If Elephant Seals Can Learn To Be Ethical, Surely Humans Can…

Right? Hello? Buhler?

A report published last month in the journal Marine Mammal Science relates what scientists, specifically wildlife biologists and seal specialists, had never observed before, or even thought possible. In January of 2022, a male elephant seal, all two tons of him, galumphed into the surf to rescue a seal pup from drowning. “The rising tide had pulled the pup out to sea and, too young to swim, it was struggling to stay afloat. The [pup’s mother] was still on the beach, answering the pup’s plaintive cries with calls of her own, which attracted the attention of a nearby male….he gave the female a sniff and then ‘charged out into the surf’…When he reached the pup, he used his body to gently nudge it back to the beach — probably saving its life.”

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Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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Saturday Night Ethics Fevers, 2/10/2024

Hardly anyone is reading or commenting today, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to clear the inventory…

1. Today’s incompetent elected official: Pennsylvania State Rep. Kevin Boyle (D-Philadelphia) is shown in a video that turned up on social media ranting and threatening people at a bar. It is unknown right now when the video was taken; from an ethical point of view, it doesn’t matter. Elected officials who disgrace themselves and their constituents like this…indeed, even less than this, should resign immediately. One time is too many. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania House Democrats blathered, “We are aware of a video circulating on social media. It is very troubling.” “Rep. Boyle has been open about his personal challenges,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are encouraged that our colleague and dear friend is seeking help. Our commitment to delivering mental health services does not stop at the Capitol Steps. One of the main reasons we advocate so strongly for mental health access is the reality that challenges can and do happen to anyone, and seeking treatment should be encouraged, not stigmatized.”

No. When an elected official behaves like that in public, his conduct should be stigmatized. He can seek treatment as a private citizen. He has no right to serve in a public position of trust when he has behaved that way.

The same, incidentally, applies to President Biden.

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Ethics Quiz: The Governor’s Ex

We are getting closer to the Fani Willis hearing, which should be fun, but another Democrat has raised eyebrows with what seems like another outburst of nepotism and the appearance of impropriety.

Uber-woke Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (D, as if you didn’t know) nominated her former girlfriend, Gabrielle R. Wolohojian, to serve on the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. Wolohojian is currently a Massachusetts Appeals Court Associate Judge. (About “girlfriend”: I’m afraid I’m using that term because I just heard lesbian comic Sandra Bernhardt’s rant about the cold inappropriateness of the favored term “partner” “What are we, a gay law firm?,” she said. No, I didn’t find the routine especially funny, but it stuck in my brain anyway…)

Wolohojian seems eminently qualified for the new position. Her law degree was earned at Cornell; she has been a partner at a major law firm; she clerked for a US District Court judge, and she has 15 years of experience on Massachusetts Appeals Court.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is Healey’s nomination still unethical if Wolohojian is legitimately qualified?

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My Annual Boycott the Super Bowl Edition…[Corrected]

Feb. 9th was the 60th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, leading me to muse on what other momentous cultural (as opposed to political and international) events American society has shared in caring about and observing since. There haven’t been many. I remember that the first Super Bowl, when the AFL and the NFL agreed on a championship game between the upstart rebel league and the establishment attracted such intense interest and coverage (two networks covered the game—when has that happened since?) which was a wipe-out by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I didn’t know any families that didn’t watch that first one. Once upon a time, everybody tuned in to the Academy Awards: it was a unifying ritual, but no more. It is disturbing to think that there can’t be a unifying cultural event in the U.S. today, but I’m coming to that depressing conclusion.

Meanwhile, I hope you are boycotting the annual hoop-de-doo by the evil NFL, which happily kills its player for profit. This NFL season I didn’t catch a second of a single game, and wrote less about the cynical, ethics-free league than I have in years. The most recently discussed incident when an NFL head coach was pilloried for trying to inspire his players by extolling the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. I didn’t write about, but should have, a study from almost exactly a year ago that found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of 345 former NFL players among 376 former players studied. That’s 91.7% compared to the normal incidence of CTE in the general public, which is in the vicinity of .4% I didn’t write about it because, as far as I can tell, none of the sources, ethics and news, that I usually check for ethics stories bothered to treat the study as newsworthy. I assume that’s because they chose not to issue a buzzkill on Super Bowl week.

Think about that for a while, assuming that you haven’t played professional football and can think.

