Madison Wisconsin Ann Althouse, who tries admirably hard to suppress her natural left-leaning biases and I admire her for that, wrote a statement over the weekend that perfectly encapsulates what is so seductive and destructive about the progressive mindset.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I was temped to make it an Unethical Quote of the Month, but it’s not really unethical; it’s just dumb. (Also Trump’s outrageous attack on Rob Reiner locked up that distinction. I’m pretty sure it is also the most unethical quote of 2025.) It is so dumb, however, that I am tempted to say Althouse failed her duty of influence and expertise. Smart people who are expected to provide intellectual and emotional guidance have to take care that they don’t mislead the people who trust them.
Her statement was…“It shouldn’t be possible to become famous through murder, but it very clearly is.”
What a silly, utopian, “Imagine”-esque thing to say, out loud or on a blog (the internet is forever). It is, however, a near perfect example of the how the progressive delusion gene makes people believe in, advocate, and administer terrible policies that can’t possibly do anything but backfire horribly, and can’t possibly work.
It is one thing for someone to think along those lines in a moment of panic or stress. That’s excusable, though my late wife, “E2” in the EA comments, was always annoyed when characters in movies or TV shows would scream, “This can’t be happening!” The political Left is constantly gulled into thinking the realities of life can somehow be banished by a well-meaning program, law or policy. That’ where communism and socialism ooze from: surely there’s a way for everyone in a successful society to be happy, healthy, safe and having the benefit of sufficient food, living space and employment!
[Johnny Mathisfinally announced his retirement this year—he’s only 90. His has been one of the most recognizable, enjoyable, seductive voices in American popular music for almost 70 years. My college room mate always had his records on hand to create the proper mood for his dates. An old time crooner’s chances of being remembered rests now on whether there is a Christmas standard he can be associated with. Johnny’s best shots are “It’s Beginning to Lot Like Christmas,” and “We Need a Little Christmas” from “Mame.” He sings all the others beautifully too, but they are taken.]
I was informed by a fellow Christmas movie fan that it is almost impossible to watch the original “Miracle on 34th Street” film on streaming services or the networks. They prefer to show the various remakes, all inferior in every way. What made director-writer George Seaton‘s movie (it won him an Oscar) so superb in addition to the casting, his straight-forward style and his obvious love of Christmas is that it instantly felt perfect despite its many suspension of disbelief challenges. Why do they feel this film has to be remade? Is it the lack of color? (“Miracle on 34th Street” was one of the first movies Ted Turner colorizes, and that version is unwatchable.)
As I’ve stated here before I believed in Santa Claus until I was 12. I didn’t want to give the fantasy up: I loved magic, and my parents always tried to make the season magical. My late wife Grace and I tried to do the same with Grant, now “Samantha,” but he was a non-believer by the third grade. Is there anything more joyful to see than the look on a child’s face as he or she wakes up to find what Santa has delivered? Will anything feel that wonderful again?
“Miracle on 34th Street” is an ethics movie in many ways. The movie is about the importance of believing in good things, hopeful things, even impossible things. The movie reminds us that wonderful things can happen even when they seem impossible, and that life is better when we believe that every day of our lives. I’m engaged in that right now: all of 2025 has required it. I’ve had serious injuries, successes, new projects and setbacks. My father taught me to be ready for the worst but to never to give up on the best.
One thing this film does well is to concentrate on the secular holiday without any allusions to the religious holy day, but not being obnoxious about it. “It’s a Wonderful Life” also straddles the line very cleverly: it begins in heaven, after all. All the “A Christmas Carol” films include Bob Cratchit telling his wife that Tiny Tim mused about how his disability reminded people of Jesus’s miracles at Christmastime, and that’s Dickens’ only reference to Jesus in his story.
On the offensive side is the Rankin-Bass animated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—I can’t believe they still show that thing—when the “stormy Christmas Eve” causes Santa to decide to “cancel Christmas.” I’d say that’s above Santa’s pay grade, wouldn’t you agree? It also suggests that Christmas is only about gifts and children. (Do parents today explain that the singing snowman who narrates the story is based on, and looks like) the real person who also sings the most memorable songs? They should. Burl Ives had a fascinating life and a varied career, and those kids will probably be hearing him sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” for the rest of theirs.
