Month: December 2015

Reflections On The Ethical Holiday

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Christmas

 

“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

—G.K. Chesterton.

“It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year we are the people that we always hoped we would be.”

— Frank Cross (Bill Murray) in “Scrooged”

CHARLIE BROWN: I guess you were right, Linus. I shouldn’t have picked this little tree. Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I really don’t know what Christmas is all about. Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?

LINUS: Sure, Charlie Brown. I can tell you what Christmas is all about.  Lights, please?

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, goodwill toward men.’”

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

—Charles M. Schulz

“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.”

― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

― Dr. Seuss, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”

“Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

― Steve Maraboli, in “Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience”

“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”

― Bob Hope

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

― Fred, Scrooge’s Nephew, in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” Continue reading →

A Merry Christmas For The Washington Redskins, “The Slants,” And The First Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Yes, The Slants were apparently, disparaging. themselves.

Yes, The Slants were apparently disparaging. themselves.

The political-correctness obsessed Democratic component of our government has decided that forcing Dan Snyder to change the name of his football team due to its alleged offensiveness to people who don’t care about football is a legitimate government function, or so they would have us believe. Actually, they believe it is a legitimate political function to lick the moccasins of progressive activist groups who thrive on opportunities to tell others what they can safely say.

After Senate Democrats signed an unethical  missive threatening the Washington Redskins if the team wasn’t renamed something that an enterprising race-baiter wouldn’t find offensive—not as easy as it may seem— the Patent and Trademark Office canceled the registration of “Redskins” using the excuse that Federal trademark law excludes the registration of “scandalous, immoral, or disparaging marks” as well as trademarks that a “substantial composite of the referenced group” perceives as disparaging to a religion, nation, ethnic group, or  belief system. [ You can read my opinion on this ruling here. I’d quote from it, but it’s Christmas Eve.]

The ruling was upheld in the Fourth Circuit, despite the fact that it seem to be fairly blatant viewpoint-based restriction of speech, or in other words, unconstitutional. To his credit, Snyder is not allowing the Democrats to bully him or illegally try to control his speech either, and has the resources to fight. The betting is that the Supreme Court will tell the Trademark Office to stop playing politics.

The Patent and Trademark Office also barred the registration of “The Slants,” the trademarked name of Simon Tam’s Asian-American band. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just held, in the case of In re Tam, by a 9-to-3 vote, that this exclusion of “disparaging” trademarks, and, by extension, the Redskins ban as well, violates the First Amendment.  This means that the Redskins case is likely to go to the Supreme Court if the government doesn’t agree to let people trademark whatever the want to, regardless of who or what it might “disparage.” Continue reading →

Trick Polls: Obnoxious, Unfair, and Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Agrabah

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit that specializes in asking Republicans questions specifically designed to allow the mainstream media to mock their ignorance, and smug progressives to puff their little pigeon chests up with pride, really hit the public relations jackpot with a recent survey indicating that 30% of Republican primary voters would support bombing Agrabah, which is where Aladdin hangs out in the Disney movie. In other words, it’s not a real place. (I know: all my Republican acquaintances are exclaiming, “Wait, you mean Aladdin isn’t real?) This gave a real chuckle to the left-wing websites and blogs, the  mainstream media and all those brilliant news anchors who don’t know what to say unless a teleprompter lays it out for them, and who believe people who look to them for enlightenment are smart.

Not taking this lying down, a conservative polling groups called WPA Research devised another deceptive poll that revealed that 44% of Democrats would support taking refugees from Agrabah.  So there.

Now conservatives can puff up their pigeon chests, I guess.

Message to pollsters: I know we’re talking about stupid and ignorant people here, but even they will eventually figure out that a certain percentage of poll questions aren’t honest, but are tricks designed to prove they are dumb, violent, stupid, greedy, bigoted, mean, or likely Trump supporters. The joke is on WPA and PPP: people trusted them, as they have traditionally trusted pollsters to be seeking useful opinion data, not proof of knee-jerk partisan idiocy. If a pollster asked about an individual, issue or nation,  those polled never dreamed that the question was setting them up to be scorned. Now both of these organizations have proclaimed that they can’t be trusted, that they aren’t neutral truth-seekers but adversaries with an agenda.

