I never got a chance to write the Wednesday warm-up, cool-down, or whatever it was going to be called yesterday, so I don’t know what this is. Something. A lot is rattling around what I laughingly call me mind, which is one reason I had trouble sleeping, I guess.

One thing I wanted to mention about yesterday, perhaps because I’m still thinking about Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr on July 11, is that it probably marks the first recorded instance of an Old West show-down. On July 21st in 1865, Wild Bill Hickok, a rare genuine gunslinger who was a dead shot with a pistol, killed Dave Tutt in the street in Springfield, Missouri. Tutt drew his weapon first and missed, whereupon Wild Bill calmly took aim. Tutt died of a bullet in his chest a second later. By the standards of the time, this was an unusually ethical shooting. Most men were not good shots and didn’t want to risk finding out that the guys they had a quarrel with were, so fatal gun battles tended to be ambushes or a nasty surprise to the loser. (Wild Bill himself was murdered when he was shot in the head from behind while playing poker.)

Because I worry about such things, I wonder how many Americans under the age of about 40 know who Hickock was. Like most of the Wild West icons, his real life exploits paled in comparison to his legend, but once upon a tim, he was a well-known figure in popular culture. Guy Madison played him as a clean-cut good guy in white in a 50’s TV series pitched to kids (its sponsor was Sugar Pops). This was strange, since Hickock was famous for his long hair, buckskins, floppy hat and long mustache. Bill’s major contribution to U.S. lore was his poker hand when he was shot: two pair, aces and eights, all clubs and spades. This was known ever after as “The Dead Man’s Hand” and reputed to be bad luck. Director John Ford included the portent in every movie he could: if a character was doomed, there was a glimpse of his poker hand, and it was always aces and eights.

1. No self-respecting woman should accept an appointment like this. No responsible President should make one, either. Victoria Reggie Kennedy is Biden’s nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Austria. She’s no dummy, but the only reason she is getting this plum is because she was married to Ted Kennedy. In the press release, her credentials are inflated by all the honorary degrees and other goodies she got as organizations sucked up to Ted or his too influential family. Such an appointment is lazy and insulting: is there anyone cognizant who doesn’t see this as what it is, symbolic ring-kissing for Democratic Party royalty? Moreover, it is one more example—the fact that Biden is President is another— of how the party’s vaunted feminism is more mirage than real. There must be thousands of women who have better arguments for being the U.S. Ambassador to Austria than “I was the second wife of a U.S. Senator who was only elected because of his brothers and whose greatest accomplishment was getting away with negligent homicide.” If Victoria had any integrity, she would have asked Biden to appoint one of those women.

2. I’m not sure how this connects to ethics...honesty and courage, perhaps…but long-time Boston Globe reporter Jack Thomas has written what seems like a sincere and thoughtful column upon learning that he has only a few months to live. He seems convinced that he will have an afterlife, which may contribute to his upbeat reflections, and if that helps him through what he calls “the hell to come,” fine. He concludes his essay,

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Relentless and esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Michael Ejercito wants to know why I have yet to publish the finale to an Ethics Alarms series that began way back in May, 2020. This Comment of the Day, by another veteran commenter, Michael R, is why. All along and from the moment I wrote the May post, my intention has been to explain that from an ethics and U.S. cultural perspective, the lockdown was a mistake, a disaster, politically motivated, and wrong. But I cannot write that post competently without having some definitive statistics regarding pandemic deaths and the identity and demographics of the victims. Michael’s post contains a version of these stats that would allow me to go forward, but I have seen other statistics [See above] that point in exactly the opposite direction.

This is the consequence of the macro-ethics national crisis created by our untrustworthy news media and professions. It is, at this point, impossible to know what the objective facts are, and not only in this matter, but virtually all others.

