Month: January 2022

Oh, Please, Tell Me Again About How The New York Times Isn’t Manipulating The News To Save The Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Today’s right column, above the fold headline in the New York Times: Economy in 2021 Surged by 5.7%, Best In Decades. All that was missing was the exclamation point. “The economic lift was largely provided by vaccination efforts, cheap credit conditions put in place by the Federal Reserve and a fresh round of federal aid to households and businesses,” the story deceitfully “explained.” Note that these are all positive factors that the Biden Administration can take credit for, or at least try.

Is the American public that stupid? The economy “surged’ in percentage terms because it was starting from a point of unprecedented ruin, substantially put in motion by Democrat-led shutdowns of the schools and much of the economy. Emphasizing the percentage increase is a deliberate tactic to mislead the mathematically challenged. One could trumpet a drug that “increases cognitive ability by 300%” if one doesn’t mention that its test subjects were suffering from closed head injuries. Many, many paragraphs into the story, we are told that the “economy has recovered almost 19 million of the 22 million jobs lost near the peak of virus-induced suspensions in activity in 2020.” Oh. So the “surge” still hasn’t brought the economy back to what it was after almost four years of the Trump administration policies—which the Times never praised, only slammed.

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How The News Media Deliberately Escalates Racial Discord…A Smoking Gun [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

This morning, Headline News devoted almost ten minutes to this earth-shattering event: in a basketball game a week ago between Laguna Hills High School and Portola High School, a single student in the stands shouted racial insults at Makai Brown, a black player for Portola, as he was shooting free throws. The HLN hostess announced the video of the section where the asshole student could be heard with a warning that I would expect for a decapitation video, or a geek eating live kittens.

“It is very disturbing,” she said. Yes, this spectator shouted “Who let him out of his cage? He’s a monkey!” and “Where is his slave owner? Chain him up! Who let him off the chains?” The student should have been forcibly shut up, or ejected. Would “High School Faculty Neglects To Eject Misbehaving Student from Gymnasium” normally rate national headlines?

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It’s Come To This: A Culture War Battle Over Minnie Mouse

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Let me stipulate up front: this is a stupid controversy, but not that stupid. I don’t care about Minnie Mouse and never did, I don’t care what she, or it, wears, and I am certain that most of the conservatives now complaining over Minnie Mouse’s “new look”—which isn’t permanent, comes to us from France’s Disneyland, and would probably go unnoticed absent the Streisand Effect triggered by the complaints—care about Minnie either.

However, one of the ways that the extreme Left got such a dangerous foothold in this nation is through ingenious incrementalism…little, teeny-tiny moves to radicalize the culture and indoctrinate rising generations that sane people just shrugged off as not worth making a big deal about until it was too late. Or almost—we shall see.

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Now THAT’S Infrastructure! Of God And Bridges…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is one of those times someone is bound to say, “There are no coincidences!” Today, President Biden was scheduled to come to Pittsburgh to talk about infrastructure. God, apparently in an Old Testament mood, decided to collapse a bridge in Pittsburgh, sending a bus and several cars into a ravine. In a New Testament mood, he chose that relatively sparsely used bridge, the Fern Hollow Bridge in the area of South Braddock and Forbes avenues, and let it go before 7 a.m., when the traffic was light. But the point was made, or should have been. Whether Joe will get that point, whether the public will wake up to it, and whether the news media will try to paper it over, is too early to tell.

Biden’s (barely) bipartisan infrastructure bill this was passed November with a price tag of $1.2 trillion dollars, more than the GDP of Mexico. Nonetheless, that’s still less than a study I oversaw in the 1980s for the U.S. Chamber of Congress calculated was needed then to address our massive infrastructure rot. So one would think, wouldn’t one?, that the bill that finally was passed would at least direct all of its money to the infrastructure—you know, roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, pipelines, the power grid, waterways, railways, sewage systems, that kind of stuff. It would still be inadequate, but it would be a start. But much of the Democratic base is being deluded into thinking that infrastructure spending is really social spending, or should be. Thus MSNBC’s Joy Reid called the bill a “white guy employment act.”

