I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.
18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.
Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”
Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.
Over the weekend after President Biden’s less-than-reassuring interview on ABC, radio hosts Andrea Lawful-Sanders and Earl Ingram appeared on CNN. Both had held radio interviews with the President after his disastrous debate performance as part of the White House’s rehabilitation program. “Were those questions given to you by the White House, or the campaign, or did you have to submit questions ahead of this interview?” CNN host Victor Blackwell asked Lawful-Sanders.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 30, 2024
If Joe Scarborough had a scrap of decency, an atom of responsibility, or a wisp of the capacity for shame, he would voluntarily end his “Morning Joe” show, retire to private life, and ideally wear a paper bag over his head ’til the end of his days. Of course, if MSNBC was a professional news operation and not a den of hacks, it wouldn’t allow Scarborough back on the air next week.
I nearly posted about Scarborough two days ago, before I saw this clip today. He was featured in the Times piece titled “One by One, Biden’s Closest Media Allies Defect After the Debate.” The main three close Biden “media allies” mentioned were Morning Joe, Van Jones and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. I was going to write something along the lines of, “Scarborough, Jones and Friedman! Would it be possible to gather an array of less credible, more ethically-revolting weasels? Having allies like them mean nothing, and having allies like them abandon you means nothing. Has the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog ever been more applicable?” Here’s the last addition to Van Jones’ Ethics Alarms dossier: he’s a proven anti-white race-huckster and face-man who cleans up nice for cameras and usually keeps his inner racist at bay so he can keep his lucrative CNN gig. The last time Friedman made the blog was in 2019, when he wrote that President Trump was “protected by big media outlets”! He really wrote that.
Now here’s how the sad Times story begins, talking about Scarborough:
News Item:“Fast food outlets in California…have slashed almost 10,000 jobs in response to the state’s newly implemented $20 minimum wage. The figure was released by the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank affiliated with Stanford University…The law, first introduced in September 2023 [which came into effect on April 1, 2024. requires restaurant chains with 60 or more locations nationwide to raise their hourly wages from $16.21 to $20. Major chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King and In-N-Out Burger have increased their prices to compensate for the wage hike…. Many have reduced employee hours, and others are accelerating the transition to automation.”
I wrestled over which of the clips from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive best fit this infuriating story. I settled on Major Clipton’s final words that end “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” reserved for “when an incident or argument makes no sense whatsoever, or that drives me to the edge of insanity,” but was also tempted to use the old knight’s “He chose poorly” from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (“Commenting on a particularly incompetent, irresponsible, or otherwise unethical decision with disastrous consequences“), or that Ethics Alarms standby, Sheriff Bart’s eloquent description of the good citizens of Rock Ridge from “Blazing Saddles,” “You know…morons!”
Mistake, stupidity, or insanity? I finally chose the latter, because there is no question that the progressive Democrats who voted for this irresponsible law and the governor who signed it knew exactly what the results would be, knew that it would be a disaster, and did it anyway.
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7063 which raises the age limit for performers and other employees of adult entertainment establishments—you know, strip clubs— from 18 to 21. DeSantis claims this legislation will “combat human trafficking.” Baloney. It is pure grandstanding, pandering to his supporters who object to sex shows generally on moral grounds, and more to the point, it is unethical age discrimination.
The issue is simple: are 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds adult citizens with all the rights of adult citizens, or aren’t they? (Hint: they are.) Since they are, there is no justification for a state telling them that there are activities, occupations and modes of expression that they cannot engage in until they are 21.
I find the transcript of the interview of deposed Fani Willis prosecutor and loverboy Nathan Wade many things: damning, outrageous, disgusting, shocking. Mostly I find it to be more evidence that I have wasted the last 25 years trying to make the legal profession more ethical. This guy, a “prominent and respected Atlanta lawyer,” not only doesn’t know what ethics is, he’s infuriatingly smug about his ignorance.
These are the people Democrats have placed in charge of “saving democracy” by using the criminal laws to keep Donald Trump from delivering condign justice to the Biden presidency, as in crushing, unequivocal defeat.
