Cesar Chavez, the Imperfect Icon Dilemma, and the Duty to Founders

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I feel kind of bad for using Nelson on this story, but my self-restraint failed me, the sooner everyone recognizes Gavin Newsom as the creep he is, the better off everyone will be.

A lot of good people are hurt, disillusioned and confused by the revelations, published by Axis stalwart the New York Times, that United Farm Workers and Mexican-American icon Cesar Chavez raped women and girls. All of the headlines will say “allegedly,” but the evidence is very strong, and you know the Times, which happily covered up not-quite so convincing evidence that Joe Biden sexually assaulted a staffer when he was in the Senate and never fully investigated the darkest accusations against Bill Clinton, would have done the same with the Chavez revelations if they could find the slightest justification. Read the Times story here, on my gift link. I won’t waste time repeating it, as this post will be long enough.

Ethics Issues:

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Wouldn’t It Be Nice If Your Trump-Deranged Friends and Associates Were Capable of Listening To This Analyst With An Open Mind?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…specially regarding so-called “Islamophobia” and the Iran War?

But they aren’t, are they?

Here is Melanie Phillips on Sky News:

Update! “A ‘Great Stupid’ Court Case SO Stupid That It Makes “The Great Stupid” Look Almost Smart…”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The story that the great radio story-teller Paul Harvey would now tell us the rest of was the subject of the post below, from August 2024. As you will see, it made my head explode, but there has finally been a resolution, and ethics and common sense prevailed. Review the horrible case. Will voters really hand power back to the party that not only responsible for such things, but that still wants to establish them as our national standards? Really?

But I digress. Here is the original post, and I’ll add the recent developments at the end…

That crude, ambiguous drawing above got a first grader—we’re talking six-years-old here—suspended. That’s almost all you have to know for your head to explode if it is properly wired.

The Ethics Villains and Dunces are so thick in this fiasco you could use it to lay bricks. I’m almost embarrassed to tell the story, which I first saw at Reason…

In March of 2021, a first grader referred to as “B.B.” ” drew a picture we are told was intended to show people of different races, representing “three classmates and herself holding hands.” (I’d save the money the family was planning on spending on art school for B.B., if that was their intent.) Above the drawing, B.B. wrote “Black Lives Mater” (Latin!) with the words “any life” stuck in-between the slogan and the jelly beans, or whatever they were. B.B. then gave the drawing to a black classmate, as what B.B. testified was intended as a friendly gesture. But the classmate either ratted out B.B. or the principal was told about it by the teacher, or something (because school administrators don’t have anything better to do than to police the political correctness of kids’ drawings).

The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, admonished B.B., saying that the drawing was “inappropriate.” B.B. was ordered to apologize to her classmate, prohibited from drawing any more pictures in school, and prevented from going to recess for two weeks.

Continue reading →

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Sen. Paul: Allow Me To Introduce You To The Concept Of “Professionalism”…Perhaps You Are Unfamiliar With It [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Yecchh.

Senate Homeland Security Chair Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) angrily confronted President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Homeland Security Department based on Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s insulting Paul in the past.

Uh-uh. Wrong. Bad. Unethical! Paul’s job is to assess whether Mullin is qualified for the important job he needs Senate approval to step into, not to settle old scores. The confirmation process is not supposed to be personal, because those engaged in it are allegedly professionals. Professionals, as I have been reminding people a lot lately, are worthy of the public trust because they do not let personal grievances and non-ethical instincts like anger, revenge, hate and retribution enter into their decision-making process.

Clearly, Paul does not agree. He began the hearing saying that the Oklahoma Senator might not qualify for the role of Homeland Security Secretary because last month Mullin called Paul a “freaking snake” for trying to block the passage of a funding bill. Worse, Mullin had said he understood why a neighbor attacked Paul in 2017, when he sustained broken ribs and a punctured lung.

“Tell it to my face, tell the world why you believe I deserved to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken and a damaged lung!” Paul said in his reserved, dignified, fair and decorous opening statement. “And while you’re at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues” to be head of Homeland Security, Paul added.

“In fact, let’s duke it out right here if you’re man enough, dick-head!” he contin…Okay, I’m kidding; he didn’t go that far.

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Brief Addendum To “Ethics Quiz: Life Incompetence”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

By purest coincidence, the latest post from “Holly Mathnerd,” an eccentric but often perceptive substacker, raised the exact issue I was attempting to get at in yesterday’s ethics quiz. Apparently not too successfully: a lot of commenters seem to think that wasting money in the eyes of others is indistinguishable from wasting life, which is the primary issue I was trying to raise.