Interestingly, all of the perennial Christmas movies have been made into stage musicals of varying success—“White Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story,” “Elf”—- but “Miracle on 34th Street” flopped so badly when Meredith Willson [“The Music Man”] adapted it as “Here’s Love” on Broadway that nobody has tried again. The show included the song, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” which Willson wrote long before the show was assembled. But as with all the movie remakes, the show missed Edmund Gwynn, the best Kris Kringle of them all. He was a distinguished classical actor until that movie: he complained that after the film he wasn’t allowed to get rid of his bushy white beard and was type-cast as jolly old men.
I decided to post the Companion earlier this year; I also was moved by the fact that a number of EA readers had sought out the 2024 version today. When I’ve posted it on Christmas Eve, it has lacked views for the obvious reasons.
The 2025 companion reflects some additional thoughts upon my re-watching “Miracle on 34th Street” last week—I even took notes. Mostly, I though about how important the holiday, the stories, the music, the movies and what they signify taken as a whole is to our nation, our society and our culture. Thus it was that I decided that here was a good place to re-post “Christmas, the Ethical Holiday” Besides, I need to read it myself.
Christmas: the Ethical Holiday
Benjamin Franklin recognized the importance of regularly focusing one’s attention on ethical conduct rather than the usual non-ethical goals, needs, desires and impulses that usually occupy the thoughts of even the most virtuous among us. He suggested that every morning an individual should challenge himself to do good during the day. In the 21st century psychologists call this “priming,” a form of beneficial self-brain-washing that plants the seeds of future choices.
The Christmas season operates as an effective form of mass population priming, using tradition, lore, music, poetry, ritual, literature, art and entertainment to celebrate basic ethical virtues and exemplary conduct toward other human beings. Kindness, love, forgiveness, empathy, generosity, charity, sacrifice, selflessness, respect, caring, peacefulness…all of these are part of the message of Christmas, which has become more universal and influential in its societal and behavioral importance than its religious origins could have ever accomplished alone. Secular and cultural contributions have greatly strengthened the ethical lessons of Christmas. “It’s A Wonderful Life” urges us to value our ability to enrich the lives of others, and to appreciate the way they enrich ours. “A Christmas Story” reminds us to make childhood a magical time when wishes can come true. O. Henry’s story “The Gift of the Magi” proves that it is not the value of gifts, but the love that motivates them that truly matters. Most powerful of all, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” teaches that the admirable conduct the spirit of the season can inspire need not be short-lived, and that if we use Christmas properly, as Ben Franklin used his morning exhortation to good conduct, it can make all of us better, happier, more virtuous human beings.
At this point in civilization, the religious context of Christmas almost does more harm than good. Though the day chosen to celebrate Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday has been spectacularly successful in promoting the ethical and moral ideals he taught, the idea that Christmas is indistinguishable from the religion he founded has made it the object of yearly controversy, as if celebrating Christmas is an affront to other faiths.
This is a tragedy, because every human being, regardless of religious belief, can benefit from a culture-wide exhortation to be good and to do good. “Happy Holidays!”—the bland, generic, careful greeting of those afraid to offend those who should not be offended—does nothing to spur us toward love, kindness, peace and empathy. “Merry Christmas!” does.
This is not just a religious holiday; it is the culture-wide ethical holiday, the time when everything should be aligned to remind us to take stock of our lives, think about everyone else who lives on earth with us, and to try to live for others as well as ourselves. Christians should be proud that their religion gave such a valuable gift to humanity, and non-Christians should be eager to accept that gift, with thanks.
It is foolish and self-destructive for there to be a “war on Christmas.” Charles Dickens understood. There is hardly a word about religion anywhere in his story. There doesn’t need to be. Christmas is the ethical holiday. Christians and non-Christians can celebrate it or not as they choose, but whether they do or not, the Christmas season is more important than any one religion, even the one that gives the holiday its name.
Christmas is important because it primes us to be good, be better, be more ethical, for the rest of the year. There should be nothing controversial about that.
Well this is all I needed on a busy day that just included me re-injuring my leg after being pulled off my feet by Spuds. The post below is based on a hoax, and damn the hoaxers to hell. Spreading false stories on the web is unethical, and satire sites are obligated to signal when a post is intended as parody. A few notes:
1. Thanks to the crack EA commentariate for flagging this.
2. The fake story is still up on the usually reliable conservative commentary site Victory Girls, which linked to the fake story I used.