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Afternoon Ethics Delights, 7/19/2021: The Follies,” focusing on the final item on Colorado’s vaccine lottery (and I forgive him for using the Trump-bashing motivated term “Covid 19” that was devised to advance the Big Lie that President Trump was “racist” to accurately call a Chinese virus a Chinese virus and to place the blame for this crisis squarely where it belonged…)

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You thought I was going to play the damn song, didn’t you? (When Drew Barrymore’s hair moved like that in “Firestarter,” it meant she was about to fry someone…)

1. Good for Mike Judge, the school pal of Justice Kavanaugh, for not letting the disgusting smearing of the judge by Kamala Harris and other Democrats (and the media, of course) sink completely into the memory hole. Judge has another of several articles he’s written on the “Get Kavanaugh by any means necessary” hearings, and it’s as informative as it is infuriating. He writes,

When they got desperate, the left dragged out Julie Swetnick. Remember her? She was the pawn of then-lawyer, now-convicted-felon Michael Avenatti. She told the disgraceful Kate Snow of NBC News that she was gang raped at a party where Brett and I were also present. The claim? That she “saw boys gathered outside closed rooms at parties but did not know what was happening behind those closed doors until she says she herself was attacked around 1982.” Swetnick said she was drugged and then “shoved into a room” where she was “raped by more than one man.” Swetnick says Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were in the same part of the house earlier that evening but she cannot be sure if they were involved. “I cannot specifically say that he was one of the ones who assaulted me,” she said.

...So what about that Swetnick police report? Jackie Calmes, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has tried to find it, [writing]: “County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through three thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.”

Wow. Not only was I a criminal mastermind at seventeen, I was wheeling and dealing early as fifteen. It was probably around the same time I was living at the Playboy mansion. There was a police report to prove it. Strangely enough, neither the media nor their hero Avenatti would bet $1,260 that it even existed.

I will never forget—nor forgive—the experience I had during the Kavanaugh fiasco, when two female Massachusetts attorneys and bar administrators, co-presenters with me in a bar program, smirked, rolled their eyes and gave each other “what a sexist!” winks and nods as I politely explained during lunch that Blasey-Ford’s unsubstantiated account of a conveniently-timed recollection of an alleged sexual assault at a time and place she couldn’t remember by a teen-age Brett Kavanaugh should never have been allowed before the Senate, and that the feminist and progressive assumptions that Kavanaugh was guilty because they wanted him to be was unconscionable. The two women were so insufferably smug and condescending, and they had nothing to justify their position but Leftist certitude.

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Pretty dead around here yesterday; my fault, I guess. I hate when life gets in the way of ethics.

1. July 18 is another of those bad old days in U.S. ethics history. Consider:

• On July 18, 1989, 21-year-old Rebecca Schaeffer, a rising Hollywood actress who had starred with Pam Dawber (of “Mork and Mindy” fame) in the television sitcom “My Sister Sam” was  murdered at her Los Angeles home by Robert John Bardo, a deranged stalker who was obsessed with her. Like a lot of horrible events, this one had some beneficial results: stalking was finally recognized as an extreme and dangerous form of sexual harassment, and not as mere cute romantic perseverance, as it was represented in, for example, “The Graduate.”

• In 1969 on this date, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts drove off a rickety bridge on  Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy escaped his submerged car, but  28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, and Kennedy did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours while he, his aides and family members plotted how to frame the story to minimize the scandal. (Ted was extremely lucky—or maybe this was a canny part of the cover-up— that his negligent manslaughter didn’t get to the news media until Apollo 11 moon landing mission was nearing its climax) In one of the worst examples of “The King’s Pass” in U.S. history, Kennedy was never arrested or charged as he should have been, Kennedy hush money kept Mary Jo’s family at bay, and ethics-free Massachusetts voters kept re-electing the last of the Kennedy brothers to the U.S. Senate for decades. The episode did probably keep him from becoming President, so there’s that.

• On July 18, 1925, Volume One of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” a blue print for the nightmare to follow,  was published. Enough said…

• On this date in 1914, Labor martyr Joe Hill, the activist folksinger whose pro-labor folk songs included one that introduced the expression “pie in the sky,” was sentenced to die by a conservative and anti-Labor jury in Utah.  He had been arrested and charged with murdering two Salt Lake City policemen during a grocery store robbery, but the evidence was flimsy, and his guilt has been debated ever since. Most historians think Hill’s execution by firing squad was political; nobody believes he was properly found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

• No date is devoid of some honorable birthdays—Nelson Mandella was born on July 18, as was John Glenn—but July 18 is marked by also being the birthday of the one man whose name became an insult: Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling. He was the Norwegian military officer and politician who became a Nazi collaborator and served as the figurehead leader of his country’s  government during its Nazi occupation  during World War II. After the war he was executed by a firing squad, and “quisling” now means “a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force.”

