No, Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post Became An Untrustworthy Blight On America Long, Long Ago And I Can Prove It…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I just saw the above and felt it was as good a visual intro to this essay as any. Now keep in mind that here I am not suggesting that the recently gutted Washington Post is necessarily a worse travesty of journalism than the rest of what we laughingly call our news media. I just had Fox News on in the background while I reorganized my sock drawer and heard it breathlessly cover the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother for a full ten minutes. Fox is doing this, I surmise, to avoid discussing President Trump’s latest social media scandal, as I do here. But I digress….what prompted this EA post is this recent bit of nostalgia in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, who wrote in part,

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself….But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster…I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

First, let me say that I am impressed that Peggy still writes as beautifully as ever, and I forgive her for being married to the guy who fired me at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and who tried to cheat on her with one of my interns until I intervened). However Noonan is one of the NeverTrump Republicans, and bias has clearly made her stupid regarding the Post’s bias and abandonment of fair, accurate, objective journalism as its mission. Come on, Peggy…

  • “Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was.” Yes, and the Post has been a significant catalyst for this.
  • “The Post was a pillar.” When was the Washington Post last a “pillar”? Watergate?
  • “… a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” As I will shortly demonstrate, the Post had become a Democratic Party, progressive mouthpiece long before that.
  •  “Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad.” In fact, that’s exactly what is happening, because conservatives, Republican and ethicists recognized that the Post had become a partisan weapon, and the Mad Left regarded it as its champion of useful disinformation and public deception. 
  • “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it.” Appears? APPEARS??? That condition has been obvious to anyone with the integrity to admit it since at least 2008, when the Post joined most news organizations in campaigning for Barack Obama. This included blaming the bi-partisan 2008 economic meltdown on only Republicans when Ted Kennedy’s and Barney Frank’s fingerprints were all over the debacle, calling GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin unqualified when she had more relevant experience for the Presidency than the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, and mocked her intellect while ignoring Obama’s running mate’s well established IQ issues.
  • “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it.” In the immortal words of John McClane, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But the Post wasn’t engaged in journalism, and hadn’t been for many years. Where was Noonan then? Why wasn’t she sounding the alarm?
  • “Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information.”  Something bad? You mean like the nation being locked-down based on the teachers’ unions refusal to do their jobs, Deep State health officials lying about what they knew,  and the Democratic Party’s desire to crash the economy to get rid of Donald Trump? Like an election being held in 2020 with insecure ballots and blue states violating their own election laws? Or a President being demented and his wife and staff running the country while the news media assisted in the cover-up? Like a group of Democratic prosecutors targeting the greatest threat to their continued power and using third world tactics to try to lock him up? Those kinds of “bad things?”
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From The “I Did Not Know That!” Files: The History of Crisco

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A British personal trainer and fitness coach named Sama Hoole posted this on “X”:

1866: Cotton seeds are agricultural waste. After extracting cotton fiber, farmers are left with millions of tons of seeds containing oil that’s toxic to humans. Gossypol, a natural pesticide in cotton, makes the oil inedible. The seeds are fed to cattle in small amounts or simply discarded.

1900: Procter & Gamble is making candles and soap. They need cheap fats. Animal fats work but they’re expensive. Cotton seed oil is abundant and nearly worthless. If they could somehow make it edible, they’d have unlimited cheap raw material. The process they develop is brutal. Extract the oil using chemical solvents. Heat to extreme temperatures to neutralise gossypol. Hydrogenate with pressurised hydrogen gas to make it solid at room temperature. Deodorise chemically to remove the rancid smell. Bleach to remove the grey color. The result: Crisco. Crystallised cottonseed oil.

Industrial textile waste transformed through chemical processing into something white and solid that looks like lard. They patent it in 1907, launch commercially in 1911. Now they have a problem. Nobody wants to eat industrial waste that’s been chemically treated. Your grandmother cooks with lard and butter like humans have for thousands of years. Crisco needs to convince her that her traditional fats are deadly and this hydrogenated cotton-seed paste is better. The marketing campaign is genius. They distribute free cookbooks with recipes specifically designed for Crisco. They sponsor cooking demonstrations. They target Jewish communities advertising Crisco as kosher: neither meat nor dairy. They run magazine adverts suggesting that modern, scientific families use Crisco while backwards rural people use lard.

