U.S. Society

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

You know how I love it when a reader saves me the trouble of writing a post by beating me to it. That’s what Steve-O-in NJ did with this Comment of the Day.

The letter sent to the Columbia University community by Minouche Shafik the school’s embattled, feckless, over-her-head president, has so much wrong with it that I would have been forced to do a fisking, and I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, putting it mildly. Here’s Steve-O’s excellent performance of that task, in his Comment of the Day to the post, “Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt”…

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This is the president of Columbia’s letter to her school after the NYPD finally took action:

Dear members of the Columbia community,

Early Tuesday morning, tensions on our campus rose to new heights when a small group of protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and occupied it throughout the day. This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level.

I know I speak for many members of our community in saying that this turn of events has filled me with deep sadness. I am sorry we reached this point. Over the last few months, we have been patient in tolerating unauthorized demonstrations, including the encampment. Our academic leaders spent eight days engaging over long hours in serious dialogue in good faith with protest representatives. I thank them for their tireless effort. The University offered to consider new proposals on divestment and shareholder activism, to review access to our dual degree programs and global centers, to reaffirm our commitment to free speech, and to launch educational and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. Some other universities have achieved agreement on similar proposals. Our efforts to find a solution went into Tuesday evening, but regrettably, we were unable to come to resolution.

Because my first responsibility is safety, with the support of the University’s Trustees, I made the decision to ask the New York City Police Department to intervene to end the occupation of Hamilton Hall and dismantle the main encampment along with a new, smaller encampment. These actions were completed Tuesday night, and I thank the NYPD for their incredible professionalism and support.  

I also want to thank all of the many people, including faculty, staff, and especially our public safety officers and facilities workers, for their tireless efforts on behalf of Columbia and to support our students through this difficult period.

Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest.

But students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our Public Safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech. Many students have also felt uncomfortable and unwelcome because of the disruption and antisemitic comments made by some individuals, especially in the protests that have persistently mobilized outside our gates.

It is going to take time to heal, but I know we can do that together. I hope that we can use the weeks ahead to restore calm, allow students to complete their academic work, and honor their achievements at Commencement. We also must continue with urgency our ongoing dialogue on the important issues that have been raised in recent months, especially the balance between free speech and discrimination and the role of a university in contributing to better outcomes in the Middle East. Both are topics where I hope Columbia can lead the way in new thinking that will make us the epicenter, not just of protests, but of solutions to the world’s problems.

Sincerely,

Minouche Shafik

President, Columbia University in the City of New York

Soooooo…what’s missing? 

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Ethics Half-Hero: Houston Astros Slugger Jose Abreu

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Astros first baseman José Abreu, 37, signed a three-year deal with a $58.5 million dollar guarantee last year that goes through the 2025 season. It was a risky free-agent signing: baseball position players peak at ages 27-29, and by 30, virtually all of them are declining unless they take the Barry Bonds route and cheat. Most are no longer MLB-worthy by age 34, though the better a player was, the more he can decline and still be valuable. (Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski had almost exactly the same season in his last year as he did as a rookie 22 years before: a perfect bell curve.) In the first year of his Astros deal, Abreu showed unmistakable signs that the jig was up. He had career lows in batting average, on-base pct., slugging pct., OPS (obviously: it’s slugging plus on-base average) and home runs. He was a below-average batter after a career of being All-Star caliber.

This season Abreu has been even worse. As the perennial World Series contender Astros have looked old, hurt and busted, he has been the worst of the bunch. He currently is batting .099 in 71 official at bats, with no homers; in fact, he ranks as the worst hitter in baseball right now.

Today came the stunning news that Abreu has agreed to go to the minors. As a veteran with over five years of major league service time, Abreu could not be optioned to “the bushes” without his consent, and veterans almost never give their consent. For an established star player to go to the minor leagues is like moving from the Ritz Carlton into a Motel 6. Abreu is a particularly unlikely exception, for he never played in the minors, coming directly to the major leagues as a refugee Cuban player.

