The New York Times Opinion Editor Sympathizes With This Formula For Analyzing The Issues In the Hamas-Israel War: Emotion, Emotion, Emotion

And ignore facts, history common sense and reality. Like so much of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Trian Wreck, this car has value unrelated to the war itself. Now we can understand why the Times op-eds are the way they are.

The Times just published a column by a recent edition to its stable of extreme woke pundits. Lydia Polgreen opines, in “This Photograph Demands an Answer,” that the news media should bombard the public with photographs that will flood readers’ minds with emotion, making rational, objective analysis difficult or impossible.

Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen….And so I ask you to look at these children. They are not asleep. They are dead. They will not be part of the future. But know this: The children in the morgue photo could be any children. They could be Sudanese children caught in the crossfire between two feuding generals in Khartoum. They could be Syrian children crushed under Bashar al-Assad’s bombs. They could be Turkish children who died in their beds when a shoddily constructed apartment block collapsed upon them in an earthquake. They could be Ukrainian children slain by Russian shells. They could be Israeli children slaughtered in a kibbutz by Hamas. They could be American schoolchildren gunned down in a mass shooting. These children are ours.

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Food Ethics, Pre-Thanksgiving Installment: Sweet Potatoes and Yams

Oh, fine, I’m an idiot. Just in time for what promises to be gloomy and lonely Thanksgiving, I learn that all these many moons I have thought yams and sweet potatoes are the same vegetable. It turns out that they are not; they aren’t even related. The reason is flat-out multi-continental language malpractice.

No wonder nobody seems to know this: here’s the explanation that Food Channel expert Alton Brown unearthed in a video posted here. Let me try to summarize:

Sweet potatoes are not merely potatoes that happen to be sweet. They are actually the root of a vine in the morning glory family, and morning glories are a kind of lily.  Christopher Columbus brought some back to Spain in 1493; they were called “batatas” by the Indians who lived in the Greater Antilles Islands. The Spanish called them “patatas.” Here’s Fred and Ginger performing a Gershwin song  about such matters…

Where was I? Oh, right, sweet potatoes…The Spanish king served a sweet potato pie to King Henry VIII at some royal event and he loved it (of course, he loved just about anything he could put in his mouth) , he took some vines back to England. There patatas became “potatoes.” (Cue that song again…). Continue reading

“Unethical” and “Incompetent Elected Official” Can’t Do Justice To This…

Pulling fire alarms? Child’s play. Challenging a Senate hearing witness to a rumble? Peanuts!

Felicia Franklin was relieved of her job as Clayton County (Georgia) Board of Commissioners vice chair after the September incident above, recorded on police body cameras. Her condition was apparently caused by downing three 40-proof Hennessy and Grand Marnier drinks, a glass of wine and some beer, along with cannabis oil.

Franklin is suing the county, claiming that she was drugged with GHB, but, as you can hear in the video, there was no evidence of that. She’s a class act, to be sure: after she was roused from her unconscious state on the sidewalk, lying in her own urine, Franklin began screaming, crying, cursing at and pushing away the first responders.

“The Clayton County Board of Commissioners deemed the removal of Franklin as vice chair and additional sanctions in the best interest of the county, citing behavior unbecoming of the position,” county officials said in a statement. Ya think? “The Board finds its citizens expect its elected officials to behave in a manner which brings a positive reflection on the citizens, businesses, and employees of the county,” it went on to say.

Do citizens still expect that? If so, how do people like Franklin, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and Senator Markwayne Mullin get elected? Margaret Bryant, a county resident and Franklin supporter, shows how: she told reporters the board should have been more forgiving.

“I think it was a bad move and an unfair move,” Bryant said. “Who hasn’t done something they are ashamed of?”

Good point. What elected official hasn’t gotten roaring drunk, passed out on the sidewalk, fought with EMTs as they were taken to the hospital, then lied about it? Come on! Be fair!

Sure, Chris Cuomo Is An Idiot, But His Shameless Admission Indicts All Of Journalism

Well, at least the troll presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has some uses. His hectoring pulled an “A Few Good Men”- style “You’re goddamn right I did!” confession from ex-CNN pretty boy hack Chris Cuomo. Fredo wasn’t admitting that he ordered a “Code Red,” though/ Instead, Cuomo spat out proof not just of his own lack of journalistic ethics but also of the ethics void in U.S. journalism as a whole.

At one point in his contentious interview on Cuomo’s NewsNation cable show, Ramaswamy challenged the host to “Look the audience in the eye and tell them how you covered for your brother.” Cuomo immediately shot back, “You don’t want to take care of your family, that’s fine. Of course I covered for my brother. Of course I help my brother. Of course I do.”

From this we can conclude that:

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month And Ethics Dunce: Sen. Markwayne Mullin

It is depressing to me that I feel it necessary to write anything here at all, other than to post the video above.

