An Australian woman had been dating her husband-to-be for a few months in Melbourne after meeting him on a dating app. Then he invited her to a “white party” in Sydney, telling her to bring a white dress to fit the theme of the event. When she arrived at the party venue, the only other people there were the boyfriend, a photographer, the photographer’s friend, and a marriage officiant. The friend explained that he had planned a fake wedding to increase his social media following (he has 17,000 followers on Instragram) and he needed her to play the bride.
She is, I should interject here, an idiot, because she shrugged and said, “Ok!” She did call a freind to ask if there were any risks to being a bride in a “fake wedding,” and the friend said, “Nah! Go ahead!” Here’s another pro tip: if you are an idiot, the chances are high that your friends are idiots too.
Nothing I like better than a big dose of frustration to start up the morning…
Glen Greenwald may be a fine and brave independent reporter, but he’s an unethical one, as I have pointed out here before. I am apparently unable to get out from his clutches, or at least from the con artists he hangs out with. As I wrote about earlier this year, I subscribed to Greewald’s substack, which he stopped contributing to because of some personal matters, but I was still charged for the subscription. (I also have had to endure some personal setbacks this year, but I have managed to fulfill my obligations to Ethics Alarms readers nonetheless, none of whom have paid me for subscriptions. Cry me a river, Glenn.) Then he announced that he was leaving Substack.
On December 10 of 2023, I received a “friendly reminder” from Glenn that my subscription to his new platform would renew in six days. I had never subscribed to the new platform, as indeed I wouldn’t trust Greenwald with another subscription if it cost me only ten cents. I had bigger metaphorical fish to fry a year ago, and never took the time to figure out what the hell was going on, but apparently my subscription renewed.
I have not heard a peep from Greenwald since that message last year, but today I received the same “friendly reminder” as you can see above. The email was “no-reply.” Nowhere was there a link to cancel the subscription, which I had never agreed to any way.
I guess it’s a bit ungrateful to post this after being paid to do an ethics training for a federal agency, but still: anyone who expects governments to solve more problems than they create just isn’t paying attention. The problem, or course, isn’t the nature of government itself, but rather the human beings that operate them. And the brains that operate the human beings.
I present for your edification Craig Adams’ nightmare…
Adams recently learned that his 8,300-square-foot Raleigh, North Carolina home where he lives with his wife is no longer registered in his name. Oh, his mortgage and property taxes are up to date, but never mind—the deed to his home is now belongs to a stranger. Adams said one day he learned that a woman and probable grifter named Dawn Magnum had the deed to his home transferred into a trust she managed. He only learned about this when the property management company for his HOA asked him if he had sold his home after Mangum contacted it to get access to the private gated community where Adams’ property is.
Magnum initially said she thought Adams’ property was in foreclosure so she managed to get the deed to the home into her trust. “She filed a false warranty claim deed against this house and basically tried to steal it,” Adams told the news media.
Dawn Mangum has been arrested and charged with is obtaining property by false pretense.
Records reveal that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) has unethically and criminally used charitable contributions to enrich family members of the Black Lives Matter cabal, and of course, the leaders of the cabal themselves.
Hello everybody! I’m your host, Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Cute, Silly,or Stupid?,” the popular ethics game show where our panelists try to decide whether an individual or organization is doing or saying something that strikes a positive emotional chord with the public sincerely, or whether they are cynically grandstanding or virtue signaling to achieve popularity, influence, money, or power. Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…
A video posted to Facebook by the Richmond Wildlife Center shows Executive Director Melissa Stanley dressed as a giant mother fox to feed a red fox kit (that means a baby fox, not a kit you use to assemble foxes) rescued by the center earlier this month.
“It’s important to make sure that the orphans that are raised in captivity do not become imprinted upon or habituated to humans,” the post said. “To prevent that, we minimize human sounds, create visual barriers, reduce handling, reduce multiple transfers amongst different facilities, and wear masks for the species.”
Denver, Colorado pastor Eli Regalado announced in a YouTube video last April that he would be selling cryptocurrency. The pastor said he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Regalado and his wife then began selling cryptocurrency, dubbed INDXcoin, to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area using his “the “Kingdom Wealth Exchange,” an online cryptocurrency marketplace he set up for the purpose. They peddled the holy investment with prayers, quotes from the Bible, and entreaties to have faith in their product. Sure enough, the plan was a godsend, at least for the pastor and his wife: the Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors.
Unfortunately, the INDXcoin was worthless, except for the purpose of making the pastor and his wife rich. The Regalados used around $1.3 million of the supposedly “investment funds” on a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and vacations, while renovating their Denver home. Hallelujah!
That tweet of signature significance isn’t the topic of this post, but it is relevant. [Thanks to comment-master Humble Talent for passing it along.] This progressive group, much like the equally dim Move-On.org, represents shrill far-left ideological cant without nuance, facts, standards or restraint. All of my Facebook Friends who were addicted to posting disinformation and propaganda memes by Occupy Democrats have unfriended me by now I think; it’s too bad, because some of them once had functioning minds, but it’s just as well. Meanwhile, the always evident ethics and intellectual rot underlying OD is finally being recognized.