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Ethics Respite, 1/27/2022: The “Boy Do I Hate Emergency Rooms!” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On the other hand, I love having a fire department half-a-block away…

I did finally work out that the spelling of February isn’t unethical, as I had long concluded. I thought the month’s name had been intentionally spelled in such a way to either guarantee that it would be mispronounced, or, as in my case, never spelled correctly on the first try. The Romans called it Februarius, from Februare, “to purify,” and februum , a means of purification or an instrument used to purify. Apparently there was a mid-month freak-out festival, Lupercalia, that was supposed to purify the rest of the year. For a while, around 1200 A.D., maybe because it was so hard to pronounce those two r’s so close together, the month was called Feverer or Feverell from the Old French Feverier. But the Latin made a comeback, damn it.

Having the month contain an extra day every four years, however, is unethical.

1. Legal, not unethical under the legal ethics rules, but still unethical, and also stupid….Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants his office to prosecute election law violations, but unfortunately,The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held that only local DAs can prosecute such offenses also under the Texas Constitution. It’s a pretty basic separation of powers issue. Paxton filed a motion to reconsider what was an adverse 8-1 ruling, and the motion is still pending. Paxton has also urged the public via conservative media outlets to contact the 8 members to pressure them to reverse their opinion. Many have done so by phone and email, with some threats included, of course. The Texas Justices are elected.

There is a rule that prohibits public comments having substantial potential to prejudice court proceedings, and the standard rule prohibiting ex parte communications directly or by third parties. Naturally, some Democratic-tilting law professors are telling the media that Paxton siccing the public on the court is a professional ethics violation. But it is not.

The tactic doesn’t speak well for Paxton, and is one more reason not to have elected judges. I also object to public figures miseducating the already ignorant public into thinking of judges as just another kind of legislator. (See the Comment of the Day.) However, the First Amendment is a complete defense, except for the threats, of course, if they are “true” threats.

There’s no law requiring free speech to be used responsibly.

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Comment Of The Day: “Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Michael West’s rueful Comment of the Day relating Justice Breyer’s eagerly awaited (by Democrats) retirement to the deterioration of the balance of powers intended by the Founders presents a useful perspective. My only cavil is his introduction.

I think it is unfair to assume that Breyer retired to ensure that a Democrat President would choose his successor. Maybe he did, but nothing Breyer has said in his years as a Justice would be consistent with that thesis. Breyer, unlike Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has never been overtly political, and has objected to accusations that his colleagues on the Court were driven by partisan agendas. If we take him at his word, it would be extremely out of character to quit so Joe Biden could apppoint a replacement based on an ideological check list filtered through the non-merit restrictions of race and gender.  Of course, all of this is really just a bad sign for the dignity of SCOTUS and the strength of the divided government. “The only ethical reason for any Justice to retire is because it’s time to retire,” Michael begins. Well, at 83, it’s always past time to retire. I think Justice Breyer has earned the benefit of the doubt.

Now here’s Michale West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement”:

***

The only ethical reason for any Justice to retire is because it’s time to retire. But we all know Breyer is making a strategic retirement to permit a Democrat president to appoint and a Democrat Senate to approve a Progressive to the bench. This is a clear indication of the intentional politicization of the Court – which is was never meant to be.

This is all because of the ever increasing ability of Executive Branch and now the Judicial Branch to basically become alternative legislatures to Congress which has largely surrendered most of it’s power since the technocratic growth of the bureaucracy from FDR’s time. Continue reading →

Emergency Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m sorry…this Open Forum is either a day early or a week late, but either way, I’m counting on readers to keep the ethics fires burning for a while as I deal with a family emergency. I’m hoping it’s better than it looks; in any event, it’s going to be complicated getting a post up for a yet-to-be-determined period.

Thanks for helping out.

Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Justice Stephen Breyer, at 83 the oldest member of the Supreme Court’s left wing, will retire from the Court at the end of the 2021-22 term.

