There was recent news about Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”…did you miss it? A tiny inscription in the corner of the original (the artist made several more) reads, “Can only have been painted by a madman.” For decades, expert have been arguing over who wrote it. The definitive answer came last month: it was the artist himself, who had been upset when a critic at an exhibition suggested that he was mentally ill. My wife and I saw a special traveling exhibition on Munch’s work in London several years ago. He kept painting the same disturbing images over and over again, not just “The Scream,” but others, like a woman with wild red hair that snakes out to strangle a man. We concluded then that he was nuts.

1. CNN has provided yet another example of miserable, biases, incompetent journalism. This one begins,

Poll of the week: A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 55% of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was the result of illegal voting or rigging. Additionally, 60% of Republicans incorrectly agree that the election was stolen from Republican Donald Trump. These polls are the latest to indicate that Republicans mistakenly think that the 2020 election wasn’t legitimate, when it clearly was.

Who says it “clearly was”? How is that a fact? If it’s a fact, prove it. This is CNN injecting opinion into news reporting, and stating as fact what is the reporter’s opinion. Nor did those who replied that the 2020 election totals were the result of illegal voting or election rigging state that election “wasn’t legitimate.” They weren’t given that option. I, for example, think the election could be fairly called “rigged,” but it was still legitimate. Nor can CNN say that 60% of Republicans “incorrectly agree” that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. First, it is nearly impossible to prove a negative; this is CNN’s assumption. There are polls that claim to show that the fair reporting of Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails alone would have flipped the election. Second, “stolen,” like “rigged” is not defined. I think it is unlikely that the election totals were manipulated sufficiently to change the result in key states. I am certain that the news media and the other anti-Trump forces unethically set out to undermine the President’s chances at re-election with a four year battering of Big Lies, anonymous leaks, fake news, slanted news, biased news reporting and non-reporting of facts favorable to Trump or unfavorable to Biden. They cheated, and claiming now that those who feel the cheating made a difference are mistaken is like claiming that a runner unfairly tripped at the opening gun would have lost anyway.

2. On the related topic of absentee ballots…RealClearInvestigations nicely shows the New York Times’ hypocrisy on the matter of absentee ballots:

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Perfect!

I had been musing about a post on how Joe Biden’s Presidency was the most dishonest in U.S. history, and then Brad Polumbo of the Washington Examiner coined the description, “Trojan Horse Presidency.” I’m angry at myself for not beating him him to it, but I am grateful for the metaphor.

It would be more useful, of course, if more than a fraction of the public were culturally literate. I wonder how many Americans know what the Trojan Horse was? They don’t teach Greek mythology in public schools; an amazing number of fans of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” are amused by the huge wooden rabbit King Arthur’s troop uses to invade a castle without knowing what it satirized. This is the tragedy of declining cultural literacy: it makes concepts harder to visualize and explain.

The tale of the Trojan Horse isn’t in the “Illiad” of Homer, which relates the tale of the Trojan War. It was the invention of Virgil, the Roman poet, in his rip-off of Homer’s “Odyssey,” “The Aeneid.” After a decade of attacking the walled city of Troy without success, the Greeks decided to try an off-the-wall scheme offered by “Wily Odysseus,” as Homer called him, one of the Greek generals. His loopy idea was to build a huge wooden horse and leave it outside the Trojan gates at night. The Trojans, see, being morons, would think the thing was a sacred gift from the gods, and move it inside their walls. Then, once they were all asleep, the Greek soldiers hidden in the hollow horse would come out and slaughter the city! Hey! It’s so crazy, it just might work!

It did work, but why used to confound me. Virgil wrote that three times while dragging the thing into the city, the Trojans stopped pulling, and heard the clatter of armor coming from inside the wooden horse. “Nah, it’s nothing! Keep pulling!” There was also the incident where Troy’s high priest, Laocoon, declared that the Trojan Horse was evil and hurled a spear at its side. Then two sea serpents arrived on the scene and ate him and his two sons. (The big snakes were the agents of sea god Poseidon, who was rooting for the Greeks.)

