Month: January 2023

“The Great Stupid” Lurches Toward PEAK Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

What happens when The Great Stupid reaches “Peak Stupid”?

Oh, it will be spectacular. People will over the U.S. of all ages and political affiliations will suddenly realize what they have been accepting and tolerating. They will realize that they have been doing to society, the culture and the nation the equivalent of shooting a nail bun directly into one’s skull because it seemed like a good idea at the time. They will be simultaneously humiliated, embarrassed, remorseful and angry.

And it’s coming my friends. It is coming because the purveyors of the Great Stupid will keep trying out more and more ridiculous tactics and stratagems to attain their desired Orwellian utopia until they reach the inevitable tipping point. Based on today’s developments, it is coming soon.

Guess what word Woke World has decided to ban as racist.

Come on, guess.

It’s field. As is “Field of Dreams,” “Lilies of the Field,” and “Flanders Field.” As in “take the field.” As in “What field are you in?” and “Let’s do some field research.”

Here is the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work proving that it is run by lunatics and can no longer be regarded as a place of serious instruction or rational thought:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“I think it would be [hypocritical] for [Speaker McCarthy] to remove, you know, the first African-born on the subcommittee on Africa on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where I’ve had the opportunity to not only represent my constituents but the voice of so many people who have never had a voice on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

—Rep. Omar (D-Minn), playing the race card, as usual.

I take no stand at this point regarding the tit-for-tat move of Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pull Omar from the the Foreign Affairs Committee, presumably because of her frequent anti-Semitic outbursts. The Democratic House had kicked Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene off the Budget and as well as the  Education and Labor Committees in February 2021 over her comments pushing conspiracy theories about Jews. McCarthy is simply applying the standards Nancy Pelosi established. (Both Greene and Omar are unethical Congresswomen who embarrass the institution as well as the districts that elected them.)

However, Omar’s claim that “historic” officials (translation: some combination of black, foreign-born, female, Muslim, gay or trans) should be held to different (translation: lower) standards of conduct than others is, while wholly predictable,  unethical by definition, as well as self-serving, discriminatory, and nauseating.

But that’s Rep. Omar.

And her party.

And the progressives who make up most of the membership of that party.

And the various tribal groups they cluster in.

The Discovery Of The Classified Documents (Including “Nuclear Secrets”) That Joe Biden Apparently Took And Kept As VP Would Be Hilarious If It Didn’t Make My Head Explode…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

(Let’s see if I can get WordPress to behave this time, unlike in the previous post...)

Double Standards Alert! Classified documents were found in a locked closet in an office used by Joe Biden at the Penn Biden Think Tank, formally known as Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania.

The fact that there is something akin to a “think tank” named after Joe Biden is itself hilarious, as it would be hard to imagine a public figure in US history whose intellectual abilities have been so frequently exposed as lacking over such a long career, even before he began slipping into dementia. This is like having an Orson Welles Fitness Institute. Baseball fans would find the Mario Mendoza Center for Batting Science similarly risible. The George Santos Integrity Academy. It’s another parlor game! I’d include Hillary Clinton endorsing #MeToo, but that’s real.

But let’s move on to the classified documents themselves. You know this is going to be reported as a “Republicans pounce!” story, but they should pounce. President Biden was recently asked on “Sixty Minutes” about the classified documents the FBI found in former President Trump’s home and he said he thought to himself, “How anyone could be that irresponsible?” In truth, a President has a much better defense to having classified documents in his possession after he leaves office than a Vice-President, because a President can declassify them. Here was a good pounce:

The stench of double standards pervades the entire Biden Presidency and the media’s coverage of it.  Meanwhile, it is fun to watch the mainstream media hustle to minimize the damage. In this case, it perfectly explicates the rueful Ethics Alarms category,  IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”)

Over at “Victory Girls,” Toni Williams was in rare form. She reacted to this report by NBC News…

…by writing,

“This was only a small number and we need to prop up Joe Biden and rules don’t apply to Democrats, they’re on our side. And the fact that we hid it until after the mid-terms means nothing, you smelly Walmart shopper.” That’s their story and they are sticking to it…You know what will happen, my fellow Deplorables. Abso-freaking-lutely nothing. Biden cooperated. It was a small number. It’s old news. Move on.

