. She is also arguing that physically interfering with ICE is “speech.” This is how a Democrat sucks up to the extreme wing of her party today. It is more than unethical: this conduct is dangerous.

2. Civility check at the dog park: this morning I tried to get a dog park romp in for Spuds before a predicted downpour (we got soaked anyway). An English Pointer who mysteriously regards my dog as the Devil was there and as she has before, charged Spuds growling and gnashing. He, as is his wont, just stood his ground and wagged. The owner quickly leashed her dog and began to exit the park, and as she passed me, I said, cheerfully, “I see your dog is still freaking out over mine for no reason. It’s okay, Spuds doesn’t take it personally!” She turned and snapped, “I resent you denigrating my dog. I’ve never had any trouble with her!” This dog has charged out of the darkness off the leash at me to barked at Spuds several times. If my wife had been with me (being dead, she was not), she would have metaphorically burned that jerk’s ears off, and I came oh-so-close to emulating her. But I pleasantly smiled and ignored the…woman. I almost wish I could prime my pit bull mix to take that pointer’s face off the next time she rushes him, but Spuds isn’t like that. Grace, however…

3. Not quite as bad as not knowing what NATO means, but still…Here is “Meet the Press’s” incompetent Kristin Walker today interviewing Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson:

“Secretary Johnson, weigh in on that point and the fact that there is no head of DHS right now at a time when DHS is shut down. Does that do real damage?”

No, I think what does real damage is that alleged journalists we count on to, you know, inform the public of the news don’t follow the news themselves. Markwayne Mullin, former GOP U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, was confirmed as DHS Secretary on March 23rd, 2026 That was almost two weeks ago. [Pointer: Newsbusters]

4. Hypocrite of the Week: Anthropic! The Wall Street Journal reports that AI developer Anthropic issued a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of its Claude Code AI model’s source code that was inadvertently released. That’s rich: this company running to copyright protection when it was built by stealing intellectual property from others.

When Anthropic was just getting started, for instance, it needed access to training data to build its Claude AI model, so it relied on digital books. The company downloaded millions of pirated volumes from an online “shadow library” called LibGen. Anthropic also downloaded books from the “Pirate Library Mirror”—doesn’t that sound ethical! For this, a group of authors sued Anthropic, which resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement. Anthropic also scanned and destroyed millions of used physical books in a secret project called “Project Panama; it involved involved cutting the pages out of the books, scanning them, and destroying the evidence. Again, the owner of the copyrights were not compensated.

5. The Jaden Ivey Ethics Train Wreck. This story was mentioned on Friday’s (barely used!) Open Forum. I have no sympathy for anyone in this mess: there are no good guys, just dunces and villains.

In a series of live videos on his Instagram account, the Chicago Bulls’ injured player declared the NBA’s Pride Month is “unrighteousness” (“The world can proclaim LGBTQ, right? They proclaim Pride Month and the NBA does, too… ‘Come join us for Pride Month to celebrate unrighteousness’”) and condemned abortion as the “wicked decision to murder a baby,” adding “They call abortion good but it’s not good in the sight of God.” Hours later, the Bulls waived him for “conduct detrimental to the team.”

The NBA and the Bulls have been grovelling for approval to all manner of woke causes, forcing their players to ratify their political positions in the process. Nevertheless, an entertainer—think of Disney’s “Snow White,” Rachel Zegler, helping to sink her employer’s movie by alienating potential audience members with gratuitous opinions—has an obligation not to shoot off his mouth or keyboard with potentially divisive political opinions that can cost his employer money and box office. That’s what Ivey did.

But the King’s Pass, or rather the “Non-King’s Smackdown,” was also at work. Ivey was injured, and already had a reputation of being a disruptive presence on a team. The Bulls didn’t lose much by canning him, and cynically used the move as a virtue-signalling opportunity. If Ivey had been a high-scoring, healthy star, I guarantee the team would have handled the episode differently.

How do you fix a Justice who’s a moron?
How can you help a judge who cannot judge?
Is there a phrase describing Justice Jackson?
“A DEI curse,” “a Justice whose brain is fudge”?

Many a thing you know you’d like to tell her
Many a thing she ought to understand
But how can you justify
A Justice who will defy
All logic and law to follow a woke demand?

Oh, how do you fix a Justice who’s a moron?
Can law survive this fool who can’t be canned?

The recent horrified response to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s assorted gibberish and idiotic comments during the oral argument regarding the birthright citizenship issue only amplified the dawning realization that President Biden inflicted on the Supreme Court and the nation the most unqualified Justice in its history, and that’s saying something.

Richard Nixon almost got Harold Carswell on the Court, and he was so mediocre that a GOP supporter in the Senate argued that he should be confirmed because less-than-stellar people should be represented on the Court too. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the abysmal Roe v. Wade opinion and the even more head-exploding decision “explaining” why Major League Baseball should be exempted from the antitrust laws (“Baseball is cool” would adequately describe his logic), looks like Oliver Wendell Holmes compared to Ketanji Brown Jackson. Heck, Justice Sotomayor is a veritable Scalia compared to her fellow DEI Justice.

This is incredible a depressing. What can be done about it?

Presumable nothing. If one could impeach a Justice for manifest incompetence, Jackon’s dissent in the recent case of Chiles v. Salazar would surely justify it. Colorado had banned “conversion therapy,” so licensed counselors could not engage in “any practice or treatment” that “attempts or purports to change” a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The law imposed penalties for those violating the law, including a $5,000 fine and the potential loss of their licenses, even if the therapy was exclusively talking.

