Now THIS Is Indoctrination

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oregon State University mandates that undergraduates complete two courses on “Difference, Power & Oppression,” as part of its “Core Education” curriculum, including “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.”

The university demands that all students take these courses so students can master the art of disrupting oppressive systems in the United States and around the world. After all, the Orwelians explain, “The inequitable distribution of social, economic, and political power in the United States and globally is sustained through systems of oppression, which represent a variety of discriminatory institutional beliefs and practices…beliefs and practices [that] obscure the origins and operations of systemic oppression in daily life, such that this inequitable power distribution is assumed to be the natural order…Such examinations will enhance and promote responsible, ethical, and anti-racist engagement by preparing students to understand and disrupt these systems as they manifest in their field.”

There is no way to spin this. Oregon State, a public university, is requiring any graduate to have their brain washed in order to graduate and get a degree. There is also no way to defend it, or the oppressive and anti-American ideology that has spawned such totalitarian tactics.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Tell Of The Month: “Arrgh! The National Debt Hit $40 Trillion!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“…and everything was so much better when it was only at 32.67 trillion!”

Watching my Red Sox TV broadcasts from Boston(as the team I have lived and died for …metaphorically of course…most of my life inconveniently rose from the dead last month and forced me to take two and a half hours I don’t have time for out of every day to follow their adventures), it has been mordantly amusing to hear all of the Democrats running ads following a script that says they will “stand up to Trump” and “deal with the National Debt.” When anyone, including President Trump, promises to take any serious action regarding the National Debt, they are proving they are stupid, naive or lying. There is no fourth alternative.

Nevertheless, the Axis media (and others) have now decided that the newly minted $40 trillion National Debt is exponentially more alarming than the $39 trillion debt, or the $37 trillion debt, and far, far more disastrous than in 1992, when Ross Perot ran for President primarily on the platform that a debt that was then “only” $4.06 trillion and about 46% the gross domestic product was dangerous and irresponsible and Democrats mocked him mercilessly. So “National Debt reaches $40 million!” is being headlined everywhere, blathered about on CNN, MSNow and the rest because Republicans have control of the Presidency and Congress, and mid-term elections are fast approaching.

I wrote about this hypocrisy and deliberate dishonesty by the Left just four months ago. Any Democratic candidate who cites the current explosion of the National Debt as a reason to vote for him, her or Democrats (and especially Democratic-Socialists) are untrustworthy liars: the claim is signature significance. No ethical, competent, believable candidate would make such a promise even once. It is proof of organic mendacity.

I was temped to repost the last EA essay on the topic, Ethics Observations on the National Debt…, but you can read the whole thing if you want; the tag for the topic and all of the EA posts on it is here. I’ll just leave with this quote—as with the rest of the post, it is as accurate today as it was then:

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The Median Strategies “Experiment” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This tears it for me, I think. I’m not paying attention to any polls from anyone or anywhere, ever.

I don’t know why anyone ever would, except, well, you know. Most people are stupid and gullible with flat learning curves, and our political parties and the news media depend on it.

A supposedly respectable polling organization released a poll before the Wisconsin gubernatorial race that showed Democratic Socialist whack-job Francesca Hong with a lead of more than 20 percentage points. Hong lost: It was close, but metaphorical miles away from winning by 20 points.

But wait! There’s more!

Then an alleged polling groups called Median Strategies issued a poll this month showing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading City Councilwoman Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the November mayoral runoff. Bass was apparently ecstatic, declaring on social media, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!”

On Monday, the company acknowledged on its website that it had produced the fake polls as a”short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Oh! That’s all right then! No, it’s not, and I don’t care what the alleged justification for releasing fake polls was. The incident proves one thing, and one thing only: we can’t trust polling organizations, we can’t trust polls, we can’t trust the news stories that cite polls (Trump’s support among Hispanics drops 50!” was a headline this week…I bet they polled illegal immigrants), and we can’t trust politicians who use them either.