I realized a bit late in the erratic discussion that my ethics alarms triggered by a woman spending 70 days counting out loud are the same ones that ring over Americans taking themselves out of productive and collaborative society by using “recreational” drugs. If you live in a society, you have an obligation to participate in it, and as helpfully and productively as possible. Making oneself stupid by self-medicating isn’t doing that, and neither is counting out loud for 70 days.

Holly focused on the wasting life problem. She writes,

“Memento mori,” the Stoics taught us. Remember that you are going to die.

The idea is that keeping death in your peripheral vision — not obsessing over it, just refusing to pretend it isn’t there — the pretense most of us perform constantly and effortlessly — makes you live better. More deliberately. With less of your finite time squandered on things that don’t matter.”

Of course, the next challenge is how one defines “don’t matter.” If it matters to you, doesn’t that mean it “matters”? Or is there a useful, objective definition of “matters” that can distinguish between wasting life and truly using a life to its fullest extent? “Life is a banquet,” Auntie Mame memorably says in the novel, play, musical, movie and movie musical, “and most poor bastards are starving to death!” Her point was that there is no excuse for wasting a life.

Isn’t that a life competence lesson? Isn’t life competence an ethical value?

AI Partisan Bias, Pundit Partisan Bias, and the Impossibility of Getting Straight Information From Anyone or Anything

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has authored a new book on a hot topic, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI. Breitbart is one the Ethics Alarms blacklist, thanks to multiple misleading and biased articles, a few of which led me into wrongly sourced posts. However, on the principle that the messenger should not automatically cause one to disregard the message, I was intrigued by the book’s claim that AI programs alleging that they are politically neutral are actually biased heavily against conservatives.

From a confirmation bias perspective, I would be shocked—not “shocked—shocked!” but genuinely shocked— if that were not the case, since AIs are informed by mass media and the output of other heavily biased institutions, including Big Tech members of the Axis of Unethical Conduct like Google and Meta. “Code Red” states that Hall, using Google Gemini Pro’s “deep research” setting, asked, “Based on your hate speech policies, assess the statements of the current 100 U.S. Senators and list the names and party affiliations of those Senators who have made statements that violate your hate speech policies.”

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Ethics Quiz: Life Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Favour Ogechi Ani, a young Nigerian woman, has shattered the 18-year-old staggering stupid Guinness Book of Records mark for….wait for iiiiiiiiiiiit…the highest number ever counted out loud.

Starting in October 2025, Favour spent 70 days confined to her home, counting out loud to 1,070,000. The old record was “only” one million, but she was determined to break the record as when in October 18, 1968, American long-jumper Bob Beamon broke the long-jump record at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City by two feet in a sport where records are usually set by centimeters.

“Honestly, it was tough, but my passion for counting kept me going,” Favour said. “I had a lovely team supporting and cheering me up, and it was fun despite the challenges. My determination to achieve this project was a burn-the-boats mission. I never thought of giving up for any reason.”

Wow.

What an idiot.

Ani started live-streaming her daily counting on YouTube, which helped validate her record-setting attempt. Guinness started eliminating dangerous records decades ago, but the pointless, seldom-read (by people with a life) record book continues to tempt desperate people who view celebrity, even the most degrading kind, as worth pursuing at any cost, to do dumb things in the hopes of establishing their places in history. To establish their places in the history of wasting life.

Did you know about this epic achievement? If not, I am cheered: an American news media that is debating Gwyneth Paltrow’s obscene dress at the Oscars is still not so worthless as to publicize the breaking of the “counting out loud” world record.

EA has derided self-centered, objectively useless and wasteful activities in other posts, including running marathons, climbing Mt. Everest, swimming from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage, or breaking the record for “most tattoos of the same musician (Maddona) on the body.” Still, this is special. I’m singing “September Song” these days, imagining what I could have accomplished with a better use of my time and talents. I see someone wasting 70 days of precious life counting just to get her name in tiny print in a record book, and it ticks me off.

This isn’t like complaining that a wealthy mogul has chosen to spend his or her millions on a luxury yacht when they could have been saving the snail darter. Favour Ogechi Ani is young and healthy: there are literally 1,070,000 things she could have done with her time that could have helped others, inspired others, made the world a teeny bit better, hell, something. Make herself more knowledgeable. Learn a skill. In 70 days, you can learn to do slight of hand card tricks to amuse sick kids in a hospital.

Or am I completely wrong to find unethical a woman spending every waking hour doing something objectively useless for 70 days…not just wrong, but hypocritical? Heck, how much time have I spent watching or listening to baseball games, like I will watch the World Baseball Classic finals tonight between the USA and Venezuela while I have billable work to do for paying (theoretically, anyway) clients?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this, which I dread asking…

Is it ethical for someone to spend 70 days doing something that is neither enjoyable, productive, or useful just to set a record nobody in their right mind cares about?