Good to know. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Washington Post’s “Ted Cruz’s Kids Are Monkeys” Cartoon Uproar

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

ted-cruz-monkey-cartoon

Here’s what you need to know: Ted Cruz launched a political ad  that features the Texas Republican reading parody Christmas fare to his two young daughters, Caroline and Catherine, stuff like “The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails.”  Washington Post political cartoonist Ann Telnaes reacted with the drawing above, titled “Ted Cruz uses his kids as political props.” The children are portrayed as monkeys. Telnaes clearly knew she was on thin ice, and accompanied the cartoon with a justification (now pulled: if anyone has the whole text, I’d like to see it) saying in part,

“But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game.”

Note: the daughters are 7 and 4.

Cruz cried foul in a tweet, and the news media and internet was beginning to tilt hard against the Post, when editor Fred Hiatt pulled the cartoon, writing,

“It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree.”

And here we are.

Observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Nazi Scientist

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Konrad Lorenz, 1903-1989 ,  was an acclaimed Austrian zoologist regarded as the founder of modern ethology, which is the study of animal behavior. His research  explained how behavioral patterns may be traced to through evolution,  and he made major contributions to the study of aggression and its roots. Lorenz shared a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviorists Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen.

It seems that documentation surfaced proving that Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938, however, and for that, Austria’s Salzburg University last week posthumously stripped him of his honorary doctorate.

Your Day Before The Night Before Christmas Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is…

Is this the right thing to do?

Continue reading →

Christmas Music Blues

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
Who are those guys?

Who are those guys?

At the rate things are going, I am certain that before long no pop vocal interpretations of traditional Christmas music will be easily accessible on the radio. This is a cultural loss—it’s a large body of beautiful and evocative music—and someone should have, one would think, the obligation of preventing it. But I have no idea who.

I realized this when I felt myself getting nostalgic and sad as I listened to a series of “Christmas classics.” For one thing, they all reminded me of my parents, whose absence beginning in 2011 permanently kicked my enjoyment of the season in the groin. For another, all the artists were dead. Bing: dead. Frank: dead. Andy Williams, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Burl Ives, Gene Autry, The Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Elvis, John Denver–dead. Long dead, in most cases. Christmas has become a serenade of dead artists. Except for the narrow range of country music stars for those who enjoy “O Holy Night” with a twang, living pop artists don’t sing these songs. OK, Mariah Carey and Michael Buble. Not many others. Sirius-AM was desperate to find living artists that it has been playing the Seth McFarland Christmas album. Seth can sing, but I’m sorry, but it’s hard to enjoy “Silent Night” while picturing “The Family Guy.”

Current pop stars are, understandably, looking for new Christmas hits that will be identified with them, and those have always been hard to come by. Bing Crosby made annual recordings of terrible entries in the Christmas song market—I just heard a station play a few of them. Gene Autry too: many of his efforts were bombs, though I rather like this weird one:

Continue reading →

“The Affair” Smears An American War Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments
The General and friend.

                             The General and friend.

“The Affair,” Showtime’s much lauded soap opera, wrapped up its season yesterday, without me. There are some things I won’t forgive, and sliming the legacy and reputation of long dead individuals of character and accomplishment is one of them.”The Affair” was guilty of that the previous week. It is dead to me.

The background: General Omar Bradley is increasingly accorded credit for planning D-Day, and thus is owed a large share of the world’s gratitude for winning World War II. He was not flamboyant like Patton or MacArthur, and had no political aspirations, so despite his remarkable life in service of the United States, Omar Bradley is an undeservedly obscure historical figure. He is, also, beyond any controversy, an American hero.

He also was an especially ethical one, as indicated by three of his better known quotes:

“It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.”

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

“Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him. Soldiers must have confidence in their leader.”

Why the writers of “The Affair” decided smear Bradley, I cannot fathom. Nonetheless, any viewers of the show that watched the penultimate episode and who didn’t know who Bradley was, and many who did, left it with the belief that Bradley, a who by all accounts was faithfully and lovingly married to the his first wife throughout the war and until her death, had an affair with actress Marlene Dietrich, who traveled with the U.S. Army for nearly two years at the end of the war. “The Affair’s” self-obsessed and perpetually horny protagonist, a successful novelist, told his therapist—and boy, does he need one–that his new book would be a historical novel about Omar Bradley. Then he said that he was tempted to skip the affair with Marlene Dietrich, but then that was the most interesting thing about Bradley to him. Continue reading →

Over 30% Of Republicans Apparently Have No Problem With America’s Representative To The World And The Role Model For Their Children Using Words Like “Schlonged” In Public

/ Jack Marshall / 157 Comments

Well, I do.