But the real coup happens in 1948. The American Heart Association has $1,700 in their budget. They’re a tiny organisation. Procter & Gamble donates $1.7 million. Suddenly the AHA has funding, influence, and a major corporate sponsor who manufactures vegetable oil.

1961: The AHA issues their first dietary guidelines. Avoid saturated fat from animals. Replace it with vegetable oils. Recommended oils: Crisco, Wesson, and other seed oils. The conflict is blatant. The organization issuing health advice is funded by the company that profits when people follow that advice. Nobody seems troubled by this. Newspapers report the guidelines as objective science. Doctors repeat them to patients. Government agencies adopt them into policy. Industrial cotton-seed oil, chemically extracted and hydrogenated, becomes “heart-healthy” while butter becomes “artery-clogging poison.”

1980s: Researchers discover that trans fats, created by hydrogenation, directly cause heart disease. They raise LDL, lower HDL, promote inflammation, and increase heart attack risk more than any other dietary fat. Crisco, as originally formulated, is catastrophically unhealthy. This takes 70 years to officially acknowledge. Procter & Gamble’s response: Quietly reformulate without admission of error. Remove hydrogenation, keep selling seed oils, never acknowledge that their “heart-healthy” product spent seven decades actively causing the disease it claimed to prevent. Modern seed oils remain. Soybean, canola, corn, safflower oils everywhere. Same chemical extraction process. Same high-temperature refining. Same oxidation problems. Just without hydrogenation so trans fats stay below regulatory thresholds. These oils oxidise rapidly when heated. They integrate into cell membranes where they create inflammatory signalling for months or years. They’re rich in omega-6 fatty acids that promote inflammation. They’ve never existed in human diets at current consumption levels. But they’re cheap. Profitable. And the food industry has spent a century convincing everyone they’re healthy. The alternative, admitting that industrial textile waste shouldn’t have been turned into food, would require acknowledging the last 110 years of dietary advice was fundamentally corrupted from the start. Your great-grandmother cooked with lard because that’s what humans used for millennia. Then Procter & Gamble needed to sell soap alternatives and accidentally created the largest dietary change in human history.

We traded animal fats that built civilisations for factory waste that causes disease. The soap company won. Your health lost.

I have no idea if this is all true, partially true, a matter of dispute, or complete fantasy. But I bet RFK Jr. likes it. The story, which certainly has the ring of truth, also raises the issue of trusting science and experts, especially when business interests and money are involved.

My personal favorite use of Crisco was when people would mix it with food coloring and sugar and call it “frosting.”

Ethics MEGA-Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As I noted in the previous post, President Trump had an epically unethical week, even for him. I found out about the latest horror on Facebook and “X”, from the post above by my friend Mary Milben, who proved her integrity and courage. Mary, you see, is MAGA’s official songbird. a brilliant soprano who has performed at many Republican functions from coast to coast. She is also an African-American who has suffered criticism for her support of the President as all high-profile black conservatives do. Despite the fact that her prominence, celebrity and livelihood depends on her relationship with the President and his supporters, she immediately spoke out against Trump’s Truth Social account posting of a 62-second video on conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 Presidential election. At the very end was added a non-sequitur section, set to the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,”showing Trump as the Lion King and various Democrats as jungle animals, including Barack and Michelle Obama as…apes.

I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple “niggers.”

After an uproar that I will bet is not going to subside, perhaps ever, the video was taken down. Karoline Leavitt, presumably following orders, took a defiant (and stupid) stance, saying “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

You know, like the desperate search for Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother. The President of the United States appearing to compare the most popular African-Americans in the nation and the only black First Couple as sub-human primates isn’t news. Seriously, Karoline?

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Another historic moment for our 47th President! Donald Trump is not only the first President but also the first individual to rate three Ethics Dunce honors on Ethics Alarms in a single week, as well as setting a record for two in a single day, with the one coming up.

I bet you can guess what that one’s about…

The Justice Department arrested demonstrator Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer, for her part in the illegal protester raid on a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, along with Don Lemon and other pro-illegal immigrant activists. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted an image of the arrest on Twitter/”X” showing Levy Armstrong dignified and composed, walking in front of a law enforcement agent. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary shared that post, but the White House posted a fake, AI-altered version of the arrest in which the lawyer appears to be sobbing. Her skin is also darker. I pasted the original photo next to the fake one above.