And you know she’s right.

Ethics Villains: Fairfax Virginia High Schools, And Why Isn’t The News Media Treating This As The Major Scandal It Is? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Let’s start with a memorable quote from that eloquent villain, Auric Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

This is enemy action against motivated and talented students, responsible and trusting parents, and core American values. It should be reported as such and responded to with the vigor and relentlessness the attack warrants, but the news media is burying the story, because they are enemies as well.

Happenstance: My fault. I reported this story as the last item in the Ethics Alarms Christmas Eve ethics outrage collection, here, pretty much guaranteeing that even fewer people would see it than usual. It should have been a full post. I wrote,

City-Journal reports that at Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax, Virginia, two administrators have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s students awarded them, most of them Asian. This denied those students the chance to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. The author believes that this was intentional, a part of “the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.”The school’s leadership is acting as if it was just an oversight—for at least three years. Read the article. [Pointer: Mark Metcalf]

Well, hey, that’s just one DEI-obsessed principal, and she’s apologized and maybe will get fired, so all is well, right? Wrong:

Coincidence? The Fairfax Times reports that while Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid claimed the principal at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology withheld National Merit awards from students in a “one-time human error,” Langley High School Principal Kim Greer sent an email to parents apologizing for doing the same thing:

Continue reading →

Oh, Fine…Now I have To Defend George Santos

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It isn’t as if there aren’t more than enough legitimate accusations one can make against Rep. George Santos, the phony, lying, none-too-bright Republican from  New York who somehow faked his way into Congress Nonetheless, the Republican-hating news media still has to manufacture absurd accusations against this jerk  to demonize the whole party, to wit: Based on the instant captured in the photo above, we were told…

  • “In a now-viral photo, Santos is shown with his fingers forming an OK gesture, a symbol that the Anti-Defamation League calls a sincere expression of white supremacy.”[Vanity Fair]
  • “Embattled Republican congressman George Santos faced criticism after he appeared to flash a white supremacist symbol while casting his vote on the House floor.” [Pink News]
  • “Incoming Rep. George Santos appeared to flash a widely known white supremacist hand sign on the floor of the U.S. House on Thursday evening, according to images captured by photojournalists.” [Newsday]
  • “Newly elected freshman Rep. George Santos (R-NY) makes White power gesture as he casts his vote for House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.” [Intellectualist]
  • “While raising his right hand to signal his vote in support of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for House Speaker on Thursday, Santos made an “OK” hand gesture with his left hand.It’s unclear why Santos made the gesture, but some right-wing trolls have increasingly used the “OK” symbol as a way to signal support for white supremacy…” [MSN]

And so on.  All completely unfair and contrived, as this video shows: Continue reading →

Capitol Riot Responsibility Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

On  December 12, the Senate unanimously passed a measure to remove authority for calling out the National Guard from politicians like Nancy Pelosi, handing the authority over to the Capitol Police. Naturally, this was virtually ignored by the news media, but the reason for the move was clear.

Despite dire predictions by federal authorities before January 6, 2021, the authorities responsible for  calling out the Guard, Speaker Pelosi  and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, were more concerned with partisan optics than security. Bowser had opposed President Trump regarding National Guard presence during the BLM riots in the past and wasn’t going to create a marshal law-like atmosphere on her watch.  in D.C.  She decided the Guard should be unarmed on the 6th and relegated to traffic control.

Good call there, Mayor.