Observations:

  • Good. Unlike Justices Scalia and Ginsberg, he is not waiting for the Grim Reaper to remove him from the job. 83 was pushing his luck as it was. This was the ethical and responsible thing to do.
  • Was Breyer pushed into retirement by Democrats, who want Biden to be able to appoint a 27 year-old socialist ideologue hostile to gun rights, free speech and any restrictions on abortion and affirmative action? It doesn’t matter. At worst, he’s doing the right and responsible thing for some unethical reasons. It’s still right and responsible.
  • Now we’ll see how ethical and responsible President Biden is. A choice that would make the most people happy would be to re-nominate Merrick Garland. He’s a lousy Attorney General; his record indicates that he’d be a rational progressive on SCOTUS, and it would right an undeniable wrong, though a legal one, in canceling Mitch McConnell’s boycott of his nomination six years ago.
  • I doubt the President will do that. He’s probably locked into nominating a black woman, whether or not there is one currently on the bench who is qualified or trustworthy, rather than the most qualified candidate. All of the (legitimate) objections to Clarence Thomas’s appointment by President Bush the First will apply, just from a different end of the ideological spectrum.

______________________

Pointer: JutGory

Baseball Hall Of Fame Ethics: This 2016 Post Just Became Ripe And Moot At The Same Time

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The sportswriters who decide who is admitted to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame voted in David Ortiz yesterday. The Red Sox and Boston icon (Carl Yastrzemski once said that while Ted Williams was the greatest Boston baseball player, Ortiz was the most important, and he was right) sailed into the Hall in his first year of eligibility, an honor few players have ever been accorded.

It was no surprise. In addition to having unquestionable statistical qualifications, “Big Papi” is also personally popular. That matters, a lot; the writers this year rejected Boston pitching ace Curt Schilling who also has impeccable Hall qualifications, because they don’t like him. Schilling is opinionated, combative, religious, and worst of all, politically conservative. Can’t have that. On the plus side, the writers also rejected steroid cheats Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, as well as almost certain steroid cheats Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Gary Sheffield.

In 2016, anticipating and dreading yesterday’s news, I wrote a post titled, “The Wrenching Problem Of David Ortiz, The Human Slippery Slope.”

Here it is again.

Ethics conflicts force us to choose when multiple ethical principles and values point to diametrically opposed resolutions.  Often, a solution can be found where the unethical aspects of the resolution can be mitigated, but not this one. It is a tale of an ethics conflict without a satisfactory resolution.

I didn’t want to write this post. I considered waiting five years to write it, when the issue will be unavoidable and a decision mandatory. Today, however, is the day on which all of Boston, New England, and most of baseball will be honoring Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz, who will be playing his finale regular season game after a 20 years career.  His 2016 season is quite possibly the best year any professional baseball player has had as his final one; it is definitely the best season any batter has had at the age of 40 or more. Ortiz is an icon and a hero in Boston, for good reason. Ortiz was instrumental in breaking his team’s infamous 86-year long “curse” that saw it come close to winning the World Series again and again, only to fail in various dramatic or humiliating ways. He was a leader and an offensive centerpiece of three World Champion teams in 2004, 2007, and 2013. Most notably, his record as a clutch hitter, both in the regular season and the post season is unmatched. You can bring yourself up to speed on Ortiz’s career and his importance to the Red Sox, which means his importance to the city and its culture, for nowhere in America takes baseball as seriously as Beantown, here.

That’s only half the story for Ortiz. Much of his impact on the team, the town and the game has come from his remarkable personality, a unique mixture of intensity, charm, intelligence, generosity, pride and charisma. After the 2013 terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon, which shook the city as much as any event since the Boston Massacre, Ortiz made himself the symbol of Boston’s anger and defiance with an emotional speech at Fenway Park. Then he put an exclamation point on his defiance by leading the Red Sox, a last place team the year before, to another World Series title. Continue reading →

Casting Ethics Incoherence

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It will be interesting to see if the movie and theater industries, both reeling from declining audiences for management, artistic, financial and cultural reasons, will continue to ride the runaway political correctness train off the metaphorical bridge and into the river. “Go woke, get broke” is not just a partisan taunt: there is a lot of evidence that it is very frequently true.

I had started a new file just this week on the now totally incoherent casting “rules” being inflicted on productions and audiences in the U.S., determined to post on them when the file was sufficiently thick. First into the fresh file—the older ones were stuffed and substantially covered in prior EA commentray–was this post, a paean to the recently deceased comic Louis Anderson for his portrayal of Christine Baskets, “the doting but demanding mother of Zach Galifianakis’s depressive clown in the brilliant, bone-dry comedy “Baskets,” which ran on FX from 2016-19.”