We should have already known this after the miserable performance of polling during the last few election cycles, but the Median Strategies “experiment” should put the question to bed permanently. All polling is a tool for manipulating elections, discouraging some voters and energizing others. Ignore them all. If a poll is correct, it’s luck.

We owe Median Strategies a debt of gratitude for clearing this question up for all time. But I think their real experiment was designed to find out how many people will still take polls seriously even after this farce. My guess: lots. Because…you know.

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Finally “The Ethicist” Has Found A Legitimate Topic Again: The Dementia Victim’s Spouse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In fact, I’ll make this one an Ethics Quiz.

I don’t need to extensively quote the letter inspiring the column. A woman whose much older husband is now consumed with dementia and unable to function or recognize her asks if it would be ethical for her to seek an intimate relationship while remaining married to her husband and serving as his caretaker. “I have a lot of working years and child-rearing years ahead of me…and I find myself desiring physical and emotional intimacy with a partner,” “Name Withheld” writes.

No, it wasn’t Jill Biden. At least, I don’t think so…

If you have been reading my periodic posts involving Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ethics advice in the Times “The Ethicist” column, I’m sure you can guess his response. Hey girl, go for it! No harm no foul! Your man is a veg, and you’re stuck with him: why not live a little in the meantime?

Ok, that framing may be a bit unfair, but it’s still where Kwame comes out. Without saying he’s necessarily wrong, I have several problems with that knee-jerk response.

If that’s the verdict with one serious debilitating illness, why not others, like cancer or ALS…or, to reference something I’m very familiar with, alcoholism? Is the distinction that the demented spouse doesn’t know his or her spouse is having affairs? Hey Ethicist Man, what happened to “Ethics is what you do when no one’s looking”?

I do know that my wife frequently said that if I cheated on her if she became seriously ill, she would come back from the grave and haunt me like Tevye’s grandmother in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And she wasn’t kidding.

Then we have the reverse situation famously experienced by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She stepped down from SCOTUS in 2005 to care for her husband, John Jay O’Connor, after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. His condition progressed to the point that he required full-time care and he was moved into an assisted living facility in Phoenix. There his mind deteriorated to the point where he no longer remembered or recognized his wife, and he fell in love with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient. Justice O’Connor was supportive of the relationship, saying, at least in public, that she was thrilled and relieved that her husband was relaxed, happy, and comfortable in his new reality. Later, he became engaged to an ottoman.

(Okay, I was kidding about that last part. )

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Do you agree with “The Ethicist” that stepping out on your demented spouse is ethical?

Unwritten Rules Ethics: R.I.P. “No Running Up The Score”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Last night the Milwaukee Brewers tied the MLB record for the most lopsided shutout in modern history with a 22-0 rout of the Seattle Mariners. Once upon a time and not so long ago, the Brewers would have been shamed for “running up the score” because a very old unwritten rule of the game held that doing so was unethical: unprofessional, cruel, pointless, sadistic, and a Golden Rule breach. When the Texas Rangers defeated the Baltimore Orioles 30–3 on August 22, 2007, the most one-sided wipe-out in professional baseball since the 19th century, the Rangers were widely condemned for inflicting such a humiliation on another team and its fans. I think, with the Brewers win yesterday, we can officially pronounce the silly unwritten rule repealed. It never was ethical. Good riddance.

The unwritten rule probably dates back before professional baseball. Running up the score in Little League and pick-up games is cruel, pointless and, yes, a Golden Rule breach, but carrying it into games where spectators pay money and the players are compensated for their performance never made sense. It is a violation of integrity for professional athletes not to exert maximum effort. The score won’t stop, or shouldn’t stop, a player from making a spectacular fielding play, or hitting the ball into orbit. Real baseball fans love the game, not just a team. For a winning team to stop trying to score runs is unethical. Fans are being cheated.