There is no defense for this, nor is there any spin you can put on it where this dishonest, deceptive. gallactically stupid conduct doesn’t land at the President’s feet, stinking like week-old fish. Incredibly, irresponsibly and also stupidly, White House officials defended the fake with deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr writing on X that the “memes will continue.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson also shared a post mocking the criticism.

Morons. Utter morons! The only ethical response possible would be to 1) take down the fake posts, 2) apologize profusely 3) fire the staffer or staffers immediately responsible and 4) for Trump, himself and at a microphone, take full responsibility while swearing never to allow anything like that again.

But he won’t do that.

It shouldn’t take a genius or a humble ethicist to explain why this episode was so harmful, but apparently nobody at the White House can figure it out, so here we go:

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My Head Just Exploded Over This News of the Corruption Of Our Legal System That I Didn’t Know About Because The Media Decided a “Today” Host’s FAMILY CRISIS IS MORE IMPORTANT…!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In case you can’t tell, I’m madly disgusted about this, “this” meaning both the episode I’m going to write about, and the fact that I didn’t hear or read about it immediately because of our incompetent, irresponsible news media deciding that their dumb audience would rather share feelings with Savannah Guthrie.

From the New York Times: [Gift link!]

“A former obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing patients must be given a new trial, a state appeals court said on Monday, overturning the former doctor’s conviction. The former doctor, James M. Heaps, 69, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in April 2023 after jurors in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County found him guilty of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person. U.C.L.A. has already paid about $700 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Heaps, who was affiliated with the university in various roles from 1983 to 2018.

“A three-judge panel on the California Court of Appeal ruled on Monday that Mr. Heaps had been denied a fair trial because the trial judge never told Mr. Heaps’s lawyer or the prosecutors on the case about a note that the jury had sent while it was deliberating in October 2022.

The “Note to Judge” said that a recently seated alternate juror had “expressed to us that his limited English interfered with his understanding of the testimony, resulting in every case being the same, and his mind is already made up.”

Under the California Code of Civil Procedure, people who lack “sufficient knowledge of the English language” cannot serve on trial juries. The appeals court ruled that Mr. Heaps’s conviction must be overturned.”

“We recognize the burden on the trial court and regrettably, on the witnesses, in requiring retrial of a case involving multiple victims and delving into the conduct of intimate medical examinations,” the appeals court wrote. “The importance of the constitutional right to counsel at critical junctures in a criminal trial gives us no other choice.”

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that it planned to retry Mr. Heaps ‘as soon as possible.’ Mr. Heaps will be sent back to county jail, the office said, and a court could release him on bail.”

I will now pause a bit while you mop your skull and brain bits off your computer screen. I’ve found that Windex does a good job, though you have to pick up the bigger pieces with your fingers.

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Friday Open Forum: Hey, Help Me Out Here, Will You? Please?

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

One of the few reasons I was worried about Donald Trump getting a second term rather than the United States ending up with that incompetent babbling, DEI Doom Machine Kamala Harris in the White House was that I knew with absolute certainty that his second four years in the White House would be exhausting on the ethics front, making it both impossible and absurdly time-consuming to cover the ethics landscape adequately. That has come to pass even more horribly than I dreaded. Trump does stuff (as Presidents are supposed to do) but often does it sloppily or defiantly; he trolls, he jokes, he behaves like a the kid in “The Twilight Zone Movie” who acquires the power of a god; the Axis of Unethical Conduct goes nuts, the Democrats lie, the polls are faked, the news media spits Trump-Hate propaganda, unethical judges throw monkey wrenches into the works, businesses pander, ethics train wrecks pop up everywhere, socialists, communists and idiots demonstrate…

I feel like Newman feels about the U.S. Mail in the “Seinfeld” clip above.

If EA were going to have the impact and thoroughness it needs to have (five commenters are not enough), it would have to be a multi-contributor site like Instapundit, Powerline, Victory Girls or Legal Insurrection, or I would have to be retired like Althouse or work only a few hours a day like Prof. Turley. But the latter options are impossible (forever, for reasons largely, but not entirely, beyond my control) and I have tried to build the former without success.

