Quixotic GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking feature of the primary season because, whatever you may think of his positions, he’s unusually articulate and adept at spontaneous responses. His outburst in Scott County, Iowa, when a Washington Post reporter asked him to “condemn white supremacy and white nationalism” is a classic.
He was asked the “gotcha!” question following the endorsement of his candidacy by former Iowa GOP Rep.Steve King, who was punished by the party after repeatedly appearing to embrace white supremacists and their rhetoric. Ramaswamy took off like Harold Hill telling the crowd about the dangers of a pool table in River City:
Sharp-eyed Ethics Alarms readers who pay attention to my baseball posts might recognize this one. It is like the most inexcusable lazy Hollywood franchise film, a sequel that is nearly identical to the original. I’m going to see how much of the post’s predecessor I can duplicate without having to change anything
Twelve years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…
Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.
I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers huddle with player agents in baseball’s off-season and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.
I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again, and last year, in 2022. There is no publication or website that has covered the issue as thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. But I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. The conflict of interest, which is throbbingly obvious and easy to address, sits stinking up the game. Continue reading →
The settlement was for the defendant school board to pay the grand total of $101 toformer student Brielle Penkoski three years after she was sent home from the Livingston Academy public high school (in Tennessee) for wearing the shirt above. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media hasn’t carried this story, as damages that tiny are considered symbolic at best. However, the fact that the defendant paid at all is symbolic, and from my viewpoint, it symbolizes a misreading of the First Amendment.
Yeah, yeah, the settlement came with the typical boilerplate language stating that the result comes “without acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of any party or the agents or employees of any party, which wrongdoing is expressly denied.” But Christian Right publications and websites are cheering the result—the school board will also pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and costs—as vindication.
In the wake of Harvard’s DEI president having to resign in disgrace, conservatives are taking a victory lap, progressives are whining or making asses of themselves, and Harvard’s students are breathing a sigh if relief, as their future degrees were being devalued like bitcoin. But before we get to all that, let’s make Barack Obama put his money where is mouth is…
Let’s draft Barack Obama to take over Harvard. Does Obama have the courage of his convictions? Does he possess loyalty to the people and institution who got him where he is today? Is he capable of embarrassment? We can determine all of this and more if the clamor for Obama to be Claudine Gay’s successor becomes loud enough to attract media attention.
Obama has this job for the asking. The Harvard Corporation, which now is seeing its DEI aspirations crumbling before their eyes, is in ethics zugzwang. Their own credibility is shot, as their much-ballyhooed appointment of Gay, already a dean at Harvard, as the first black president there and only the second woman, now looks careless and incompetent. She almost immediately proved that the promotion was the Peter Principle in action, and worse, Harvard’s blue ribbon search committee never vetted her scholarship, which was paltry, inadequate, and sloppy. She is a serial plagiarist. Yesterday it was not only clear that the students were turning against her (and they are a least as leftist as their university overseers), but those mean conservatives at the Washington Free Beacon published evidence of even more plagiarism by Gay after Harvard’s leadership had taken a “Harvard presidents can get away with plagiarism that students can’t” position that was both cowardly and dishonest.
So Gay resigned, proving herself to be an unethical hack in the process by virtually ignoring the academic misconduct issue and blaming her self-fueled ejection on racism. The Harvard leadership then provided an amusing “It isn’t what it is” coda, saying goodbye with a letter calling her all the things she clearly wasn’t, like an effective leader.
Back to the ethics zugzwang: Who can Harvard recruit to succeed Gay that won’t cause more controversy and criticism? Essentially nobody. Harvard faces a challenge to its woke priorities (ideological indoctrination, not superior education, is its mission now, as Ethics Alarms has been pointing for years) flowing from the Supreme Court finding that Old Ivy was discriminating against whites and Asians, so it is almost forced to find another diversity hire like Gay to fight the good fight. Marc Lamont Hill, himself a diversity hire but with the wrong chromosomes, made this clear with a tweet any legitimate scholar would be embarrassed to post (5.5 thousand followers loved it, the morons):
Yet any black woman who is appointed to succeed Gay will look even more like someone hired because of race and gender than Gay did, and worse, she will also be tarred with the rank of second best—to a bad choice. If Harvard appoints a white academic or established leader…
…or, heaven forbid, a Jewish one, Harvard will be seen as a traitor to the cause.
There is only one way out of this mess, and it is delicious: the new Harvard president has to be Barack Obama. Hear me out, now.
I was prepared to write a sympathetic and generous post in response to the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University. It must be a crushing blow for her, both personally and professionally. At this moment, I can’t think of a fair analogy from the past in any field: the closest I can come is Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the American Presidency. She was celebrated as a great trailblazer as the first black and first black female president of the world’s most famous university only a few months ago. Her fall was rapid and ugly.
I an not sympathetic any more, however. Her Unethical Quote of the Month is her resignation letter, which you can read here. It is disgraceful. She never alludes to her failure to adequately address the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism demonstrations on the Harvard campus. She never mentions her plagiarism in multiple scholarly papers, without which she probably could have survived the criticism arising from her inept testimony in Congress. What she says, in the midst of empty rhetoric about her aspirations and how much she cares about Harvard, is this:
“[I]t has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Breaking! Minutes after I posted this, the Harvard Crimson announced that Harvard president Claudine Gay is resigning.
Harvard’s daily campus newspaper, the venerable Harvard Crimson, currently has two editorials and one student op-ed up regarding the President Claudine Gay scandal, aka The Harvard President Ethics Train Wreck, in which the new president, the first black and only the second woman ever to hold the post, faces duel crises of confidence regarding her leadership. The first is her stuttering and inadequate response to anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus, low-lighted by her evasive and cringe-worthy testimony before Congress. The second is the subsequent revelation that Gay engaged in plagiarism in multiple scholarly works to a degree that would get her school’s students sanctioned.
The NFL’s Carolina Panthers owner was videoed as he threw a drink at a fan or fans in the stands beneath his box near the end of his team’s latest loss, a 26-0 wipe-out to the Jacksonville Jaguars. There’s no audio in the video, which was posted on Instagram, so we don’t know (yet) what the provocation was, but it doesn’t matter. Dousing a fan with a drink will get usually get the drink-tosser escorted out of any stadium or arena—I’ve seen it, more than once. For an NFL owner to do it to a fan, well, this mandates a Costanza:
The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.
The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.
As the capper on a really bad year for Disney, Mickey Mouse finally loses its copyright protection on Jan. 1, 2024, and goes into the public domain. Disney unethically used its lobbying power to use its iconic founding rodent to persuade the U.S. Congress to extend copyright protection beyond all reason. Disney’s monopoly over Mickey will end95 years after his debut in the short film “Steamboat Willie,” long, long after the original copyright protection would have expired based on the correct theory thatonce an artist has gleaned a reasonable benefit and profit from a creation, it benefits the culture and society to be able to use the work to spark innovation and new uses for the original work.
As Carnac the Great would say, “Wrong, Ethics-Breath!”
Disney still has its hooks into Mickey, as the company continues to warp U.S. intellectual property law, setting the precedents for other properties to avoid the public domain far longer than is healthy for the culture. Yes, the original Mickey of 1928’s trailblazing Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie” (above) has lost its copyright, but not this Mickey,
Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.
Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.
You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.
Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.
In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.
Ethics Alarms 