Occupy Democrats’ campaign finances over several cycles show that the group spent most of the money it acquired from charitable contributions— $577,000 of a total $797,000 raised this cycle—on “fundraising consultants,” with no—that’s zip, nada, zero— contributions going to candidates.
A quarter-million dollars of what the group raised over this past election cycle, did flow into the coffers of Blue Deal LLC, which is owned by Occupy Democrats’ founder Omar Rivero and his brother, Rafael.
Oh! So Occupy Democrats is like Black Lives Matter, then!
April 7 is a really bad ethics date. In 1994, the worst episode of genocide since World War II was triggered in Rawanda, resulting in the massacre of between 500,000 to 1 million civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwandan forces even managed to avoid significant international intervention after the murder of ten Belgian peacekeeping officers: the Tutsis, a minority population that made up about 10% of Rwanda’s population, were never deemed important enough to be rescued by the international community. (Yes, the United Nations has been fearful, negligent, and in this case, racist, for a long time now.) The U.N. did eventually admit that a mere 5,000 soldier peace keeping force could have stopped the slaughter at the start.
That was big of the U.N.
Let’s send them more money.
The genocide’s seeds were planted the early 1990s when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power . What followed were several massacres, killing hundreds of Tutsis. The government and army assembled the “Interahamwe” (meaning “those who attack together”) and armed Hutus with guns and machetes for the explicit purpose of wiping the Tutsis out. On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. In response, Hutu extremists in the military began murdering Tutsis within hours. Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, and the U.N’s reaction was…
It bravely pulled its forces from Rwanda. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors, but the international community, and notably the United States, took no action to stop the genocide. An estimated 75 % of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered. Bill Clinton later called America’s failure to intervene “the biggest regret” of his administration.
At least it beat out Monica.
1. They are still trying to excuse Will Smith and blame Chris Rock! Surprised? There were two additions to the canon today. The New York Times featured an absurd piece called “The Slap, Hair and Black Women.” A sample: Continue reading →
The anti-gun group “Change the Ref” pretended to represent a fake school, “James Madison Academy,” when they invited former NRA president David Keene to give a speech at a graduation ceremony. He was told that he was participating in a rehearsal, as he addressed a stadium of empty chairs. Another gun rights advocate, John Lott Jr., also was lured into the trap by the same ruse.
In reality, the group was filming an anti-gun video. As Keene exhorted the imaginary students to revere the Second Amendment, the video added audio from 911 calls, and the sounds of terrified students during an active shooter episode (or simulations of them). Keene addressed empty chairs, 3,044 of them, allegedly representing children and teenagers who were shot and killed before they could graduate from high school, though he wasn’t told that. Just a rehearsal! After they provided the desired footage to be used against their cause, Keene and Lott were told that the ceremony was canceled.
Change the Ref was founded by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, parents of a boy killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting. The video is called the “The Lost Class.” Powerful! Clever! Also dishonest, unfair, disrespectful, unforgivably unethical and one more thing: signature significance. A group that would do this is untrustworthy. Nothing it says or publishes can be trusted; none of its arguments can be taken at face value; none of its statistics or analysis can be relied upon by anyone. With this video and its abuse of Lott and Keene, Change the Ref exposes itself as practicing “by any means possible” warfare, not legitimate policy advocacy. It believes that the ends justify the means—their ends. It is a perfect match for the current progressive movement, which has taken an ominous turn to totalitarian strategies with its full embrace of Alinskyism.
Frankly, at this point, I can’t tell the difference.
1. ARRGH! Trump Calls For An Insurrection! I must say, having a President who is 12 does create problems. The President’s juvenile “Liberate Michigan!” tweet naturally had the “resistance” in an uproar; the Washington Post even dug up a lawyer from the Obama administration who was willing to write an op-ed seriously arguing that he had advocated the overthrow of the government. Oh, great, I can’t wait for Adam Schiff to try to impeach him for a tweet that had the gravitas of graffiti.
If one concedes that the President should tweet at all—and since he refuses to use any filters whatsoever, I don’t concede that; I doubt that anyone who wants to maintain credibility and trust should tweet—then urging the states to start nudging the economy back into operation is a legitimate objective, and so is opposing outrageous meat-axe over-reach by governors. mayors and police that abuse civil rights—like banning the sale of seeds, or being alone in a car. However, as I am sick of saying, the President’s mode of communication does not include nuance, which makes tweets like yesterday’s irresponsible and incompetent
2. “ARRGH! I’ve been infected!” When the going gets tough, the tough get scamming. In Arcata, California, a fake on-line ordering webpage named “Order Hero” copied web pages from local restaurants including phone numbers, addresses and actual menu items. Customers accessed the website through Google, then provided credit card information to order food. When the victims arrived at the restaurant to pick up their order, they learned no such on-line ordering services existed. Continue reading →
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