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Early Evening Ethics Cool-Off, 4/30/2024: Marxist Indoctrination Petard Hoist Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Hitler committed suicide on this date in 1945. Good. Maybe he would have stuck it out if he knew American college students, primed by a youth dominated by reckless indoctrination, would be trying to carry on his work in 2024 on American campuses. Meanwhile…

1. Déjà vu! The moment I lost all sympathy or respect for the students at my college demanding various things while taking over buildings and disrupting my education was when they added amnesty to their “demands.” The terrorist assholes at Columbia are doing the same thing now. Nobody should give serious consideration to the positions of such cowards. Writes David French, “When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.” And when I can fly to the moon by flapping my arms, I’ll save a fortune on gasoline. The vast majority of today’s college administrators—Haven’t female college presidents just covered themselves in glory lately? Another DEI triumph!—are the direct ideological descendants of those arrogant, unaccountable revolutionaries of yore.

These ignorant, terrorism-enabling jerks have good reason to assume there will be no consequences, since (I don’t know how or why) their cause is apparently justified lawlessness sanctified by the political Left, you know, like the George Floyd riots and Occupy Wall Street. When you break laws to demonstrate your frustration after a dodgy election, however, you end up like the J6 defendants, prosecuted and locked up. MSNBC’s Joy Reid—why is she on television?—compared the “Get rid of the Jews” protesters to the Civil Rights movement. Over at ABC’s “The View,” Sunny Hostin, the lawyer who thinks an eclipse is evidence of climate change, argued that critics who use “anti-Semitism” to describe the protests are “far-right” with “authoritarian leanings” who oppose free speech. “They don’t want students on these campuses to voice their opinions,” she said. Sunny, as anyone who has listened to her rantings know, would be calling for the executions of students chanting anti-black or anti-gay slogans, but “Kill the Jews” is good, old fashioned anti-war sentiment in her book. (Why is she on television?)

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Regarding Those “Shocking” Poll Numbers…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

OK, this should really be the lead graphic…

but Claude Rains is always welcome here because he makes me laugh, and boy do I need one today.

Over the weekend the Axis needed one, because its members were freaking out over polls by organizations that in the past (like 2020), reliably employed their unethical bias to inflate pro-Democrat Presidential race poll numbers, now showing Joe Biden substantially trailing Donald Trump. Here’s another one:

James Carville is a good stand-in for the whole amusing spectacle…

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Did You Know Donald Trump Will Violate the Constitution? You Know, Like Biden’s Department of Agriculture…But That’s GOOD Discrimination, See…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Biden Administration’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is distributing disaster and pandemic relief funds to farmers based on their race and gender, in direct defiance of the equal protection provisions in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The USDA openly prioritizes relief money to “socially disadvantaged” farmers: women, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian-Americans, blacks or African-Americans, Hispanics or Hispanic-Americans, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. White men, not so much. Farmers who fail to meet the “socially disadvantaged” criteria have received far less assistance for their losses than if they were of a different race or sex. Can’t do that—but the racists, bigots and woke in Joe’s USDA do it anyway. USDA has a smoking gun form, CCC-860, Socially Disadvantaged, Limited Resource, Beginning and Veteran Farmer or Rancher Certification, hopeful recipients of government aid must file to swear that they are not evil, undeserving, patriarchal and racist white males:

“I certify that I am a member of a group listed below, whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. (Check all that apply but note that if only “women” is checked without selecting the other category, the selection does not make the applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs).”

  • Women.
  • American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Black or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics.

That’s pretty clear, no? And yet, in a masterpiece of “It isn’t what it is” rhetorical dishonesty, the form then says,

“In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating in or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status, income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA.”

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Hey Douthat! How About Coming Right Out and Stating That U.S. College Students Are Indoctrinated into Radical, Progressive, Marxist Ideology?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Talk about burying the lede.

Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.

This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.

