Month: October 2023

The Great Stupid, Halloween Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Trick-or-treaters over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia can be charged with a misdemeanor. Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach nearby bar kids over 12 from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. An ordinance in Belleville, Illinois, slaps insufficiently immature door bell-ringers with a $1,000 fine.

Morons. The same communities don’t punish juvenile adults who have spoiled the kids holiday by expropriating it. The theory these silly places have adopted is, we are told, that they are trying to reduce teenage crime. I believe there are already laws against teenage crime. Most of the same elected officials who are pushing these laws also wanted to force teens to wear masks not too long ago.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The North American Grappling Association (And All The Sports Organizations Like It)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

After several female martial artists withdrew from competitions in fear of being injured by much stronger transgender fighters, The North American Grappling Association (NAGA) has overhauled its rules to prevent such unfair and dangerous contests.

It was the right thing to do, you say? Yeah, it was the right thing to do many months ago. What were they waiting for? This is a sport in which physical strength is obviously a major factor, and the advantage of going through puberty as a male is obviously going to be a factor. Natural-born female competitors shouldn’t have ever been placed in the position of having to choose between dropping out and risking getting crushed by recently-minted female with testosterone aided skeletal structure and muscles.

NAGA isn’t an Ethics Dunce because it decided to protect the integrity of the sport and the safety of its female fighters, it’s an Ethics Dunce because it was too cowardly, negligent, irresponsible and incompetent to do it the second the possibility raised its hairy head, stubbly head that a converted male might enter their competitions under their rules. NAGA didn’t take action because they wished and hoped that they could duck the issue without LGBTQ+ activists and social media mobs coming after them. Maybe, these despicable weenies thought, everyone would get along. Maybe women with their original lady parts wouldn’t object.

Continue reading →

Never Mind “Are American Students Prepared for College?”…Are They Prepared For Life?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well, no.

And framing the problem as one of college preparedness doesn’t help.

Dr. Steven Mintz, Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, (aka”The Ethics Sage”,””) posted a depressing essay about the decline of US ACT scores on his blog. He begins, “By now you’ve probably heard that ACT test scores for the class of 2023 were the worst in at least 32 years.” Actually I hadn’t heard, but it’s not surprising: the U.S. education system, as I’m sick of writing and you must be sick of reading, has rotted through. That chart above is one of several alarming graphics the professor’s article features, supposedly listing the top mentioned goals “when I grow up” for Chinese, British and U.S. students.

Unlike the Sage, I don’t think wanting to be an astronaut is a lot more realistic or admirable than wanting to be a “YouTuber”—in fact, I think the chart shows that Chinese students have been pretty much sucked into the same cultural muck that ours have. “When I was a lad,” kids wanted to be lawyers, doctors, and President of the United States. Twenty years ago, my son wanted to be exactly what he is today, an auto mechanic. Today’s culture doesn’t encourage or respect learning, knowledge, or quality thinking. The emphasis is on empty credentials that are believed to lead to fame, wealth and power, and among those credentials are degrees, which Mintz, as an old school academic, naively reveres as the equivalent of education, intellectual enrichment, and broadening perspectives. For most graduates, they haven’t signified those for a long, long time.

Continue reading →

The Unmasking Continues: So A Big Chunk Of The American Left Hates Christians AND Jews Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.

This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)

After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall. 

Silly me: I thought this Babylon Bee story was satire.

Continue reading →

My Favorite Poem: An Ethics Tale, A Romance, And A Ghost Story…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Happy Halloween, from Ethics Alarms!

***

The Highwayman

By Alfred Noyes

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

Continue reading →

Disney’s Sunk Costs Fiasco, And Introducing “The Nelson”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Disney, which has completely lost its way as a cultural icon, story-teller, entertainment source and exemplar, recently announced that it will be delaying its release of the live-action “Snow White” for at least a year after terrible publicity and a big-mouthed star made its $300,000,000 plus investment look shaky at best. Initially, the thinking was that the studio, recently the victim of one high-budget bomb after another, was just hoping to let all the controversy fade away, but no. The plan, it turns out, is to spend as much as another 100 million dollars to add CGI dwarfs, modeled on the animated originals, to the film and to remove whatever the hell these were…

…which was the DEI-driven, uber-woke Disney replacement for the iconic little fellas after a single short actor had complained that keeping that feature of the classic fairy tale would be uncool. The company really made an artistic decision this way. It really did. Morons. Walt would have rolled in his grave if he weren’t frozen stiff.