Mullins decided to make a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing about personal animus between him and Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien. He read into the record tweeted insults by O’Brien, who had called the Oklahoma Republican a “moron” and “full of shit” among other juicy descriptors. This precipitated the disgusting display above, with Mullin daring O’Brien to a fistfight, “right here, right now,” and both men apparently preparing to due battle in the U.S. Capitol. “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” Mullins said.

Luckily committee chair Bernie Sanders appeared to have some sense of honor and decorum, and ordered Mullin to stand down, saying, “You are a United States Senator! Sit down!” Mullin is a former professional MMA fighter, and apparently needed reminding.

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Why Is The Washington Post Publishing All These “Poor Gaza!” Hamas Propaganda Stories?

“Gaza reports more than 11,100 killed. That’s one out of every 200 people,” screamed a Washington Post headline yesterday. Today, the featured propaganda piece is “In Gaza, the dead go uncounted as medical infrastructure disintegrates.”

It is obvious that the Post has thrown in with the war crimes/genocide/ innocent civilians/humanitarian crisis that Hamas was counting on to make Israel the villain in an episode where reality is exactly the opposite, and the ethics are remarkably clear. The lessons, which Israel is now determined to teach Hamas, its sadly brain-washed Palestinian supporters, and others is this: Don’t start wars. If you do, you have no standing to complain about what happens to you. When you find that what is happening is unsustainable and intolerable, surrender, and accept the consequences of your actions.

Another lesson that the “Imagine” crowd, the best of the propagandists, and the anti-Semitic crowd, the worst of them also need to understand is that objective in any war is, or should be, to end it as quickly as possible. Regardless of what some toothless international body might claim, the way one ends wars quickly is to make them as costly and painful as possible as quickly as possible.

That’s what Israel is doing. Good.

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Ethics Quiz: This…

This resurfaced video of the Senate Majority Leader gleefully tripping the light fantastic with the New York Democratic Attorney General, one of the party’s several prosecutors engaged in an effort to use the criminal justice system to hamstring Donald Trump before the 2024 election, raises several ethics questions, but I’ll focus on just one.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is participating in this public spectacle ethical conduct for a prosecutor?

Before I comment, let me just say…Ick.

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“48 Hours” Revelations

For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.

“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.

The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.

Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—

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Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh!) Megan Rapinoe!

I haven’t gone back and checked all of the Ethics Alarms “Don’t Make Me Defend…” posts, but its hard to imagine one involving a public figure I admire less than Megan Rapinoe. Her only legitimate claim to significance is that she was a talented player in a game I wouldn’t abandon my sock drawer to watch, yet she has used that narrow platform to bray a series of woke knee-jerk pronouncements that showed her to be ignorant, anti-American, and the kind of militant feminist who gives feminism a bad name. That, added to an abrasive and narcissistic personality, has made her a blight on the sports landscape and others. And yet…

…fair is fair, and unfair is unfair. Conservatives detest Rapinoe, naturally, and today they pounced on an off-the-cuff comment she made exactly the way the progressive media has deliberately attacked every statement made by Donald Trump that could possibly be interpreted as dumb, mean, sinister or otherwise objectionable when the same words would be ignored from anyone else. I sometimes call this “The Perpetually Jaundiced Eye.” I hate it, and I hate it no matter who the victim is. Yes, even Megan Rapinoe.

During the National Women’s Soccer League Championship, in what had been announced the final match of her storied soccer career, Megan tore her Achilles tendon. This, coming off her humiliating botch of a crucial penalty kick in her team’s loss in the World Cup gave Rapinoe an exit that was approximately the exact opposite of Ted Williams’ (or Roy Hobbs’) home run in his last at bat.

In the post-match, post-injury, and post-career press conference, Rapinoe said, “I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t. This is fucked up. It’s just fucked up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles!”

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Breaking! The Supreme Court Finally Issues Its Own Code of Judicial Ethics

This is a rarity: genuine breaking ethics news. The U.S. Supreme Court just released a SCOTUS code of conduct, signed by all nine justices. I have already read that the code “largely follows an existing code for other federal judges.” That code is here. I disagree. The new SCOTUS Code is significantly more detailed, with special emphasis on family conflicts (no doubt prompted by the criticism of Justice Thomas’s wife, a conservative activist.)  I find it fascinating, after decades of arguing that the general precepts of judicial ethics were to be presumed in the very core of our nation’s most powerful judges, when they finally codified their ethics, it yielded the most specific and extensive judicial ethics requirements in existence.

I want to flag two important features. First, the word used in all of the five Canons is “should,” not “shall.”  That makes these best practice guidelines, but not absolute requirements. Second, the code does not include any mechanism for enforcement, discipline, or public oversight. Presumably the Court is still  entirely self-policing.

Here is what was released today; I apologize for the funky formatting. WordPress made a lot of strange changes when I copied and pasted, and I had the patience to fix only the worst of them… Continue reading