Ethics Verdict: The President’s Executive Orders On Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is easy: irresponsible, petty and stupid.

President Trump signed a pair of executive orders directing that there be federal investigations and other sanctions against high-profile administration critics from his first term. The first is former homeland security official Miles Taylor. He’s the jerk who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 boasting about how he and others were working behind the scenes to sabotage the first Trump term. describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who worked to oppose Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and “stolen,” and was was subsequently fired.

In the case of Taylor, the President implied in his remarks that he engaged in “treason,” which is a stretch, to put it lightly. Krebs was fired: that should have been punishment enough. In either case, Trump has bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes, and these orders do nothing to advance his agenda.

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Unsolicited Virtue Signaling and Grandstanding Like This Should Be Slapped Down, and Hard

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Anderson Cooper, as we all know, is a weenie, and he proved it in this exchange.

Ms. Thomas may be an activist, but she’s also an asshole. Cooper should have said, “Excuse me, but did you inform me of your favored pronouns? Did I ask what they were? Do they have any relevance to the matter we are discussing? Since the answer to those questions are all “no,” your making a point to correct me on live TV is rude, obnoxious, and uncalled for. Sit down, please.

Next questioner!

Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Ethics Alarms Friday Forum…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week’s open forum was wild, man, and I hope today’s can be as lively.

Based on the early returns, there’s a lot to bloviate about in the ethics world. The amateur golf champ playing in the Masters was caught pissing into a creek on n the 13th hole at Augusta National golf course. Pennsylvania judge Sonya McKnight was just convicted of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. (Seems awfully judgmental…). Almost all Democrats in the House voted against the bill requiring voter ID in Federal elections. Yes, their determination to prove the cognitive dissonance scale wrong continues apace! A black Congressman tried to discuss issues with a Trump-Deranged white female and was called a “race traitor”…

…and we learned that after VP JD Vance’s March visit to Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon’s northernmost military base, issued a gratuitous email to the base’s personnel stating that he did not speak for her of the base. What an idiot. (She was fired.) Finally, we have this stupid incident, in which Frontier Airlines let a woman fly to Puerto Rico with her “emotional support parrot” but wouldn’t let the bird on the return flight. (Gift link.)

Be careful. It’s stupid out there…

Nobody Should Trust The News Media Anyway, But Trusting It After This Is Unconscionable…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

How infuriating.

Ex-NBC News chief political analyst and “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd was a guest on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on yesterday, and when Morgan asked Todd “why was the mainstream media so reluctant” to cover President Biden’s mental state, especially when “everyone was seeing [it] with their own eyes,” Todd offered this: “The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden, right?”

NO, you despicable asshole, NOT right! Your job is to report the facts that the public not only should know but has to know in order to govern themselves effectively, not to decide which facts will benefit a particular individual, policy or party and censor accordingly. Right before that damning statement, Todd said the American public should have been able to figure out that President Biden was failing cognitively because the media had been “subtle” in its coverage. “I would argue the reason people were able to come to their own conclusion on Joe Biden is because of the media coverage,” Todd said. “Look, we were subtle. ‘He’s using the back staircase. He’s not using the front staircase.’ ‘Hey, he’s not doing any interviews.’”

This isn’t a game of charades, you incomparable fool! The public isn’t supposed to have to guess what’s going on based on the clues you and your fellow propagandists for the Democrats are willing to reveal.

Over at Instapundit there has been a mantra repeated often lately: “No matter how much you hate these people, it isn’t enough.” Todd, the most inept and untrustworthy host of “Meet the Press’ in its long and once distinguished history, is among the worst of the worst in his field: he’s biased, he’s partisan, and he’s just not very bright.

Law vs. Ethics (Again): The AP Wins Its Lawsuit

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

When the Associated Press refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in its style book, the White House excluded the once-essential news organization from its press briefings.The AP filed a lawsuit arguing that this was a violation of the First Amendment by the Trump Administration, as an infringement on the Freedom of the Press and the first Amendment.

Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden ruled in the AP’s favor, granting the AP’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Judge McFadden acknowledged that there is no constitutional right to attend a press briefing at the White House:

[T]his injunction does not limit the various permissible reasons the Government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events. It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the President or nonpublic government spaces. It does not prohibit government officials from freely choosing which journalists to sit down with for interviews or which ones’ questions they answer. And it certainly does not prevent senior officials from publicly expressing their own views……[But]while the AP does not have a constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, it does have a right to not be excluded because of its viewpoint….

