A Few Notes About Banned Commenters…

1. Good, I’m glad they are gone.

2. The latest bannee, “Jude” managed to get me to respond to a couple of unauthorized comments post-banning. (This is because he wasn’t around long enough for me to remember his name.) In the unauthorized comments, since sent to spam hell, he illustrated the basis for his banishment by stating, with absolute certainly, that the experience I described here was triggered by a scam, and that I made a dumb mistake by calling both the collection agency (a law firm) and the company that had mistakenly charged me. I had been phished, Jude the Obscure Asshole insisted. No, I replied, I had not been phished, and I have sufficient experience with such things to have checked. Jude just arrogantly insisted that he was right and I was wrong, without any of the information I had that he did not.

I just received an email from AfterPay USA. It reads,

“Hi Jack, Thank you for your patience regarding your ID Theft Claim – Disputed Liability with respect to Afterpay account 10082791185.
Afterpay has concluded our investigation and your ID Theft claim has been accepted. You will not be held liable for Afterpay account 10082791185 or any debt incurred from this account.

What does this mean?

  • Afterpay Account 10082791185 has now been closed. 

Thank you,

Vivien
Global Fraud Senior Specialist

I was right. Jude was wrong. So Jude can bite me.

Ethics Villains: Yes, The New York Times Again…And Its Biased, Ignorant, Pro-Terrorism Readers

The gift link to the NYT article at issue is here.


I’m not going to quote it or summarize it. I will characterize it: the opinion piece, Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future, by Ghada Abdulfattah, “a writer who lives in Gaza,” is anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda that the Times has handed a large amount of space to promote. This is a “poor Gazans being victims of genocide by those inhuman, cruel Jews” essay. The writer never comes right out and says that, but her chronicling of the devastation in Gaza since the Israeli assault began three years ago is definitely aimed at conveying that misleading message.

All right, I will offer a quote:

“It isn’t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence — the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn’t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today.”

Gee, I guess launching a sneak terror attack on civilians in your neighboring state, killing over 1200 people, including infants, raping woman and taking 250 hostages isn’t such a good idea, eh? Huh. Who knew?

Does Anyone Really Have To Ask This Question?

Ann Althouse, who for some strange reason is obsessed with AI in general and Grok in particular, asked her favorite bot, “Which U.S. First Ladies have received the cruelest treatment in the press (and in public conversation)? Especially which ones were disrespected as, essentially, whores?”

Anyone who doesn’t know the answer and the runner-up is both politically and historically ignorant. Obviously Grok informed Ann that Melania Trump is the “winner” and that it isn’t even close, telling the bloggress in part (my comments interspersed in bold),,

“Melania Trump stands out among actual U.S. First Ladies for receiving some of the most explicit, sexualized public disrespect in the modern era—being directly called a “hooker,” “whore,” or accused of having been a prostitute/escort. This came from tabloid stories, a New York Times reporter (who was reprimanded after a model publicly called out the comment), social media, and partisan commentary tied to her pre-White House modeling career and alleged links to escort services. She filed (and later settled or pursued) defamation suits, including a $150 million claim against the Daily Mail over “elite escort” allegations, which the paper retracted. Media and online discourse frequently framed her as ornamental, aloof, or unworthy in ways that veered into slut-shaming, far more personal and vicious than typical policy or style critiques faced by others. Some contemporary observers (across outlets) described her overall press treatment as among the worst for any modern First Lady.”
SOME? There’s no contest! Melania is first, second, third…American First Ladies have always, always, been treated with respect by the news media, though there have been partisan critics of some First Ladies like “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama, but nothing close to the venom heaped on Malania. Back to Grok…
“No other serving First Lady matches this level of direct “whore/prostitute” framing in the historical record… The single most brutal sexual character assassination of a presidential spouse involved Rachel Jackson (wife of Andrew Jackson) during the 1828 campaign. Opponents dredged up her first marriage’s messy divorce and her subsequent union with Jackson, labeling her a bigamist, adulteress, “whore,” “harlot,” and woman of “open and notorious lewdness” in newspapers and pamphlets. She was devastated, withdrew from public life, and died of a heart attack shortly after the election (before inauguration). Andrew Jackson blamed the “slander” for her death and had “A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound, but could never dishonor” inscribed on her tombstone. 
Note to Grok (and Ann): It wasn’t a “messy divorce,” it was a legally invalid divorce, so technically Rachel was a bigamist.

Stop Making Me Defend Eric Swalwell!