3. I was fooled because first, none of the quotes sounded unlikely given what we have heard and witnessed in Portland in the recent past, and
4. I had never seen a “butt plug” before.I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the City of Portland. I try to be careful, but this time I was fooled.
5. Apparently the hoax was inspired by Portland’s city officials this year referring to their annual tree lighting event as just “the tree” or “winter tree,” deliberately omitting the word “Christmas.” Typical dumb Portland wokeness at work: if the hoaxers had only made it clear what they were spoofing, I’d call it a successful and well-deserved satire.
6. I apologize to all, including the City of Portland, for my error.
***
I missed this, which happened about a week ago, in part because I view Portland as a lost cause. You know those zombie apocalypse movies where the survivors will say, sadly, “Boston’s gone, San Diego’s gone”? Portland’s gone, and has been for a long time. I would say it’s Patient Zero for Trump Derangement, woke insanity, anti-Americanism and The Great Stupid, except there are so many other candidates: New York City, California, Minnesota. None of them, however, have descended so far into incompetent cultural madness as Portland, as exemplified by the Christmas, sorry, Holiday Thing the city unveiled this month.
Portland officially replaced its traditional Christmas tree—to be fair, it’s so hard to find evergreen trees in Oregon these days—with that whatever it is above. Officials described the holiday display as “bold,” “inclusive,” and “a meaningful departure from tree-based expectations.”
How far gone do you have to be to utter the words “tree-based expectations” without feeling ridiculous?
City leaders, presumably the same ones who let Black Lives Matter take over parts of the city five year sago, explained the traditional Christmas tree ultimately failed to reflect Portland’s “evolving” relationship with holidays. Thus the “inclusive” replacement, officials said, is intentionally ambiguous, streamlined, and designed to invite interpretation.
I, for example, interpret it as “meaningless, joyless crap.”
Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned from her post as NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s director of appointments. The Anti-Defamation League dug up comments she made as a teenager that registered as anti-Semitic; this happened just a day after Mamdani announced her appointment. Da Costa, 33 (above) is married to a deputy city comptroller, and he is, ironically enough, Jewish. When she authored the social media posts in question, however, she wasn’t married and couldn’t imagine that her dumb posts would come back to sideline her career.
“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using the abbreviation for “shaking my head.” “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote in another post. “I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said in her resignation statement. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”
Long-time readers here may remember Ethics Alarms posts about the “Hader Gotcha,” named for a young Major League Baseball pitcher of note (he’s still pretty good) who was forced to grovel an abject apology for tweeting offensive things when he was in high school that almost nobody read. I wrote in one of the early EA posts on the phenomenon,
Contrasting in gravitas and significance this week have been at least three revelations that the Axis of Unethical Conduct will try mightily to keep out of the public eye and our consciousness. Instead, we will be bombarded with Rob Reiner’s wonderful movies, “the collapse of the Trump Presidency,”and, of course, Epstein. With an ethical Fourth Estate, however, and a POTUS who wasn’t determined to destroy himself, these stories would be leading the news:
The startling admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board. Before that, as we all know by now, Trump had been accused of trying to “overthrow” the election and his lawyers have been disciplined for trying to halt the certification of what they believed was an unconstitutional election. No, Georgia alone couldn’t have stolen the Presidency, but this additional information certainly undermines the five year narrative, as well as the already dead-in-the-water state prosecution of Donald Trump.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced in an X post, “Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway.” “Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice. Read for yourself,” Grassley added, linking to the documents posted online.
It was not a “miscarriage of justice,” it was a deliberate political hit job using law enforcement as a means to taking a Biden political rival out of the 2024 race. Who was the threat to democracy, again?
I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>
EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,
1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”
3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.
I’ve got four posts up today, and I’m tired, but I can’t resist this one…
Outgoing D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith decided to show what she was made of as she spoke as the honoree in a good-bye ceremony yesterday. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had accused her of manipulating data to make it seem that crime has decreased in the District of Columbia when it had not. She could have stuck around, of course, until the final numbers were in, but instead she decided that she would leave her post “to be with her family.” That’s always a good dodge when you’re being investigated. In her farewell speech, she played the God card (she’s also a reverend at a Baptist church in D.C.), then the “haters” card, and finally the “it’s not my fault” card. Wait: are the statistics correct, or are they wrong? Smith’s argument somehow came out, “The statistics were accurate, but if they’re not, somebody else rigged them!”
That’s accountability, D.C. Government style!