The brilliant Mrs. Q opted out quickly because of other priorities. Curmie, who brought a different perspective to his carefully curated posts, went Trump Deranged and quit without so much as a “thanks,” a “Bye!” or a “Good luck!” I have a standing offer to one of EA’s dependable contrarians, who has chosen to ignore it. (This is one reason I bristle when someone calls the blog an “echo chamber.”)

Talk about the mail “coming and coming”! I already have several topics on the runway, and this morning I saw about a dozen others that need ethical analysis that know I will not have time to provide, as well as some issues I’ve already discussed continuing to throb. For example, all of the morning shows and the news were concentrating most of their time on the disappearance of the “Today Show’s” hosts’s mother, which is, literally, trivia compared to other developments, like, say, emerging evidence indicating that a member of Congress—a Democrat, of course—may have ties to terrorist organizations. But.. but…a talking head celebrity’s mother is missing!

Also on the Ethics Alarms radar…

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I assume the President will get severely criticized for this, and he will deserve it. “Make America Weenies Again.” Is that the strategy?

President Trump said yesterday that he has personally ordered the withdrawal of 700 I.C.E. officers from Minnesota and that his administration could use a “softer touch.” Earlier in the day, Tom Homan, the White House mush-mouthed “border czar,” said about 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state because an “unprecedented number of counties” were finally cooperating with federal officials and allowing ICE to take custody of unauthorized immigrants before they were released from jails. “This is smart law enforcement, not less law enforcement,” he said.

Okaaaaay. Maybe that’s true. It doesn’t matter. How the action will be received by the open borders mob, not just in Minnesota but in Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Virginia and the rest, is that interference with law enforcement works, riots work, elected officials demonizing law enforcement works, and open defiance of the federal government and U.S. laws work. Trump’s move, especially in a week when The Nation, the Far, Far Left magazine, nominated Minnesota for a Nobel Peace Prize for encouraging attacks on I.C.E officers, is a retreat that can only encourage more George Wallace -style nullification.

I know he is stuck with a party of weenies who will always surrender first principles when the whining from voters gains volume (“Why does law enforcement have to be so mean?”) Nevertheless, The President should have driven a hard bargain here, beginning with a demand that Tim Walz and his lackeys shut the hell up and stop talking about fighting law enforcement, arresting officers, the Civil War and the Holocaust. Trump should have threatened to use the Insurrection Act and added a “Dirty Harry”-esque “Go ahead. make my day.”

I get it: Trump doesn’t want to invoke the Insurrection Act. But his decision to try to avoid conflict only increases the likelihood that he will have to.

Ethics Dunces: All The News Organizations and Everyone Else Who Isn’t A Member of Savannah Guthrie’s Family

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I just took a brief break from work to have a quick lunch. As I often do, I tried to catch up on the news. I was foiled in this endeavor because CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all spent at least ten minutes each with extensive reporting on the mysterious disappearance of “Today” host Savannah Guthrie’s mother.

This is an unethical waste of journalism resources and breach of the duty for the news organizations not to at least try to report events that citizens need to know to be informed, safe, competent citizens.

600,000 Americans go missing every year, and about 90,000 of them, on average, are never found. If I were a member of the family of one of those Americans, I would be angry and disgusted at the disproportionate attention and resources being devoted to this one woman, Nancy Guthrie, whom I had never heard of before this week. And why should I have? She is not a crucial figure to the nation or society. Her greatest accomplishment is that she is the mother of a celebrity, and one who makes $8,000,000 a year.

The “Today” star has the resources to pay for a private investigation. We can empathize with her, but no more so than with anyone beset with a family crisis.

Absurdly, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he was ordering federal law enforcement to”deploy all resources” to find Nancy Guthrie. Good Lord, why? She is not essential to national security. The nation will not suffer one bit if she has vanished like Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce or Amelia Earhart.

Sure, it would be tragic for the Guthrie family. I could list the important stories that the news media is burying, hiding or ignoring now but it would take up too much of my time or yours. It is true that other disappearances from high profile families became media feeding frenzies: the kidnappings of the Lindbergh baby and J.Paul Getty’s grandson were hysterically over-covered too. But at least they were both children.

The entire spectacle just rubs ordinary Americans’ faces in the ugly truth that they just don’t matter as much as the welfare of the rich, famous and beautiful.

