Bias makes you stupid, and lets everyone know you are biased and stupid, except those who are also biased and stupid. It also destroys your credibility, and signals that you are untrustworthy. That simple meme above was briefly tweeted out by The Daily Show, which appears on Comedy Central, once a cable option that was devoted to making people of all backgrounds and orientations laugh…you know, like comedians used to try to do. But eventually progressives took over the media and entertainment, and as with the once bi-partisan late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live, decided that the only people who deserved to be made fun of were conservatives, religious Americans, Republicans and, most of all, Donald Trump, and the only people they cared about making laugh were the hard-biased woke, like these shows’ hosts, performers and writers.

Thus when the meme of the dying battery was issued during “Sleepy Joe’s” wreck of a State of the Union speech, fans of the show erupted in anger. “… how very republican rhetoric from you,” protested one user. What the fuck?!?! Who hacked this account?!? This is bullshit!!! @Trevornoah did you approve this?!?” read another  tweet, which referred to the show’s reliably progressive messaging host. 

So the meme was taken down. Bias also makes you a weenie, apparently.

I read about this after being thoroughly disheartened reading an exchange a very, very intelligent and informed college friend had on Facebook about Biden’s SOTU. One development that has been fascinating to observe is that after four years inwhich insulting and complaining about President Trump were my Facebook Friends’ daily pastime (and in which Facts Didn’t Matter, just raw hate and virtue-signaling), since Biden’s election there have been virtually no political posts at all regarding this President, favorable or unfavorable. No jokes, no memes, no observations.Thus this exchange really stood out, as my old friend expressed admiration for the speech and snidely offered that it was a big upgrade from “Drumpf.”

The verdict essentially echoed the mainstream media reviews in places like MSNBC and CNN, but they are paid to issue Democratic propaganda. How can anyone with two brain cells to rub together call that speech anything but dishonest, frightening and infuriating?

What–the hell-–does “go get ‘im” mean? How can anyone believe that the state of the union is “strong”? How can a nation spend its way out of crazy inflation? What sense does it make to lob verbal insults at Putin when you are still funding his invasion by buying his oil and making it clear that no military force will be used to stop him? Who but an idiot would find any of that impressive or reassuring?

Yes, Biden promised that the next time, Putin will really be in trouble. The next time. Sure. “And as I’ve made crystal clear, the United States and our Allies will defend every inch of territory that is NATO territory with the full force of our collective power — every single inch,” the President said. Like Obama defended the “line” he drew in Syria. Like Joe stuck by our commitment in Afghanistan.

And, of course,we saw and heard the usual signs of Biden’s mental decline, like when he tried to ad-lib and said, “We’ve sent 475 Million vaccine doses to 112 countries, more than any other nation. And we won’t stop, because you can’t build a wall high enough to keep out… a vaccine…the vaccine can stop the spread of these diseases.” Joe also called the Ukrainians “Iranians.”

To be fair, he did this kind of thing even before his mind started turning to oatmeal. Still, how much biased-fueled denial does one have to embrace to watch that speech and think, “Wow, that was GREAT!!! I am so confident in the three years lying ahead!” ?

1. Yet another unethical and incompetent Republican House Member…Van Taylor, a Republican U.S. Congressman from Texas,  dropped out of his re-election race after it was revealed that he had been in an extra-marital relationship with a woman whose previous marriage was to an ISIS commander. Taylor has a wife and three daughters. He paid his paramour  $5,000 to keep quiet about the affair.

All you have to do, once you are elected to Congress, is resolve not to get involved in sex scandals, adultery, child porn or sexual harassment for two short years. How hard can that be? If a politician can’t control himself or herself to that minimal extent, then they should be in another line of work.

In his apology, Taylor admitted to a “mistake.” This means that at some point he must have thought having an adulterous affair with a women connected to a terrorist organization while he was serving in Congress was a good idea. He has dead ethics alarms. He shouldn’t be trusted to sell hot pretzels on the street.