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The Supreme Court, the “Suicide Pact,” and Ethics Zugzwang [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I confess, I didn’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court to give Donald Trump’s Presidential immunity claim as serious a hearing as it did in last week’s oral arguments. Now that I read the transcript, however, I understand “what’s going on here,” to quote my own starting point for ethics analysis. Its focus, or at least the focus of the conservative members of the Court, is appropriate considering the current assault on our system of government by the totalitarian Left as it tries to use the criminal laws, the courts, and partisan prosecutors to prevent the public from throwing them out of office.

Naturally the Left is furious, and is attacking the justices. The attack isn’t based on legal reasoning, but the same tactic progressives and Democrats used to claim that SCOTUS had “stolen” the 2000 election by finally ruling that enough was enough, and that it was time to settle the identity of the leader of the nation and not paralyze the government fighting over an election with a filament thin edge within the margin of statistical error. The Bush v. Gore ruling was an example of one of the core functions of the Supreme Court as it has evolved: stepping in to guide the Constitution and the nation through unanticipated situations the Founders never considered or prepared for. But Democrats attacked Justice Scalia and the other conservative justices for defying their own guiding principles—“textualism” and “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should not be extrapolated into new areas never anticipated or discussed in the original document. That judicial philosophy is a conservative bulwark against the arrogant and excessive “legislation from the bench” that marked the Warren Court in the Sixties, and to a lesser extent its predecessor in the Seventies, the Burger Court, the latter most infamously in the purely political Roe decision, finding a right to abortion in a document that didn’t hint of such a thing.

After hearing the oral argument in Trump v. U.S. and detecting signs that some of the Justices on the rightish side of the ideological spectrum agreed that some kind of Presidential immunity might be prudent and even essential, the Axis howled. “Two years ago, conservatives relied on a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s text and original meaning to overturn the federal right to abortion. But on Thursday, as they debated whether Trump can be prosecuted for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, they seemed content to engage in a free-form balancing exercise where they weighed competing interests and practical consequences,” whined Politico. “Some critics said the conservative justices — all of whom purport to adhere to an original understanding of the Constitution — appeared to be on the verge of fashioning a legal protection for former presidents based on the justices’ subjective assessment of what’s best for the country and not derived from the nation’s founding document.”

Translation: “The judges we support do this all the time and we think it’s wonderful, but these bad judges can’t do it no matter how much sense it makes because they have made it clear that they generally disapprove of the practice.”

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Good News/Bad News On Karine Jean-Pierre’s Status

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The New York Post has released a scoop: White House insiders attempted to persuade President Biden’s incompetent paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, to leave her post, thus sparing the administration, Democrats and any American who thinks his or her government should be run by people at least minimally qualified for their jobs of ongoing embarrassment.

Whew! That’s a relief. At least a few in the executive branch recognize an unqualified, inept high-profile job occupant when they see one and have the integrity and sense of responsibility to try to rectify the problem. The reason this secret effort to dump Karine was apparently attempted is what anyone watching her painful press briefings already knows: She terrible at her job. She doesn’t understand the issues and isn’t quick enough or smart enough to parry reporters’ questions effectively. Unfortunately, Karine is also a Dunning-Kruger sufferer. “She thinks she’s doing an amazing job,” one of the Post’s sources says.

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T.J. Maxx Wouldn’t Hire Her: It’s a Mystery!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Oh goody, EA hasn’t had a face-tattoo post for a while. I think we can make short work of this one.

That’s Ash Putnam above, a Tik Toker who’s “annoyed” because she applied for a job with the discount retailer and was told via email saying had been rejected. She strongly suspects it might have been her tattoos and body piercings that ruled her out.

Gee, what would make her think that?

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Early Friday Open Forum on Thursday!

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Gah! I have a Zoom legal ethics program om professionalism to teach in about 30 minutes and overslept, so you’ll have to hold down Fort Ethics until I can get a post up around noon. Sorry!