A game with so many runs scored is long? Hey, nobody’s forcing a spectator to stay. If I pay to see a game, I pay to see the whole game. Moreover, one of baseball’s inimitable charms is that weird and wonderful things happen that have never happened before all the time, even though there have been roughly 243,700 baseball games played over the entire history of the sport since 1876. Just this week, a rookie hit three home runs in his first three trips to the plate in his first game ever, something that is unprecedented.

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“When They Go Low, We Go High…” Suuure, Democrats: You Can’t Go Much Lower Than This

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several of my Trump Deranged, “Knee-Jerk-Democrats-To-The-Death-Even-If-Their-Party- Started-Sending-Dissenters-To-Gulags” friends tell me that they are all exited about flavor-of-the-week Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga) ending up as the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee in 2028. Morons. Desperate morons. In addition to the fact that Democrats have painted themselves into a “must-have-a-DEI-President-or-bust” corner (I’m going to see how many of these I can have in a single post: that’s three), Ossoff has already proven that he is an irredeemable asshole. The latest smoking gun evidence was his snide innuendo that President Trump’s ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, is some kind of POTUS comfort woman.

Sen. Ossoff slimed the President this week by saying, “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The Axis loved it because its members are contemptible and have no ethical values left; Joseph Welch’s kill shot to Senator Joe McCarthy would be appropriate here if directed at “the resistance,” Democrats, progressives and the news media: “Have you no sense of decency?” No, in fact they don’t. The Axis cheers because Ossoff proved he could “troll” Trump. What he really proved is that he’s such an asshole that he would cast aspersions on a hard-working, patriotic young woman’s morals and rectitude, which in former, more ethical times would guarantee a law suit and maybe a duel.

Nevertheless, the Axis news media, disgusting and unethical to its core and getting worse by the second, pounced. “With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges: President Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?” snickered the New York Times. (Why look! Permanent Times Trump-slimer Maggie Haberman co-authored the piece! I’m shocked! Shocked!). Then we have similar “Riiight-she’s-his-“aide”-and you-know-what-she’s-aiding” (that’s four) stories from the The Independent, NBC News, The Guardian, MS NOW, The Hill, CBS News, Daily Mail, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Daily Kos, and more. “Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him” slobbers CNN.  “Yes, We Absolutely Should Talk About Natalie Harp”  writes Media Matters’ (Talk about “Have you no decency?”) Paul Waldman.

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Censure Rashida Tlaib. (And Spit On NPR)

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

3.8 thousand “hearts.”

NPR, in an abominable piece of deceitful journalism two years ago about Ferguson, Mo. ten years after a young black thug there got himself shot in self-defense by a police officer, and his buddy’s lies were immediately accepted as truth by a biased, corrupt news media, wrote in part…

Right. “Many” maintain that justice was never served because of lying, divisive, race-huckster, police-vilifying ethics villains like Rep. Tlaib, who deliberately and repeatedly maintain that facts don’t matter. It isn’t an opinion that Mike Brown was murdered. It is a destructive false narrative designed to keep racial distrust and anger perpetually high. She is a member of Congress. For a House member to make a public statement so irresponsible, dishonest, and corrosive to society isn’t just grounds for censure, it demands censure.

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So This Is What It Takes To Get A Bipartisan Condemnation Of A Political Candidate! Good to Know…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Color me unimpressed.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Party Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a bi-partisan rebuke of Florida Republican Dan Bilzerian, one of several Republican candidates in Florida’s 6th Congressional District running in the primary today. Bilzerian, a veteran, has run a bare-knuckles campaign to put it mildly, and his latest campaign ad crossed more ethics red lines than any such production in memory. In the process of attacking incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of his opponents in the primary, the ad uses AI-generated images (the one on the left accompanies the ad hominem slur “fat Jew”) and such blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric as “Shylock,” “Jewish supremacist” and “satanic whore” while suggesting that Adolf Hitler’s “opinions” many have some validity after all.

Nice. Stay classy, Republicans.

