Before we delve into the substance of the article at issue, let me express my gratitude to author David Kaufman for giving me another opportunity to post a brilliant cartoon by one of my heroes, New Yorker satirist/philosopher/humorist Charles Addams. If you read here often, you have seen his work highlighted periodically because it is so often appropriate. In this case, that cartoon above, which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a high school student, immediately leapt to mind when I read that Kaufman believes the little white figures in the “walk/don’t walk” traffic lights represent white people.
Did anyone, at the New Yorker, among its readers, among the millions of people who have seen that creepy but very funny drawing in the best-selling collections of Addams’ mordant humor think for a second that it had anything to do with race? No, because it didn’t, doesn’t, and until quite recently, before The Great Stupid spread hate, fear, darkness and toxic cretinism over the land, nobody would be so woke-mad and brainwashed to see racism in everything that they would come to such a bonkers conclusion. Continue reading →
The organizers of an international figure skating event in Finland last week decided to show their oneness with the times, known at Ethics Alarms as “The Great Stupid,” by featuring Markku-Pekka Antikainen in the opening ceremony of the ISU European Figure Skating Championships. Antikainen is a 59-year-old man who at age 50 decided to “transition” and become a female figure skater. He would have been just as successful aspiring to be a bunch of carrots. His skating name, which he will presumably use when he is featured in “Disney on Ice” (can you really say with confidence that that won’t happen?), is Minna-Maaria Antikainen. Continue reading →
This isn’t funny any more, if it ever was. I was pondering whether reports that an organization called The Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance is demanding that Apple Music and Spotify remove the Aretha Franklin 1968 song “Natural Woman” from their playlists because it “perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” since “there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ woman.” The group claims that the song “has helped inspire acts of harm against transgender women.”
Really? I’d like to see the citations for that. I know I want to run amuck with a machete every time I hear “Imagine,” but Aretha never made me feel violent.
I couldn’t believe this story could be true, until I encountered this story, which is even dumber.
Last year, Mars Wrigley changed the shoes of some of its cartoon M&M’s characters that appear in TV ads. Conservatives were upset. Let me repeat that: some conservatives were upset because of a change in the design of anthropomorphic animated candies’ shoes.Tucker Carlson criticized the character makeovers as “Woke M&M’s.” Slow news day, Tucker?
M&M’s marketers had re-shod the green “female” M&M’s high heels with flats and replaced the intimidating brown “female” M&M’s stilettos for smaller heels.
Tucker pounced! “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Carlson said on his show. “Until the moment when you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.” Continue reading →
…the Department of Energy quietly released a report highlighting the positive economic benefits of developing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, an energy project canceled by President Biden in the hours following his inauguration….Released without a formal announcement, the DOE’s report points out that the pipeline would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had an economic benefit of between $3.4 and 9.6 billion….Yet with one stroke of his pen, Biden slashed the project and instead focused his efforts on costly “green energy” goals. As a result of his executive action, 11,000 pipeline workers were promptly laid off…
Now, everyone except hard-core climate change fanatics—and maybe poor Joe— knew that closing down the pipeline would have no salutary effects on global warming or conservation. The Obama administration had essentially admitted that shutting it down would be largely symbolic but otherwise pointless (like all climate change grandstanding). Never mind: the pipeline was killed anyway just as Biden had promised to do on “Day One” during the 2020 campaign. If they could have voted, the 16-year-olds would have gone for Biden. Continue reading →
The official proposal from San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the existence of which itself is evidence of psychosis, is finally out, and The Great Stupid has reached a new benchmark.
In December, Ethics Alarms reported that California’s Task Force to Study and Recommend Reparations Proposals for African Americans was about to submit a recommendation that the state hand over $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California as a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers will be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget. I concluded that “it was just one more indicator of how the entire state had lost its collective mind, that The Great Stupid knows no bounds.” Well, I was right about that, and San Francisco’s panel apparently decided to show the USA that its home state was relatively reasonable.
The committee, after much thought, study and debate, has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” And that’s not all! The committee also proposes cancelling all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households, and supplementing lower-income recipients’ income for the next 250 years. After all, the report points out, “Reparation must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.”
They do not, apparently, have to be feasible, responsible, reasonable or constitutional, but then, the city has been working up to clinical insanity for quite some time. We shouldn’t be too surprised.
What happens when The Great Stupid reaches “Peak Stupid”?
Oh, it will be spectacular. People will over the U.S. of all ages and political affiliations will suddenly realize what they have been accepting and tolerating. They will realize that they have been doing to society, the culture and the nation the equivalent of shooting a nail bun directly into one’s skull because it seemed like a good idea at the time. They will be simultaneously humiliated, embarrassed, remorseful and angry.
And it’s coming my friends. It is coming because the purveyors of the Great Stupid will keep trying out more and more ridiculous tactics and stratagems to attain their desired Orwellian utopia until they reach the inevitable tipping point. Based on today’s developments, it is coming soon.
Guess what word Woke World has decided to ban as racist.
Come on, guess.
It’s field. As is “Field of Dreams,” “Lilies of the Field,” and “Flanders Field.” As in “take the field.” As in “What field are you in?” and “Let’s do some field research.”
OK, That’s IT! Now The Great Stupid is messing with me personally.
This is war!
Among my many useless and unprofitable areas of expertise are the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, which I performed in, directed, produced, adapted and lectured on for most of my life. Maybe there is someone who has as much experience in the genre as I have, but I doubt it, frankly.
Recently I was engaged to prepare a program on my exploits with the great Victorian musical comedy team for a private club in Washington, D.C. I assembled a capable cast of experienced Savoyards to assist me, including in the planned program numbers from 12 of the 14 performable operettas. I will be emphasizing how many of the songs make still valid satirical observations on current societal foolishness; that number above is included in the program and is from “Princess Ida,” in which Gilbert pokes fun at early feminism. The song is sung at a women’s college where the faculty and students have forsworn male contact and regard the opposite sex as inferior in all respects. Here are Gilbert’s lyrics:
A Lady fair, of lineage high, Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by. The Maid was radiant as the sun, The Ape was a most unsightly one, The Ape was a most unsightly one So it would not do His scheme fell through, For the Maid, when his love took formal shape, Express’d such terror At his monstrous error, That he stammer’d an apology and made his ‘scape, The picture of a disconcerted Ape!
With a view to rise in the social scale, He shaved his bristles and he docked his tail, He grew mustachios, and he took his tub, And he paid a guinea to a toilet club, He paid a guinea to a toilet club But it would not do, The scheme fell through For the Maid was Beauty’s fairest Queen, With golden tresses, Like a real princess’s, While the Ape, despite his razor keen, Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!
He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits, He crammed his feet into bright tight boots And to start in life on a brand new plan, He christen’d himself Darwinian Man! He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do, The scheme fell through!
But it would not do, The scheme fell through! For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey crav’d, Was a radiant Being, With a brain farseeing While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d, At best is only a monkey shav’d!
A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, a TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked job applicants for a $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to apply while removing “all undergraduate and graduate school name references” from their résumés, citing only the degree itself. Apparently this policy applies to all HR&A job postings, which the company says is part of its “ongoing work to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”
The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,
Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.
You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…
or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →
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