Ring any bells? Here’s a hint: “Freedom of speech.”

These bans on such “talk therapy” that endangers LGBTQ orthodoxy are scattered through the statutes of “blue states” across the nation. As I find the arguments for conversion therapy denigrating to gays and others, I had to check the blog archives to make sure that I have been consistent in opposing efforts to make such treatment illegal. Whew! I have.

During the oral argument on this case in October, I wrote,

“One more thing: if this dispute doesn’t prove for all time that progressives are remarkably skilled at holding opposing beliefs in their heads without feeling any discomfort, nothing will. The Left is fighting like honey badgers to allow school personnel to talk kids into thinking they are girls trapped in boys’ bodies or vice-versa, resulting in life-wrenching hormone treatments and surgery, but insist that conversion therapy for gays must be banned as harmful.”

This ad has been around for a while and running frequently on Fox News. I never paid attention to it until this morning, because I was watching a debate among some legitimate legal experts about the birth-right citizenship issue.

KABOOM! Basically the ad directs donors who identify with the ethnic group behind the plea to be concerned about the victims of the Ukraine war with Russia who belong to one specific group (tribe, race, religion, whatever—pick your word) as if nobody else’s lives count. I know there are many, far too many, Americans who think like this, and the more Americans who do think like this, the weaker, more divided and more imperiled our nation, society, culture and democracy is.

The message is literally “Jews are suffering in the Ukraine, so please send money to help them. Let other groups take care of their own. They aren’t our problem.”

I am not picking on Jewish groups here, for a TV commercial calling for donations to poor black people or poor whites to the exclusion of everyone else equally in distress would be similarly unethical…and disgusting. So far, I’ve never seen such an ad. This thing compounds the offense by making the invalid appeal to emotion represented by playing the Holocaust card. The suffering of elderly Ukrainian Jews at the hands of Russia is particularly cruel today because of what Germany did 80 years ago?

Don’t insult my intelligence. I was a fundraiser for many years: I know the drill. This ad, however, is indefensible. Shame on The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews for creating it. Shame on Fox News for running it. Shame on anyone who gives the group a dime in response to it.

Yecchh.

I keep posting these because I regard them as snap-shots of how the combination of irresponsible biased journalism, bubble-bases ignorance, and peer reinforcement is warping our social discourse and pushing the public into foolish and dangerous misconceptions. Is it an ethical problem? Sure it is. Posts like the one below make readers upset and irrational. They create false framings that warp perceptions of reality. The activate cognitive dissonance, in which the people who like, admire and respect the writer are moved to feel postively about the absolute garbage that he has published.

The author of the screed below that arrived on my Facebook feed yesterday is a wonderful human being. He is kind and effusive in his positive rhetoric; he sends me a birthday card every year, and I have only spent time with him face to face twice in 30 years. He never posts political rants: he is a lifetime showbiz writer, scholar and producer.

I assume this was triggered by the latest “No Kings” lunacy. My friend is also virtue-signaling to his showbiz connections, including me; since he likes and respects me, he assumes that I must agree with his sentiments. My friend is way, way out of his lane.

Get this…

Alyssa Izatt and Kimberley Brownlee wrote in the paper titled “Justice for Girls: On the Provision of Abortion as Adequate Care” that abortions should be forced on young women—legal minors— even if it requires “sedation or physical restraint.” This in a journal recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

The adults responsible for an underage girl’s care “should never pressure or compel her to continue a pregnancy,” they opined. “Nor should they confront her with the three ‘options’ of abortion, adoption, or mothering, as medical professionals are currently advised to do. Instead, her adult caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it.”

They recommend sedation or restraint if necessary. Forced abortions. Not to save the mothers’ lives, but to eliminate the human lives that pro abortion activists believe are mere obstacles that need removal in the best interests of the mothers.

My opinion as an ethics expert: HOLY CATS! This is the reverse of “The Handmaiden’s Tale”!

But write about whatever you feel is ethically urgent.

…which is terrifying.

At the beginning of this week, Chicago prosecutors charged an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Medina-Medina, with the murder-murder of Loyola freshman Sheridan Gorman. Medina-Median allegedly killed Gorman at a nearby beach early on the morning of March 19.

Loyola’s campus newspaper, “The Phoenix” first reported the charges in an Instagram post titled: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved,” and referred to Medina as an “illegal immigrant.”

There was student indignation, however, that the paper called an illegal immigrant an illegal immigrant. The paper, being staffed by students that Loyola’s campus indoctrination and The Great Stupid have rendered incapable of coherent thought, quickly rewrote the report to refer to the accused killer as a “Rogers Park Resident.” Then, to guarantee their place in The Great Stupid Museum, which I am hoping to fund, with this head-exploding apology:

“On March 23, a post on The Phoenix’s Instagram page carried the following headline: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved.”

That headline didn’t reflect the most important elements in the story, and it was taken down minutes later to prevent any further harm to affected community members.

Additionally, in the body of the original post, we described the man who was charged as an “illegal immigrant,” using language provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That language does not align with Associated Press style, nor does it align with the values of this newspaper.  No human’s existence is illegal, and we quickly changed our wording to reflect that.”

Wow.