Comment of the Day: “I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone…”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This rueful Comment of the Day arrived like manna from Heaven. I was cogitating about how we hadn’t had an “echo chamber” complaint on Ethics Alarms in a while, especially if we don’t count “Marisa’s” immortal “five commenters” snark. My mind went to that issue in part because I was marveling on how conservative Jonathan Turley’s commentariate had become, though he has always been described as a liberal, Democrat law professor, as almost all of the are. Most of the progressive and Trump-Deranged comments on his posts are anonymous (which I don’t allow) and also usually don’t deal with the post, but just regurgitate anti-Trump taking points. Jonathan need start moderating his comments.

Ann Althouse’s blog has evolved similarly. The few resolute progressive regulars are well-known by name, like the infamous “Inga,” but the vast majority of the former U. of Wisconsin law prof are conservative, though Ann insists that she is “fiercely” non-ideological.

I attribute the lament of EA’s house contrarian below to three factors.

1 Since 2016, Democrats, progressives, “the Resistance” and the their captive institutions have gone bonkers, abandoned ethics, and as a result, the bulk of criticism here has been aimed at their words and conduct, and appropriately so. I am as sick of this as anyone else, but it’s sure not my fault, and as an objective analyst I can’t pretend it is other than it is in the pursuit of “balance.”

2. The courageous, idealistic but annoying stance of some here that all points of view deserve respect and debate is periodically bracing, but in the case of many issues the myth involves literal denial of reality for various and generally unethical reasons. Illegal immigration is not defensible, and laws should not be cancelled by disobedience rather than legislative action. Open borders are by definition suicidal. The mainstream news media is biased in favor of the Left, and clearly so. Banning guns is unwise as well as impossible. Hate speech is constitutionally protected (and so is same sex marriage). Israel has not only a right but an obligation to end Hamas. DEI is repackaged racial and gender discrimination. The Democrats’ pursuit of Donald Trump was politically motivated and has destroyed an important bulwark of our democracy. The Joe Biden senility cover-up was among the worst and most dangerous political scandals in U.S. history. I could go on; the point is that I didn’t arrive at these conclusions and others because of any party affiliation. I arrived at them through strict ethical analysis, legal principles, and historical perspective, adjusting for bias. This is a hard time to be a loyal Democrat or a committed progressive, because so many of your positions have been proven to be wrong, and so many of your leaders have been exposed as hypocrites and frauds. I’m just reacting to reality. I feel bad for you, just as I felt bad for my Republican friends when the Religious Right, Tom Delay and assorted crooks and knaves made the GOP impossible to defend in good conscience.

3. When I was a fellow at the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C, I argued vigorously that the organization, which calls itself “a source of information and guidance for ethics and compliance professionals everywhere,” needed to take stands on national issues with ethical implications, including corporate misconduct. Their response taught me a lot about the field. The organization wouldn’t take a black and white stand even when it was an easy call because it was afraid to alienate potential donors, board members and political allies. I vowed then and I retake that vow now that I will never accept that limitation, that indeed I view it unethical to do so. In both the Ethics Scoreboard (RIP) and Ethics Alarms, I have always tried to spawn discussion and enlightenment by taking strong positions, sometimes, I admit, more strongly than my true opinion justified, because I don’t think wishy-washy posts encourage dissent.

I have more to say on this topic, but the intro to Here’s Johnny‘s Comment of the Day on the post, I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionmentis too long already. So Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!

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That Tears It: I’m Heading To The Woodchipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On Facebook just now, two brilliant women I have long admired, loved and respected posted the following on Facebook:

…One quoted FDR about the President as a “moral leader.” This was intended by my friend as a knock on Trump. She obviously knows next to nothing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cheated on his devoted wife for most of their marriage, ultimately dying with one of his mistresses. He locked up Japanese American citizens in arguably the worst civil rights breach of any American President. He helped the Holocaust to proceed by allowing anti-Semites in his Cabinet to foil the efforts of Jews to escape Nazi Germany. FDR condemned Eastern Europe to decades of brutal Communist rule in gratitude to Stalin. Roosevelt also allowed himself to be elected four times, the last time when he knew he was dying: an odd choice to use in contrast to a President being accused of being a “king.”

FDR was a great President in many ways, but few of our leaders were less interested in morality or ethics than Roosevelt.

.…The other poste that she read Kamala Harris’s book and found it inspiring. I don’t even want to talk about that one…