“How dare you? How dare you attack my integrity? Attack my character? You don’t know who I belong to!” she said. Wait, what does THAT mean?
It used to be that I could count on a tsunami of comments and clicks when I aired my unalterable conviction that pot, weed, cannabis, marijuana, what ever you want to call the junk, was a blight on civilization, that legalizing it would be a big net loss on society, and that the elite advocates for legalization were selfish, irresponsible creeps who wanted their little highs at the cost of kids, the poor, and the less-than-bright harming themselves, their families, their employers and their future prospects. Once the states started giving up after the culture had pushed them into the mendacity that the drug was as harmless as Junior Mints, I gave up too. I was right, they were wrong, the embrace of stoned kids and adults would be one more malady in a nation where we have too many already, but the metaphorical genie was out of its bottle and there is stuffing it back in.
At this point in my life, the whole subject just ticks me off.
“…we should acknowledge that policy moved faster than the evidence on public health effects. The challenge is whether we are willing to adjust course when we encounter unintended consequences…”
I wouldn’t call consequences that were completely predictable and likely “unintended.” The spoiled grown-up (sort of) college kids who just wanted their bongs had plenty of people—like me—telling them that siding with Cheech and Chong was irresponsible and reckless, but they didn’t care about kids, the workplace, side-effects, any of it. Next he writes in part,
This time of year, Ethics Alarms has many posts about Christmas music. Every year, it leads me back to the question: Did Alice Cooper write a Christmas song?
Mirroring the debate about whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie, or just a movie that takes place at Christmas time (some have credibly argued it is actually a Hanukah movie), is “No Man’s Land” by Alice Cooper a Christmas song, or just a song that is set at Christmas time?
“No Man’s Land”?
Yes, “No Man’s Land,” Track 4 from what is probably Alice Cooper’s most obscure album, “Dada,” the last of his “blackout albums,” released when he was stuck in the throes of severe alcohol and drug abuse. “Dada” is to Alice Cooper what Music from “The Elder” is to KISS, except that “Dada” is not derided nearly as much as “The Elder,” and is considered by many to be a hidden gem in Alice Cooper’s catalog.
“No Man’s Land” takes place around Christmas. Is that enough to make it a Christmas song? “Baby’s It’s Cold Outside” is considered a Christmas song and Christmas is not mentioned even as it endorses patriarchal rape culture. “Jingle Bells” is a Christmas (or Thanksgiving song) even though it does not mention Christmas, but perpetuates a culture of White Supremacy.
And, “No Man’s Land” is a love song. As I thought about Christmas love songs, of course, and Mariah Carey’s 1994 song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came to mind. As I contemplated the lyrics of that song (which I will quote as little as possible in order to avoid banishment from our esteemed host), I became convinced that Mariah Carey stole the idea for “All I Want For Christmas Is You” from Alice Cooper’s “No Man’s Land”. I am 29% positive of it. You can judge for yourself.
By way of introduction, for those who do not want to seek out the audio on the internet, “No Man’s Land” does not have the typical feel of a Christmas song, either in form or in content. There is not a lot of pausing between verses, as you find in “Little Drummer Boy,” “White Christmas,” or practically any other Christmas song. Many of the stanzas are a single sentence that are spat out without taking a breath. This is no “Silent Night.” The stanzas are often structured like a normal song, but the rhythm and word arrangement often uneven and offbeat as one stumbles through the story.
So, yes, “No Man’s Land” is a Christmas Love Song, the Christmas Love Song that only Alice Cooper could write! Here it is:
1. Once, a guilty pleasure of surfing the web and social media was seeing amusing videos of dogs and cats, and other animals too, behaving anthropomorphically, spectacularly, or adorably. Now, “thanks” to artificial intelligence, no such video can be trusted. The more remarkable it seems, the less trustworthy it is. Unethical people seeking views on Facebook and elsewhere post these fake videos as real, because viewers knowing they are staged and manufactured robs them of most, if not all, their entertainment value.
Above is a screen shot from one of the suddenly ubiquitous videos showing dogs frightening other dogs with Halloween masks. The link to the video, which WordPress wouldn’t let me embed, is here. It’s fake. Dogs, in my experience, are seldom fooled by masks. No dog would tolerate having a mask like that fastened to its head. No dog would go along with the gag and creep up on a sleeping canine companion. And no American Bully could leap like that all the way to the sofa.
Ethics Alarms 