Huh? We have been told that actresses have been robbed of the opportunity to play rich and serious roles in films and television. We have watched iconic characters undergo gender change so women could have more opportunities. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson was forced to withdraw from the lead role in “Rub & Tug,” about a transsexual male because she wasn’t a transsexual male. As a result, the movie never got made. But the Times, which along with most of the media has cheered on these bonkers and restrictive new “rules” (Maybe my favorite was rule the that Dwayne Johnson, a Samoan-Black Nova Scotian- American, wasn’t black enough to play the fictional “steel-driving” John Henry), celebrates a white, middle-aged comedian’s portrayal of a mother.

Explain, please. No, never mind: I get it: this is Calvinball, run by the corrupt and manipulative tribes and groups who benefit from it.

Next came Peter Dinklage, apparently feeling his oats now that his star turn on “Game of Thrones” has made him the entertainment industry’s biggest “little person.” Dinklage, who is 4’5″, is preparing to play Cyrano in a musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. I love that casting idea; that’s non-traditional casting at its best, assuming Dinklage can sing. Substituting a height disadvantage for Cyrano’s freakish nose should work wonderfully. However, having found that he can now get performing jobs that were once closed to him because of his height, he has decided to object to Disney making an un-animated version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” complaining on a podcast,

They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?

What are you talking about, man? They didn’t live in a cave: has Dinklage even seen the original movie? They lived in a nice cottage in the forest, and worked in a mine. And what’s “progressive” about casting a Latino actress as “Snow White” when you are trying to evoke the original film, and wouldn’t dare cast a white actress to play “Snow Brown”? Disney, which has become so “woke” that it is ridiculous, instantly groveled to Dinklage’s ignorant complaint, saying, incomprehensibly,

To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period.

That’s “Huh?” #2. Is it a “stereotype” for dwarfs to be small, like Dinklage? Is it the term “dwarf” that he’s bitching about? The story is hundreds of years old: is Disney supposed to call it “Snow White and the Seven Little People”? It already has a movie in the vault called “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” but those little people are leprechauns. In fact, at last report, Dinklage is going to star in the American comedy “O Lucky Day” playing a con-man who pretends to be a leprechaun. I assume he’ll be saying things like “Begosh and begorrah!” and “I see ye’ve come to steal me gold! Catch me if you can!” No stereotypes there!

Or will Disney really cave, and call the thing “Snow White and the Seven Variably-Sized Miners”?

Maybe the problem is that the characters in the original film had names like Dopey, Sleepy, and Grumpy and personalities to match. I’m sure the “dwarfism community’ wants them renamed Empathy, Smarty, Healthy, Lively, Friendly, Bravely and Doc, with at least three female dwarfs, two dwarfs of color, a transsexual dwarf, and one with hooks or diverticulitis or something. Sounds terrific: another success like “West Side Story.

Today came the trigger for the post: a review of the new Off-Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” generally regarded as America’s greatest playwright’s greatest play. (I vote “The Iceman Cometh” myself). I won’t get into the issue of the “reimagined” version of the four-act drama being cut to less than two, except to say that such a production is no more O’Neill than the Cliff Notes “Moby-Dick” is Melville. However, this is a family drama; indeed an autobiographical family drama, indeed THE autobiographical family drama of the American stage repertoire. There’s the “family” above.

The two white actors, representing O’Neill’s parents, have two black sons, and the Times reviewer thinks this is just swell, it’s “colorblind casting.” Yet he would not—trust me on this—celebrate colorblind casting in Lorraine Hansberry’s black family drama “Raisin in the Sun,” which would 1) be absurd and 2) would steal acting jobs from black actors. Colorblind casting is destructive in dramas that are about the dynamics of a family, because the audience cannot suspend its disbelief, even if critics with an agenda pretend they can.

I suppose one defense for this production would be that since it’s not even half of what O’Neill wrote and littered with such distractions as pandemic face masks, it might as well pander to “Inclusivity and Diversity.” (Hey! Those could be dwarf names!)

OK. I think I’ll wait for the real thing before I shell out any of my increasingly hard earned cash, though.