Palumbo writes,

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Historical airbrushing comes to my backyard: the Alexandria School Board voted last week to approve “Alexandria City High School” as the new name for T.C. Williams High School, which is a stone’s throw from my house—in fact, I throw stones at it all the time. You have to admit, the new name is catchy, kind of like “Washington Football Team.” At this point, T.C. Williams was just a name: the man Alexandria’s largest school was named for died in 1963, and I doubt one citizen here in a thousand, and no students in the last 20 years, had a clue who he was or why the school was named for him. In fact, Thomas Chambliss Williams was Alexandria’s Superintendent of Schools from the 1930s to 1963, and presumably the school had been named in his honor to recognize his long and presumably successful service. But, we are told, he “promoted the school division’s resistance to desegregation efforts.” Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t; it’s probably a good bet, given the time period, but these accusations are put out to the public as fact (as in the recent San Francisco fiasco) and nobody bothers to check or challenge them.

Current Superintendent Gregory Hutchings Jr. said in part, “We are excited about the Board’s decision to adopt the [name] of Alexandria City High School…[to] honor the diverse, inclusive and anti-racist community that ACPS is striving to become.” Yeah, if anything says “anti-racist” it’s “Alexandria City High School”! That name brings a tear to my eye, I can tell you. Once upon a time, successors to long-time public servants operated with some fealty to the Golden Rule. Would they like to be smeared forever as terrible people 50 years after their deaths based on a cultural shift, or a faddish, empty catch-phrase like “anti-racist”?

1. Good. Making reasonable accommodations so the handicapped can participate in society is one thing; burdening citizens and organizations with crippling expense so they endure no disadvantages at all is unethical. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act, a troubling number of activists have demonstrated an inability to tell the difference. Thus Ethics Alarms welcomes the 11th Circuit’s ruling last week that websites are not public accommodations that must be accessible to blind users unless they create a barrier that excludes disabled people from accessing goods and services in a physical space, like a store.

The decision supported Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., a grocery chain, in the lawsuit by plaintiff Juan Carlos Gil, who is legally blind. He sued because he was unable to use the Winn-Dixie website with his screen-reader software. Gil wanted to use the website to fill prescriptions because in-person requests could be overheard by other people standing nearby. He felt having to wait 20 to 30 minutes for the prescription after making an in-person request was too much to bear, so he forced the company to engage in long and expensive litigation.

Title III of the ADA limits places of public accommodation to physical locations, the 11th Circuit said in its April 7 opinion. It bans discrimination on the basis of disability “in the full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations,” with “discrimination” occurring when an operator of a place of public accommodation fails to take steps to ensure that no person with a disability “is excluded, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than other individuals because of the absence of auxiliary aids and services.” The law as it stands is bats, embodying the Carter-era delusion, now rampant, that society has an obligation to eliminate all individual disadvantages. The law’s examples of public accommodations included hotels, restaurants, theaters, auditoriums, schools and grocery stores, however, so the 11th Circuit seized on that to limit the law in a way its creators would not have done, if they had any clue what a “website” would be. “No intangible places or spaces, such as websites, are listed. Thus, we conclude that, pursuant to the plain language of Title III of the ADA, public accommodations are limited to actual, physical places.”

Now watch Democrats try to expand the ADA to include websites, raising prices, costing jobs, and creating havoc.

2. More partisan censorship from YouTube<yawn!> Once, this would be shocking news, but now we know, don’t we?

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National Public Radio issued a correction after repeating a false statement about Hunter Biden’s laptop in a piece about Biden’s upcoming memoir, “Beautiful Things.”  NPR’s correspondent repeated the partisan media falsehood that the laptop story had been discredited by news organizations. Neither Hunter nor his father the President denied that what had been identified as Hunter Biden’s laptop or the files and pictures found on it were genuine. They just ducked the issue with reporters’ complicity, running out the clock to the election as the news media pretended there was no story, and social media engineered a near blackout on the story to ensure a Biden victory.

NPR’s correction read that “A previous version of this story said U.S. intelligence had discredited the laptop story. U.S. intelligence officials have not made a statement to that effect.” That’s deceit. There has been no denial that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden and that the contents were genuine. Nonetheless, NPR along with the rest of the partisan mainstream media worked diligently to hide the implications of the laptop until Joe Biden was safely moved into the White House, and more to the point, Donald Trump was moved out.

Then, Hunter Biden weirdly acknowledged in an interview, after avoiding the clarification before November 8, that the infamous laptop might be his. In an interview with CBS’s Tracy Smith, he was finally asked about the incriminating laptop, which somehow never occurred to reporters while Joe was a candidate. When she raised the matter, Hunter answered: “There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence.”

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