On Sunday’s “World News Tonight” and Monday’s “Good Morning America” ABC revealed two segments (here and here) from an “exclusive” interview with former Fulton County, Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade. He was, you’ll recall, forced to withdraw from the lucrative gig gifted to him by his girlfriend Fani Willis by the judge in the case, Willis’s prosecution of Donald Trump for “election interference.”
If there are more segments, I think I’ll pass: cleaning up the serial head explosions caused by what I’ve seen already is more than enough for me. Nothing in them could change my mind about Wade (or Willis) at this point. He’s not just an unethical lawyer.He’s a fick. And an asshole.
I’ll just repeat some of the more glaring statements so you get the idea:
Asked how he could endanger a high profile prosecution by letting an illicit romance pollute the prosecution: “You don’t plan to develop feelings. You don’t plan to fall in love. You don’t plan to have some relationship in the workplace that we you don’t set out to do that and those things develop organically. They develop over over time. And the the minute we had that sobering moment, we discontinued it.”
I see: he’s 13 years old, then….just so darned romantic or horny that he couldn’t help himself, even though this was exactly the opposite of professional behavior. Continue reading →
From one perspective, this development seems encouraging. Maybe the lesson of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is finally starting to take down the destructive DEI delusion.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will end the use of diversity statements in the faculty hiring process. These statements, typically a page-long, were required of all faculty candidates so they could persuade the institution that they could be relied upon to support and enhance the university’s commitment to “diversity.” The statements are now routine in faculty hiring at many public and private universities, as well in corporations and other organizations. I confess that I had not focused on this development sufficiently; it is scary, and the mainstream media and its pundits apparently felt it was not something “the public has a right to know.” [The only previous Ethics Alarms essay on diversity statements is here. I helped sound the alarm, and then did nothing for two years.]
As she announced the reform, MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth, the lone survivor of the fateful Congressional hearing that led to the dismissal of two other female presidents of elite universities, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, condemned the statements as compelled speech. “My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to M.I.T. and to make sure they thrive once here,” Dr. Kornbluth said . “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
Interesting phrasing. If they “worked,” whatever sinister meaning that has, would she be eliminating them? The diversity statements are not just compelled speech, they represent compelled ideological conformity. That’s fascist stuff. Explain to me again: who are the “threats to democracy”? It also points to the other perspective besides the one I alluded to at the beginning. The fact that diversity statements has infested academia at all is ominous.
Thirteen federal judges—appellate Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, Matthew Solomson of the U.S Court of Federal Claims, District Judges Alan Albright and Matthew Kacsmaryk, Stephen Vaden, who sits on the United States Court of International Trade; plus judges David Counts, James W. Hendrix,Jeremy D. Kernodle, Tilman E. Self, III, Brantley Starr, Drew B. Tipton and Daniel M. Traynor—have all announced in a letter to Columbia University’s president, that beginning with the entering class of 2024, they “will not hire anyone who joins the Columbia University community—whether as undergraduates or law students.”
“Since the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, Columbia University has become ground zero for the explosion of student disruptions, anti-semitism, and hatred for diverse viewpoints on campuses across the Nation, ” the letter begins. “Disruptors have threatened violence, committed assaults, and destroyed property. As judges who hire law clerks every year to serve in the federal judiciary, we have lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education. Columbia has instead become an incubator of bigotry. As a result, Columbia has disqualified itself from educating the future leaders of our country.”
After suggesting measures that need to be taken to restore trust in the institution, the judges conclude, “Recent events demonstrate that ideological homogeneity throughout the entire institution of Columbia has destroyed its ability to train future leaders of a pluralistic and intellectually diverse country. Both professors and administrators are on the front lines of the campus disruptions, encouraging the virulent spread of antisemitism and bigotry. Significant and dramatic change in the composition of its faculty and administration is required to restore confidence in Columbia.”
It is a responsible, powerful, and much needed response, both to the institution and the students who have demonstrated both an absence of critical thinking and judicious temperament as well basic respect for their fellow students, liberal education, and the law.
Ethics Alarms 