• Speaking of villains, the Emperor Nero’s Rome burned on this date in 64 A.D., and while the depraved leader didn’t fiddle (the lyre was his instrument), he is suspected of not making much of an effort to stop the blaze, as he wanted to redesign the city anyway. Hundreds of Romans died in the fire and  thousands were left homeless while Nero sat out the excitement at his country villa. After the embers cooled, he used the catastrophe to slow the growing influence of Christianity in Rome, arresting, torturing and executing hundreds of Christians for supposedly starting the fire.

• And an apparent unethical act on this date in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination for a precedent-breaking third Presidential term, illustrates the Ethics Incompleteness Principle. While George Washington’s self-imposed two-term limit was a wise and important safety-valve on the Presidency to make the rise of a popular dictator more difficult (and FDR was exactly the kind of man who was a threat to be such a figure), every ethics rule has an exception. Winston Churchill (among others) was convinced that any other President would have risked a Nazi victory in World War II, and he was right. Churchill lobbied FDR hard to break with tradition; after the war, that broken tradition became a Constitution mandate.

2. Baseball crowd ethics: An asshole in the Yankee Stadium left field bleachers threw a baseball at Red Sox leftfielder Alex Verdugo during last night’s Sox-Yankees game and hit him, causing Boston to pull its team off the field. This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the game’s primitive days a hundred years ago. It’s rare now, but less rare among Yankee fans than anywhere else. Other fans around the assailant cheered the attack, while some pointed him out to stadium security, which removed him, one hopes to a jail cell.

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“I think what I said in the tweet is the regulation permits students to rape and sexually harass with impunity. I think that the regulation has weakened the intent of the Title IX that Congress wrote.”

That was Biden  nominee Catherine Lhamon in her confirmation hearing this week, answering a question about whether she would enforce the DeVos  Education Department regulation requiring due process and the presumption of innocence in campus evaluations of sexual misconduct complains by female students. Remember this quote the next time you read one of those claims that Republicans or conservatives are existential threats to democracy and civil rights. What Lhamon is literally saying is that due process is a bad thing, because it allows those accused of crimes or misconduct to escape punishment when allegations against them can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what she means. And what she said means that she, those who think like her on the progressive side of the spectrum, and anyone who would give her power are existential threats to democracy and civil rights.

Lhamon was doubling down on this May 2020 tweet— Continue reading →

And, as in this case, stupid.

Marine experts and and animal rights advocate in Australia want the public and media to refrain from using the word “attack” when sharks, meaning no harm, bump into a human swimmer and inadvertently take his or her arm, leg or head off. They suggest that violent, even fatal human meetings with the predatory fish be described with more neutral words such as “interactions.” “negative encounters,” or “incidents” the Sydney Morning Herald recently reported.

All of these, as is usually the case with euphemisms and “cover words,” convey less than accurate information. When an animal intentionally inflicts harm, it’s an attack. It might be an attack based on misidentification—“Hey! That doesn’t taste like a seal!”—but it’s still an attack.

Oh, no, says University of Sydney language researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff: “Shark attack’ is a lie.” He argues that a majority of what people call “attacks” are merely nips and minor injuries from smaller sharks. Apparently prior to the 1930s such episodes were once called “shark accidents.”

“Shark accident” is intentionally vague. Would poor Chrissie, above, call what the shark did to her an “accident”? And I know they use the language a little differently in Down Under, but since when does whether an animal bite qualifies as an attack depend on the size of the creature? If a rapid squirrel “nips” me, I have to call it a “squirrel accident”?

This is like the “Wuhan virus” censorship. Because some idiots react to the truth by being irrational, we have to obscure reality according to the woke, misguided, and addled enemies of free expression.

What happened to poor Chrissy was an attack, and the attacker was a shark.