Pelosi, meanwhile “was heavily involved in planning and decision-making before and during the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and micromanaged the Sergeant at Arms,” according to texts and other communications that were revealed after the rioting. While the report of the partisan and Trump-deranged House January 6 Star Chamber completely ignored Pelosi’s role in allowing the debacle to occur, the Pelosi team’s negligence was exposed in an investigative report by the House Republicans Pelosi removed from the “J6 Committee” so there would be no distraction from the mission, which was vilify Donald Trump ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections. The exiles were Jim Banks (R-IN), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Troy Nehls (R-TX). The final intelligence threat assessment issued three days before the riot warned of a violent scenario in which “Congress itself” could be attacked by armed Trump supporters, but the warning was buried at the end of a 15-page document and was not included in the introductory summary.  Then the the warning was omitted in three subsequent daily intelligence reports.

Shades of Pearl Harbor! Continue reading →

Nah, There No Progressive Social Media Platform Bias!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The British political commentary magazine “The Spectator” has published a nearly1400 word explanation for why the cover above was rejected for a Facebook advertisement (an “advert” in Brit-talk) as not complying with the platform’s policies, while these covers…

…were deemed acceptable.

Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading →

Cowardly And Unethical College Administrators…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The ethics of this controversy are easy. How could Hamline College administrators screw it up so badly? That’s easy too.

An adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University (in Minnesota, where strange things are always happening), Erika López Prater, knew that Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, so before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder, she alerted any Muslim students taking her class through her course syllabus that images the Prophet Muhammad would be shown and studied in the course. She directed students with any concerns to contact her. No student did.

Before the class in which paintings of Muhammad were about to be shown, she again alerted students in case anyone felt they needed to leave. No student left. But after Dr. López Prater showed a painting featuring the prophet, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Then Muslim students who were not in the course argued that the class was an attack on their religion. Guess what?

Hamline officials told Dr. López Prater that she was out. Emails to students and faculty pronounced the episode “Islamophobic.” Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email saying that respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Ethics, 1/8/23: Lots Of Next Shoes Drop! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 85 Comments

You learn something every day. Despite years of studying Clarence Darrow’s career, cases, life and courtroom oratory (and despite co-authoring “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow” which you can purchase for a pittance here), I only learned today that the great defense lawyer is credited with inventing the tactic of arguing for a lesser sentence because of what a guilty criminal had suffered in his childhood. Before Darrow’s defense of Nathan Leopold and Dickie Loeb in 1924, such an argument was unprecedented. It didn’t really work in that case, since the judge based his refusal to condemn the two teenage “thrill killers” on their youth alone, but the strategy caught on.

1. Thanks, “Federalist”! Saved me a post! I have considered writing ethics comments about the inconvenience caused by people who insist on backing their cars into parking spaces several times, most recently last week,and rejected the impulse as too trivial even for Ethics Alarms. Then “The Federalist” publishes this: “For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces.” It concludes,

“….the people backing into spaces are so selfish they haven’t even tried to imagine the levels upon levels of “just because you could doesn’t mean you should” that we decent citizens are dealing with every day on the mean streets of our local strip mall. If you’re still backing into spaces, just cut it out and pull straight into the space the way basic geometry demands.”

I heartily concur.

2. More on the six-year-old school shooter...Today’s Times article at least mentions the mystery of the child’s parents’ involvement, and reminds us that “Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded gun where it is accessible to children under the age of 14.” The article also examines school shootings generally and the usual gun availability concerns, none of which are very relevant to what is a freak incident. The fact that a first-grader somehow got control of a loaded gun and brought it to school reveals little about the strengths or weaknesses of gun policies or school security. It is irresponsible to base policy proposals on incidents that virtually never occur. “When will the shock of gunshots in school be enough to inspire the action necessary to prevent guns in schools and the shattering of lives it causes?” said reliable demagogue Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Laws won’t make dumb, irresponsible and reckless parents smart, responsible and careful. All you can do is hold them responsible for the damage they do, and then try to protect the children. Continue reading →