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Clearly, #MeToo Never Quite Got Its Message Across

Baltimore judge Kevin M. Wilson is facing an ethics hearing in May after a female lawyer accused him of inappropriate and unwelcome touching at a bar association event at the Maryland Club in May of last year. Thecomplaining victim says that when she stopped at a table where Wilson and another judge were seated, she felt Wilson’s hand rub her leg up and down. Two lawyers witnessed this, as well as hearing the complainant tell Wilson that his behavior was inappropriate. The judge moved his hand away, but then, also allegedly, put his hand back on the attorney’s leg, moved his hand up under her skirt, and touched her buttocks.

The event was called “Join Our District Court Judges for Practice Tips on Tap,” so I guess maybe Wilson was just…tapping. 

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From the “Rules Are Rules” Files: The Matchstick Eiffel Tower

47-year-old Richard Plaud of France spent the past eight years assembling a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks in order to become the Guinness Book of Records record-holder in that cherished category, “World’s Tallest Eiffel Tower Model Made Out of Matchsticks.”

Aside: How many parts of that sentence justify a “What? For God’s sake, why, and who cares?” Why is there a published record for matchstick models of anything? Does the Guinness Book of Records include records for matchstick Chrysler Buildings, Pentagons, Statues of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridges? Big Ben, the London Eye? What’s special about the Eiffel Tower? Why should holding an obscure record in a book few people read or care about matter to anyone except pathetic losers desperate to give meaning to their empty lives? How shallow must a man be to devote eight years to assembling something with no utility whatsoever other than to win him mention in that silly tome?

Back to poor Richard: after he completed his project, he discovered that even though his model, at 7.19 meters, is easily taller than the current record holder for matchstick Eiffel Towers, the 6.53-meter-tall model built by Toufic Daher in 2009, his opus was ineligible for the honor. Why, you ask? 

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Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

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Popcorn-Popping Friday Forum!

The theme today is going to be the fun of watching Democrats, the news media, and your Trump-Deranged friends (and mine) freak out, spin themselves dizzy, and go whataboutism bat-crazy after yesterday’s one-two punch combination to Joe Biden’s hopes of staying in the White House. Almost lost in the stunning indictment of Biden’s mental state and the prospect of a genuine and justified invocation of the 25th Amendment’s disability clause was the fact that the report probably doomed the prosecution of Trump for mishandling classified documents.

I almost dedicated this installment of the Friday Open Forum to “The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz (“Ha ha!”) I have no sympathy for Biden’s enablers, allies, paid liars, puppeteers, party or family. None. Zilch. They deserve to be mocked mercilessly, as does everyone who voted for a President who was so obviously in the twilight of senility at least as far back as 2019.

The assessment of Biden’s DOJ’s special counsel and Biden’s disastrous public address trying to debunk it arrived late enough yesterday that reeling pundits had an excuse not to write about their humiliation immediately, but Paul Krugman, the NYT’s shamelessly biased Nobel Prize-winning hack, dived right in:

“When the news broke about the special counsel’s hit job — his snide, unwarranted, obviously politically motivated slurs about President Biden’s memory — I found myself thinking about my mother. What year did she die? It turned out that I didn’t know offhand; I knew that it was after I moved from Princeton to CUNY, because I was regularly commuting out to New Jersey to see her, but before the pandemic. I actually had to look into my records to confirm that she died in 2017.

I’ll bet that many readers are similarly vague about the dates of major life events. You remember the circumstances, but not necessarily the precise year. And whatever you think of me, I’m pretty sure I don’t write or sound like an old man. The idea that Biden’s difficulty in pinning down the year of his son’s death shows his incapacity — in the middle of the Gaza crisis! — is disgusting.

As it happens, I had an hour-long off-the-record meeting with Biden in August. I can’t talk about the content, but I can assure you that he’s perfectly lucid, with a good grasp of events. And outside that personal experience, on several occasions when I thought he was making a serious misjudgment — like his handling of the debt ceiling crisis — he was right and I was wrong.

And my God, consider his opponent….

Glorious.

You can write about any ethics issue you want, as always. But pop that popcorn….

Ethics Quote of the Week: Justice Dept. Special Counsel Robert Hur

From the report issued today by the DOJ Special Counsel tasked with investigating Joe Bden’s storing boxes of classified documents in his garage:

Holy guacamole.

Well, I assume this document will authoritatively put an end to the dissembling Democratic narrative that President Biden is as sharp as a tack. The status of Biden’s mental facilities was relevant in making the determination of whether charges should be filed, if prosecutors were doubtful about whether and jury would convict someone who is described as a doddering old man, as in this passage:

“…We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

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