2. Where are those Democratic District Attorneys when you need them? While DAs in various Democratic run cities are declining to prosecute shoplifting, drug possession and defecating in public, two Cape Coral, Florida children are facing battery charges because they shot two other kids….with Silly String.

Continue reading →

As story of the Alamo heads to its bloody and legendary climax on March 6, 1836, commenter Michael West filed another update on what transpired on yesterday’s date, March 1, but corresponding to today, because 1936 was a Leap Year. Michael’s running account is indispensable, and I am so grateful for it. He writes,

March 1, 1836: The Alamo defenders are down to their last 5 full days.

The “Mina Volunteers” — a militia unit from Bastrop, Texas—departs for the rendezvous in Gonzales. Captain Joseph Lynch begins recruiting up and down the Brazos River to form a company and march to Gonzales. Captain Phil Coe does the same up and down the Colorado River. Captain Robert McNutt and his 2nd in Command Gibson Kuykendall activate a company in San Felipe (west of what would eventually be Houston).

These are just a handful of the many companies gathering across Texas as rapidly as they could to make their way in answer to Colonel Travis’s plea for aid, all while the civil drama plays out in Washington-on-the-Brazos. Texas’s Declaration of Independence, to be officially declared the next day, was finalized by George Childress.

Behind enemy lines, south of Urrea’s “Coastal Column” a somewhat interesting character, Dr. Grant, and the fledgling remains of his wild mission to raise a rebellion in Matamoros continues to wander north, soon to meet its fate in a far less spectacular end that Grant probably had envisioned for himself. Meanwhile, at the Alamo, the truce apparently has come to an end as Santa Ana noted the Texans fired a cannon, ending the truce and apparently cancelling any offer of amnesty he had made. In further Alamo lore involving  a fact that seemed too perfect to be true, the shot from one the cannons fired that day actually struck the house that the dictator was occupying.

Santa Ana’s army was still not at full strength, and was not expected until the 3rd of March.

The most distant  Texan reinforcements were about 150 miles from the Alamo, the rest closer. At a rate of about 30 miles per day on horseback, the farthest reinforcements could reach the Alamo in five days. As the men rushed westward with all their zeal, they would have been quietly reminded that they were each groups of 15 to 45 men charging headlong out of wooded terrain and into open prairies, towards a Mexican army of several thousand.

Now in more mundane and present day ethics matters;

1. Now THIS is hubris! Talk about not knowing your lane…Dr. Bruce Glavovic, 61, a professor at Massey University in New Zealand, has joined two colleagues in the field of environmental research to declare, in an academic journal, that climate scientists should stage a mass walkout and stop their research until nations take action on global warming. Continue reading →

“So on this night, in our 245^th year as a nation, I have come to report on the State of the Union.  And my report is this: the State of the Union is strong—because you, the American people, are strong.  We are stronger today than we were a year ago.”

—President Joe Biden in his State of the Union speech before Congress last night, talking nonsense.

I mentioned yesterday that I would have gained respect for Joe Biden if he had the integrity to say last night, as Gerald Ford did in 1975, “The State of the Union is not good.” I did not expect him to do so, because Biden has no integrity, as the rest of his speech proved.

Unlike most SOTU messages, Biden waited until the very end to give the report to Congress that is supposedly the justification for the whole useless, increasingly embarrassing ritual. Doing so, he might as well have said, “Everything I’ve said before this is calculated dishonesty, just like this false assessment of our nation’s state. But what else am I supposed to do?” One astute wag wrote that the unspoken message of Biden’s speech was perfectly embodied in this immortal “Animal House” clip:

Who, including Biden, could possibly believe that the State of the Union is anything other than in deep, deep trouble, or that—this is even more ridiculous—that it is “stronger today than we were a year ago”? By what measure could that be true?

Consider: Continue reading →

I know I’ve run this SNL clip on other March Firsts, but a) it always makes me laugh and I need a laugh today, and 2) it always provokes ethics reflections.