I don’t know why I was so dense when I posted this story that it didn’t occur to me what was going on, especially after Hakeem Jeffries weirdly tweeted that Swalwell, as near to the bottom of the ethics barrel as a House member can be (but not alone there) was too disgusting to be a Democratic Governor but not so horrible that he couldn’t stay in Congress. I believe it’s because my brain just won’t process how Machiavellian, corrupt and dishonest the Democratic Party of 2026 (actually 2008 through 2026) has become. Maybe I can’t grasp that because so, so many otherwise good people in my life still embrace this indefensibly organization and its anti-Democracy, anti-“Truth Justice and The American Way” proto-totalitarian drift. Maybe it’s that Cognitive Dissonance Scale. The damn thing is pulling the Democrats up from the depths they deserve because people I have high in positive territory for other reasons—love, trust, loyalty, respect—are chained to the party like a luxury cruise ship to an anchor.

Heck, I don’t know how I missed it, but I did. (Commenter James Flood didn’t, I know) So once again I ask rhetorically, “What’s going on here?” to answer: This…

Oh For Heaven’s Sake! The Answer To This Question For “The Ethicist” Is EA Rationalization List #13…

Too bad Prof. Appiah doesn’t read Ethics Alarms…

A particularly clueless inquirer of the Times Magazine advice columnist “The Ethicist” asks…

“I volunteer for a small nonprofit organization picking up free food from pantries and delivering it to an impoverished local community. Recently I learned that one of the directors of the organization lied to food pantry personnel to obtain more food for our clients. The pantry normally allocates one bag of food per week for each family. Our director said we were delivering to twice as many families, so each family actually received two bags a week. When asked to provide the names of the clients we were delivering to, our director gave fake names.

“I’m uncomfortable with lying to sister organizations so we can procure more food than our families would receive under the established rules. And I worry that the extra bags for our families mean that other needy clients don’t get what they need.

“When I discussed this with another volunteer, they reminded me that one bag of food could never feed our large client families and that the director’s intentions were good. Please help me sort this out.”

Both the fact that anyone would ask such a question and that a philosophy professor thinks enough readers wouldn’t know the answer makes me again wonder if I’m wasting my life trying to advance the cause of ethical decision-making.

Climate Change Experts Try To Rescue Their Credibility With “Studies” Showing They’ve Been Wrong All Along

I find this mordantly amusing, but I wonder how many climate change hysterics will react to it by saying, “SEE???”

The Yale School of the Environment announced this week,

“Scientists have uncovered a “blind spot” in the research on rising seas, revealing that tens of millions of people thought safe from coastal flooding are at risk of inundation. Across much of the world, sea levels are higher than previously assumed and land is sinking faster…

These findings come from two major new studies that are reshaping our understanding of the threats posed by rising tides and sinking land and underlining the imminent risk of inundation facing tens of millions of people in some of the world’s largest megacities, say researchers not involved in the studies.

“The impacts of sea level rise under climate change have been systematically underestimated,” concludes Matt Palmer, a specialist on sea level rise at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. “We could see devastating impacts much earlier than predicted — particularly in the Global South.”

“Taken jointly, these two papers paint a considerably more concerning picture than either would in isolation,” says Franck Ghomsi, an oceanographer at the University of Cape Town. “We are seeing an emerging body of research that rewrites the story of coastal vulnerability.”

…Data from tidal gauges shows that actual sea levels worldwide are on average 9.4 to 10.6 inches higher than predicted by models.”

If the author of this piece were under cross examination in a courtroom, the question would be: “Interesting. So you are saying that we should believe those studies now by the same “experts” who have been mistakenly reporting results that they now admit were vastly miscalculated. Is that correct?”

There is also the little matter of confirmation bias, which the “experts” choose to ignore. The climate change industry is committed to this theory, and researchers must have been frustrated and fearful.

“We keep predicting imminent disasters and issuing deadlines that pass without the dire results we promised! People are beginning to think we’re dishonest hacks.What shall we do?”

“What we need is a study that explains why our models have all failed…”

“Brilliant! Let’s do one!”

And so they did.

Of course, maybe this one is accurate and correct. Based on the track record of these “experts,” however, basing policies on its results and spending billions would still be a matter of faith rather than science. Or competence. Or responsible conduct.

Huh. You’d Almost Think The Party Behind This Hates The Founders, Democracy, and the United States of America…

Nah! Can’t be that.

The planned Times Square ball drop to celebrate America250 will no longer be a public event in New York City. The announcement follows Communist Muslim Mayor Mamdani’s emergency order to block “large-scale” gatherings this summer. The suspicion is that he will hand out permits to various anti-American, anti-Trump protest groups. We shall see. Happy Fourth of July!

Well, good. New Yorkers deserve this, and more. They deliberately elected an anti-America mayor, and, to his credit, he is behaving exactly as he indicated he would. This guy wants free bus rides for everyone, but wants to make Americans buy tickets to celebrate a patriotic holiday in the nations’ most iconic city.