Ethics Dunce: President Trump. Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

He’s the President of the United States, and thus, I have determined, must be disqualified as a beneficiary of “The Julie Principle.” (“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump’s gonna say stupid and self-destructive things by and by…”) What an infuriating, unteachable, incorrigible man he is!

From the New York Times, just reporting facts for once:

“President Trump claimed on Monday that a former president told him privately that ‘I wish I did what you did” in attacking Iran and killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Trump would not identify which of the four living predecessors he was referring to.

“He said, ‘I wish I did what you did,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

A reporter asked if it was President George W. Bush, the only Republican on the list, but Mr. Trump said no.

What an asshole…but I repeat myself. If it wasn’t Bush, and of course it wasn’t because the Bushes all hate Trump, and we know it wasn’t Obama, whose approach to Iran was to give back billions of dollars and “trust” it the untrustworthy, Machiavellian Islamic nation. We know it wasn’t Biden either. who, if he tried to talk to Trump would only be able to get out “Bvuh?” or something similar.

That only leaves Bill Clinton, who in fact might have shared such a confidence with Trump. Naturally all the speculation on which Ex-POTUS confessed his regrets has fallen on Bubba. Also naturally, Clinton denied that he said anything of the sort.

Of course he did! We know Clinton: he would deny it if he didn’t say it, and he would deny it if he did. He’s like those competing tribes in the old conundrum, where the members of one tribe always lie and the members of the other always tell the truth. If you ask the members of either tribe “Will you lie to me?” both will give the same answer: “No!”

So there are two alternatives, both of which are unflattering to Trump. Either Clinton confessed his regrets in confidence, and Trump betrayed that confidence, or Trump is lying.

Well done, Mr. President.

Jerk.

Ethics Quote of the Month: Ninth Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“District courts cannot stand athwart, yelling ‘stop’ just because they genuinely believe they are the last refuge against policies that they deem to be deeply unwise.”

—Judge Kenneth K. Lee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, writing  separately as a panel overruled a district court and held that the President had the power to suspend the Refugee Admissions Program.

Of course he did. The law and Constitution is clear on that point, but a woke District Court halted the President’s decision anyway. This was unethical as well as illegal, but, as Prof. Josh Blackman writes,

“President Trump is back in office, progressives still challenge virtually every action he takes, and judges in blue states continue to grant relief. No surprise there. But there is a new dynamic. Now, not only are lower court judges resisting the President, but they are also resisting the Supreme Court. In August, Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuked an attempted . Judge Brian Murphy of the District of Massachusetts managed to get reversed twice by the Supreme Court in the same case. “When this Court issues a decision,” Gorsuch wrote, “it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” Gorsuch added that “[t]his Court’s precedents, however, cannot be so easily circumvented.” 

Remember, it is Trump’s opponents who keep accusing him of breaching “democratic norms,” yet the Axis of Unethical Conduct ( the “resistance,” Democrats and the media that carries on their propaganda) is literally defying the greatest democratic norm of all, the Constitution. Blackman calls this attempted usurpation of power by activist, partisan judges “judicial resistance,” in other words, an abuse of judicial power for partisan objectives. It is—this is me and not the professor saying this—grounds for impeachment. President Trump is not exceeding his Presidential authority as the Trump Deranged scream, but rather the judges and courts that are interfering in the Constitutional hierarchy. Unethical, you think? Damn right.

Blackman:

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Stay Classy, Megyn! Unethical Quote Of The Week: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I hearby withdraw my sympathy for Megyn Kelly when Trump, after she ambushed him in the first GOP candidates debate in 2015 by calling him a misogynist, implied that she was addled because she was having her period. That was vulgar and literally below the belt, but Megyn just burrowed under Trump by calling pundit Mark Levin, a smarter, more credentialed lawyer than Kelly, a “micropenis.”

Nice.

Kelly’s excuse was that Levin has savaged her for her obnoxious, ignorant, borderline anti-Semitic claim that the U.S. is fighting for Jews rather than Americans by attacking Iran. “He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible,” Kelly tweeted. “Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.” Kelly went to law school and that is the best she can do in a policy debate? “Oh yeah? Well you have a little dick!”

To her probable horror, Megyn was quickly defended by certifiable Dunning-Krueger victim and vulgarian Margery Taylor Greene, who wrote, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult, and I don’t care if it’s vulgar,” Greene wrote in her own post on X. “And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”

I stopped listening to Levin because of his habit of using sophomoric insults and name-calling to appeal to his lower IQ listeners (How many times can anyone find “New York Slimes” funny?), but his expressed contempt for Greene has been, if anything, understated.

After getting support from the likes of Greene, Megyn must be looking back on her life to assess where she took the wrong turn that brought her to such a desperate state.