For example, I think about how much healthier the nation’s culture was when its primary weekly source of current events satire was devoted to making all Americans laugh rather than pursuing a one-sided ideological agenda, as it does now. Then there is the brilliant John Belushi, who robbed himself of a career of almost unlimited potential and his nation of the many joys that career would have generated by deliberately violating drug laws that would have kept him alive, if he hadn’t been persuaded by a drug-loving culture that insisted that recreational drugs were cool. Now, of course, our laws send completely muddled messages that ensure that more talented Americans meet Belushi’s sad end than fewer.

In the U.S., ethics came in like a lion, and is going out like a blind shrew rat…

1. Unethical Quote the New Month: President Biden. (I should probably highlight this with a full post, but there is too much political news on the ethics horizon today, so I’m trying to lessen the load.) During a Black History Month event as the White House, the President who promised to heal divisions in society and bridge the partisan divide, said,

“We’re protecting our country’s threshold liberty, the sacred right to vote, which I’ve never seen as under such attack.You know, it’s always made it harder for blacks to vote but this is trying to be able to figure out how to keep the black vote, when it occurs, from even counting.”

Trying to prevent the black vote from counting! No misinformation there! Restricting unlimited mail-in ballots, banning vote harvesting, limiting early voting  and drop-boxes, and requiring photo IDs at polls constitutes an “attack” on the sacred right to vote, says the President of the United States.

He’s not only lying, he’s an asshole. Continue reading →

That’s Ukrainian model Tetiana Gaidar above, nicely symbolizing what old guy Vladimir Putin didn’t get about launching an unethical war in 2022.

Because of social media, 24-7 cable news and the web, world public opinion can–can—quickly coalesce around basic ethical values and arrive at a crushing consensus. Putin is being personally cancelled, and if his nation’s people decide they don’t want to be cancelled too, he might be in bigger trouble that he could have imagined in his worst nightmares. Ethics Alarms already mentioned how Putin forgot the Alamo, always a bad thing to do. He apparently also had forgotten that one of the big cracks in the Iron Curtain was inflicted when Ronald Reagan termed the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire.”

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in the Sixties about what made huge corporations successful, argued that they created nation-like loyalties by behaving as good corporate citizens, and that there was a crucial benefit in this that went beyond mere profit. The best people, he claimed, would not work for companies perceived as unethical, so becoming an organization that the best and the brightest would be proud to be part of was a matter of long-term survival.

Galbraith, was we have seen, was overly optimistic, but his general point is still important, particularly at the extremes. Too late, Putin is trying to save his reputation by trying the absurd cognitive dissonance trick of associating the Ukraine government with Nazis. It’s not working, because it is so obviously a self-serving lie.

1. If only baseball writers read Ethics Alarms...(or knew what ethics was, for that matter). More than five years after Ethics Alarms explained why Red Sox icon David Ortiz created an unavoidable  slippery slope likely to carry Barry Bonds and the other steroid cheat superstars into baseball’s Hall of Fame, esteemed baseball writer Bob Nightengale figured it out, and just announced his brilliant analysis in USA Today. Ortiz was recently voted into the Hall, as EA noted here in the follow-up to the original article. [Much thanks to Jutgory for alerting me to Nightengale’s piece]

See? I’m smart! Not dumb everybody says… I’m smart and I want respect!

2. If the Republicans are going to publicly shun Liz Cheney for joining the political witch trials the Democrats are holding on the January 6 riots, they have no excuse not to take even more decisive action against the  GOP Congress members Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, and AZ State Senator Wendy Rogers, for openly supporting Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who has been correctly labeled a “white supremacist” by the Justice Department, and his organization, the America First Political Action Conference. Republican Gosar and Greene both attended the group’s conference this weekend, and both addressed the all-white throng, which engaged in such fun activities as applauding for Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and chanting “Putin, Putin!” Continue reading →