Rep. Fine is among the most vocal and determined supporters of Israel in its war with Hamas and Gaza. Jeffries and Johnson both condemned Bilzerian. “The hateful campaign being run by Daniel Bilzerian in Florida is blatantly antisemitic and shocks the conscience,” Jeffries said. “People of goodwill regardless of political affiliation must reject his vile attacks on the Jewish community. This cannot and will not stand.” “The vile attack ads against Congressman Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District are disgusting and should be condemned by all political leaders on the Right and Left,” Speaker Johnson said in a statement the same day. “Antisemitism and outward hatred of Jewish communities have no place in our politics or in America.”

There’s no argument that Bilzerian deserves those rebukes and more, but I see no actual principles involved in the decisions of Jefferies and Johnson to attack him. It’s easy for Jeffries to condemn an outlier and rogue GOP candidate for vile attacks on the Jewish community, and it is also hypocritical. His party has extolled and supported plenty of anti-Semites who managed not to be as brazen as Bilzerian, but their statements and transparent attitudes have been “vile” nonetheless. Indeed, Jeffries’s whole party is increasingly sliding into routine Jew-hate, notably on college campuses.

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More Ethics Observations On Nancy Mace’s “Sleeves”…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is a rare case of EA using the same graphic two days running, but there is a good reason.

In yesterday’s morning post, I wrote, concerning Rep. Nancy Mace’s extensive tattoo “sleeves” which she revealed in public for the first time this week, that voters and parties needed to stop letting people with serious emotional or mental issues from getting at the levers of power. I also mentioned that an associate of mine, also fully sleeved, a veteran and a Camp Lejeune victim who suffers from Complex PTSD, once told me that excessive, visible tattoos like Mace’s (and his) are often, even usually, a form of self-harm to cope with serious emotional damage.

I need to pay more attention to his observations in the future. I had missed a story in the New York Post earlier this year in which Mace explained her reasons for getting the tattoos:

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has gotten nine tattoos as a member of Congress because getting inked provides “the pain that I need to feel,” the congresswoman said in a revealing profile released on Friday. The 48-year-old congresswoman got the tattoos in “rapid succession” between a period in late 2023 and early 2024, marked by the breakup with her fiancé and an exodus of staffers from her office, some of whom viewed working for Mace as “toxic,” according to Politico.

Aside from a need to feel “pain,” Mace described getting tattoos as a way to “reclaim” her body and identity. One of her nine tattoos is the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf, as Politico pointed out, committed suicide in 1941 over fears “she was going mad.”

“So my story is I am totally broken,” the congresswoman and South Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate is quoted as saying in the profile. Mace details the strained relationship she has with her father, her struggles in becoming the first female graduate at The Citadel and alleged instances of sexual molestation and rape that she’s been the victim of throughout the piece.

“I have PTSD over what I’ve been through,” she said.

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It’s Beginning To Look Like The University of Cambridge Is Just Plain Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The doctrine of subsequent remedial measures holds that evidence of safety improvements, fixes, or changes made after an accident cannot be used in court to prove that a defendant was negligent. However, when a miscreant reacts to an incident of negligence or wrongdoing by taking measures that make it look more guilty without fixing anything, what do you call that? I vote for “really stupid.”

In the wake of its worldwide humiliation in the Jason Arday scandal and its craven, mealy-mouthed public declarations as the mess reached its climax with the fraudulent professor’s death, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education decided to hide its faculty. The staff list is now offline. When one tries to access it, the screen above appears.

A double-secret faculty! Cool!

Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice promised that the investigation of how an emotionally disturbed fantasist who fabricated credentials, his biography and his scholarship yet nonetheless was passed into the faculty of one of the most prestigious universities in the world would be “thorough and transparent.”

That’s nice, but forgive me for being skeptical: how transparent is Cambridge likely to be when it won’t reveal who’s on its faculty? I suppose it’s possible that the professors are so embarrassed to be associated with Cambridge now that they will enter the Professor Protection Program and are only going out in public wearing Groucho glasses.

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