What’s going on here? What’s going on here is that Mamdani is showing us exactly what the nation is on the road to becoming if the Axis of Unethical Conduct prevails in November. All of our large Democrat-run cities are only a silly milometer behind New York in seeking this cultural rot, if that.

The Drip Drip Drip Of Trump Derangement Evidence…

Seen on social media (with over 6,000 “loves”:

“Name one thing this administration has done that it promised it would.I can name a dozen ways this admin has backstabbed his base. I can’t name single accomplishment other than feeling good the day he won.”

It’s one thing to be deliberately obtuse, continue with absurd Axis narratives (“Trump is senile”) and to deny facts right in front of your face, which is what my Trump Deranged Facebook friends do daily. It is quite another to put a statement as fatuous as the one above in the web like a hanging curve over the middle of the plate to Aaron Judge.

Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain replied as I might have,

“Border crossings to near zero. Net negative migration. 95% reduction in asylum grants. Lawsuits against a slew of woke universities. DEI getting crushed everywhere. Massive, beneficial deregulation. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Venezuela turned into an American ally. And that’s just off the top of my head.”

He left out winding down the Dept. of Education, finally getting rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, using tariffs to negotiate more favorable trade deals, making major progress in ending the war in Gaza, seriously addressing crime in major cities, gutting idiotic climate change policies, and making America Great Again, which means, in part, going to the Moon again, demonstrating American military power, and ending wokey military policies that have nothing to do with defending the country. And that’s just off the top of MY head. It is also relevant that Trump has only been in office less than 15 months.

As for the alleged “endless wars” betrayal, any President who would not do what Trump did in Iran after assessing new developments and intelligence because of a campaign promise has breached his oath and his duty. That’s unethical as well as cowardly.

I know, I know…I promised to do an exhaustive and thorough post about what constitutes Trump Derangement beyond disapproving of the Presidents tweets, rhetoric, style and dubious taste in appointees. I hope I find time to do it (living up to my promises)…in the meantime, I’ll be addressing the issue piecemeal.

Ethics Trivia, Horror Stories, and More…

The Rest of the Story: After picking up frozen entrees at Trader Joe’s yesterday, this afternoon I went to Harris Teeter’s for staples, like coffee and soft drinks. And guess what! The same woman who hit me up yesterday flashed her “I am poor with children and they are hungry…” card at me again, and a second woman, using what looked like the a copy of the same card, stopped me a bit later! I reported both of them and got them kicked out of the store. I should have told them, “The ice section is right over there…”

Also:

1. Memories! Last night I re-watched “Swing Time,” my favorite of the Fred & Ginger movie musicals (directed by George Stevens before filming the death camps in Europe during World War II convinced him that he didn’t want to make comedies any more) and was jarred into a reminiscence when Fred started doing his homage to Bill “Bojangles’ Robinson, one of his tap-dancing mentors. I remembered how in 2018 I wrote a serious ethics post about how Astaire’s blackface number “Bojangles of Broadway” was an example of using black make-up as simply make-up, and not as a racial slur. When I poste it on my Facebook page, Facebook banned Ethics Alarms, with any link to it causing a post to be taken down, for over two years. At the time, a lot of my views were coming from Facebook, and the censorship was harmful. So no, I don’t forget, and won’t forgive, Woke World for its suppression of speech, opinions and ideas as practiced by Big Tech and the social media giants through to the end of the Biden administration, and yes, that experience taught me that the “liberal” side of the ideological spectrum wasn’t liberal at all. Here’s that post.

Now watch me get banned again…

2. Some Democrats are really talking about impeaching President Trump because he said that he would wipe out Iran’s civilization. Why would anyone take this party seriously? I’ve been trying to think of what Trump’s variation on Teddy Roosevelt’s most famous quote, “Speak softly but carry a big stick” would be, not that TR always spoke softly by any means. “Speak like a madman and keep them guessing?”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor Helpfully Reminds Us That She’s The Second Most Incompetent DEI Supreme Court Justice

The “Wise Latina” is an embarrassment, and it is good that Sonia reminded us of her obnoxious wokism since it has been briefly over-shadowed by Biden’s DEI appointment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. That embarrassment was recently discussed (again) here.

But Justice Sotomayor recently used an appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law to insult fellow Court member Bret Kavanaugh using the favorite leftist cheap-shot, attacking his “privilege” as an ad hominem approach avoiding a substantive argument regarding the law. Sonia has neither the wit nor legal acumen to debate Kavanaugh on the merits.

Sotomayor was referencing a Supreme Court stay of a partisan judge’s order preventing I.C.E. agents in the Los Angeles area from stopping and questioning individuals suspected of being illegal aliens. Kavanaugh, agreeing with the Court’s stay, wrote in part,