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Comment of the Day: “How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Another epic and irritatingly rational Comment of the Day from Extradimensional Cephalopod, this one on the thorny topic of discussing unlikely conspiracy theories with true believers. Almost all of E.C.’s contributions to Ethics Alarms topics are helpful and impressive; this is one of his—its?—best.

This is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?”:

Your friend has arrived at a conclusion that is based on, generously speaking, an implausible interpretation of the evidence surrounding the Titanic’s disaster. If he were looking at the evidence with no biases, he presumably would not have come to this conclusion. Therefore, I suspect that he has either an emotional attachment to the conclusion, or an emotional attachment to the process he used to reach it.

An person’s attachment to a conclusion might be as personal as a belief about what that conclusion says about them or someone they respect, or it might be as impersonal as preferring a more pleasant view of the world, such as one where disasters don’t just happen by accident.

An attachment to the reasoning process may be based on a fear of not having a good alternative reasoning process to turn to, a fear of what conclusions those alternative processes might lead to, or (similarly) an attachment to another conclusion that they arrived at through their current process. For example: “I have to believe this person wearing a cape is a bad person, because if people who aren’t bad can wear capes, that means that maybe I did a bad thing by attacking those other people for wearing capes.”

I’d like to talk with your friend and see how his worldview compares to what I suspect it is. My preliminary hypothesis is that your friend’s subconscious reasoning process is loosely based on the following premises, which I am not rendering judgment on at this time:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Why aren’t progressives on Trump‘s side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side, and we’ve got progressives crying over the drop in stock prices.”

—Bloggress Ann Althouse, neatly noting, regarding the Axis’s fury over tariffs, why Trump’s tariffs  against China, the Left’s hypocrisy and incoherence.

Gee, thanks, Ann! I’ve been asking this exact question of my various Trump Deranged relatives and friends, though not on social media. No answers, of course, except this one, which isn’t exactly ennobling: “Because I just lost thousands of dollars in the value of my stock portfolio!” Wait, I thought it’s the bad guys that only care about their own wealth and everyone else be damned.

Ann adds Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement earlier this week: “I’m not happy with what’s going on in the market today, but the distribution of equities across households? The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. Eighty-eight percent of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12%. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills. They rent their homes. They have auto loans. And we’ve got to give them some relief.”

Political parties have never been known for integrity, but in a very long time of watching the Donkeys and the Elephants, I have never seen a party descend into such complete self-destructive chaos as today’s Democratic party.

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Ethics Quiz: The Good Deportable Immigrant

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times has a variation on its routine “Won’t someone please think of the good illegal immigrants’ children?” sob story; this time it’s “Won’t somebody please think of the good green card conditions violator’s disabled American friend?”

For four years, Alfredo Orellana, 31, has been a caregiver and pal for Luke Ferris, a 28-year-old with severe autism. “The pair worked out at the gym, got tacos and played video games together. They exchanged elbow bumps,” the Times says.

Awww!

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How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A friend and business associate just stunned me by professing belief in a conspiracy theory that I had never encountered before. He doesn’t see it as a theory, either: he is certain that it is historical fact, that it has been covered up by historians and other malign forces, and that eventually it will all be revealed.

This one is, I am quite certain, bonkers, just as bonkers as the Truther claim that Bush and Cheney were really behind the attack on the Twin Towers. My cognitive dissonance scale is in revolt: I have to trust and rely on this individual, whom I respect and admire. Yet embracing something this wacky is a red flag. A big one.

The short version of the conspiracy is that the calamitous sinking of “Titanic” in 1912 was secretly orchestrated by financier J.P. Morgan. His motive was to remove three powerful businessmen—Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor—who opposed the formation of the Federal Reserve.

A related conspiracy theory is that as part of an insurance fraud scheme, Morgan had “Titanic” secretly switched with one of its sister ships, “Olympic.” That one is, if possible, even wackier than the murder plot, and like it, the theory is easy to debunk. Both ships had distinct construction identification numbers or yard numbers that were stamped on many of their parts, including their wood paneling. “Olympic’s” yard number was 400 and “Titanic’s” was 401. Many artifacts bearing the number 401 have been raised from the wreck of “Titanic,” and items auctioned off after “Olympic” was retired in 1935 show the number 400. Also, I can’t figure out why switching nearly identical ships would benefit anyone, but we don’t need to go into that.

As for the murder plot—

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