I have previously opined, confidently, that Donald Trump supporters, every single one of them, are stupid. This I have pointed out, is the only possible explanation for supporting an obvious narcissist who utters no substantive or serious policy ideas, believes rationalizations are legitimate arguments, is vulgar and insulting without shame or hesitation, and has the essential character of a pimp.

I was wrong.

They aren’t stupid.

They are very stupid.

An Act Of Kindness, Danny Kaye And Me : An Ethics Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Brian Childers

This isn’t a Christmas tale exactly, but it is a deeply personal one that will always make a big difference in how I make decisions in my life. It is episode that taught me, once and for all, that when you do the right thing, the amount of good that can come from it is unpredictable and sometimes unimaginable.

Maybe it will inspire you too.

In 2001, my friend Bob McElwaine handed me a script and a CD of a musical he had been working on about his long-time friends and clients, entertainer Danny Kaye and his wife, song writer Sylvia Fine. Bob was in his 70s, retired, a former Hollywood publicist and later an association executive who had taken up writing musicals with his childhood buddy, legendary movie score bassist Bob Bain (that’s Bain you hear playing the famous bass instrumental on the “Bonanza” theme, and the melody line in “The Munsters” intro too.)

McElwaine knew I was a long-time Danny Kaye admirer. He had been a wealth of information for me about Kaye when I was directing “Lady in the Dark,” the Broadway show that had made Danny a star in 1941, for the American Century Theater years before. One day, Bob asked me, as a favor, if I would agree to workshop the new piece, direct it, and see how it turned out in front of an audience.

I was not enthusiastic about the project, not at all. I had my ethics business as well as the theater to oversee; I had just finished directing a show, requiring me to be out of the house every weekday night and all day Saturday, and I thought the piece itself was too old-fashioned and formulaic to work. Mostly, however, I didn’t see how anyone could be a credible Danny Kaye, since Kaye was a unique performer—he wasn’t exactly a comedian, or a singer, or a dancer, yet  all of these and more—that has never had a close equivalent since. I was trying to find a way to turn Bob down nicely when I watched a performance of the show I had just gotten up and running. A young man named Brian Childers who was only in his second professional role played the romantic lead, and that night, for some reason, he handled a scene differently than I had ever seen him do it before—and for maybe three seconds, probably because Bob had just put the late performer’s image in my short term memory, reminded me of Danny Kaye.

After the performance I asked Brian if he would be interested in playing Kaye in this new musical, and he enthusiastically agreed, saying he was a huge Danny Kaye fan. (Later I learned that he barely knew who he was). Continue reading →

The Washington Post Surrenders To Web Hoaxes

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

oreo

The Washington Post’s two year old column dedicated to flagging web hoaxes is shutting down, because…well, you read the story and explain it to me, because I read the column twice, and I still don’t get it.

I think Caitlyn Dewey, whose beat this was, is complaining that there are too many hoaxes to track now, because there are now whole websites devoted to hoaxes (as Ethics Alarms has documented), that hoaxes are fed by confirmation bias (well, yes, everyone knew THAT in 2014) and partisan bloggers are sending out hoaxes as fear-mongering tactics. Dewey then mentions two terrorism-related hoaxes. In fact, every example she uses suggests that the increase in hoaxes comes from conservatives. It’s all because conservatives are so eager to believe untrue things, you see. She can’t keep up any more.

Which is funny, because it was Hillary Clinton who stated…

“We also need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”

There is no evidence whatsoever that ISIS is using videos of Trump. If a fake news site had a headline, “ISIS USES VIDEOS OF TRUMP FOR RECRUITMENT,” that would be an internet hoax, and though Hillary Clinton would apparently fall for it, Dewey claims what has suddenly made internet hoaxes uncoverable is all those gullible people who no longer trust “institutions,” as in “government.” You know who those people are.

Then there are Dewey’s colleagues, journalists, like the ones at CNN who broadcast that “Ethan Couch’s attorney convinced the judge that the teen suffered from “‘Afflienza,” which is factually untrue. If that were a headline, I’d call it a hoax. Continue reading →