Continue reading →

Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Updates: The Lewiston Shooting And “Arghh! Biden Has A Primary Challenger!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

bias

The fact that so many loyal Democrats and smug progressives will still look you in the eye and say that mainstream media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory speaks eloquently of the corruption of American politics, individual integrity and democracy. Two depressing examples:

1. The missing mass shootings.

Kevin Downey reviews the large number of mass shootings since the Lewiston massacre, and points out that even though one would assume that a) they are all newsworthy and b) that the anti-gun journalism establishment would want such tragedies to be known, only the Maine shooting ticked off the right boxes to advance the agreed-upon MSM narrative without undermining some part of it. In addition to the high body count, the Lewiston massacre featured a white male shooter using a semi-automatic weapon (that they could call “an assault weapon”). And he apparently liked some conservative social media posts, meaning that the shooting was really Donald Trump’s fault.

Maine authorities were also warned about Robert R. Card II in plenty of time to stop him if they had followed established policies but didn’t. Oh, never mind: as with the Uvalde shooting and others, it’s the guns, the victims and the shooter that matter, not the fact that existing laws and competent law enforcement should have been sufficient to prevent the disaster.

Since the Lewiston shooting (October 25) there were ten more mass shootings, leaving 14 dead and 65 wounded. Two took place in Chicago (of course) and left 19 people shot.In one shooting involving a handgun, 15 victims were hit by gunfire. That there weren’t more deaths is moral luck. The mostly ignored shootings involved shooters “of color,” drug gatherings, parties substantially attended by non-whites, and weapons that couldn’t plausibly be called “weapons of war.”

Downey also cited the amusing idiocy of, again, Joy Behar on “The View,” produced by ABC News, showing abject gun ignorance ( I missed it–sock drawer…). She said (and no one on the set had the wit, integrity or knowledge to contradict her),”If you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it because you basically demolish the animal.” She “doesn’t know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka,” writes Downey. That’s fair.

Continue reading →

Insulting Chutzpah Of The Year: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Donald Trump may win the Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce of the Year title (he has several entries in the field, and the year is young) as well as the Unethical Quote of the Year distinction (ditto). He has already won Asshole of the Year in record time. But with this one, he has forged a new category entirely.

During a rally over the weekend, following Mike Pence’s inevitable withdrawal from the Presidential race he never should have entered, Trump said, “People are leaving now and they’re all endorsing me. I don’t know about Mike Pence. He should endorse me. You know why? Because I had a great, successful Presidency and he was the Vice President. But people in politics can be very disloyal. ”

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces, Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Division: Any American Jew Who Reflexively Supports Today’s Progressives And Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I shouldn’t have to expound on this, as the news and rhetoric from college campuses, academia, Black Lives Matter and “The Squad” ought to make the case. I’ll just note this, among many equally persuasive examples:

York City Mayor Eric Adams has appointed as the chair and executive director of the city’s Commission on Racial Equity Linda Tigani, previously acting chief equity and strategy officer for the city’s Health Department.  Tigani has posted pro-Hamas propaganda on social media, including the slogan “From the river to the sea,” which is explicitly anti-Semitic, a call for the elimination of Israel.

Nice. But she is hardly an anomaly. “Never again!” sounds hollow when Jews willingly ally themselves with those who seek their destruction.

Ethics Hero: Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The United Nations General Assembly voted on a non-binding resolution calling for an immediate “humanitarian truce” in Gaza. 120 countries voted for the measure, with 45 abstaining. Only14 nations voted against it: Israel, the US, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga. Eight EU members supported the cease-fire, including Belgium, Ireland, France, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain.

The vote was not surprising, but disgraceful nonetheless. One might think that Belgium, France, Luxembourg, which suffered so at the hands of the Nazis, might have a greater appreciation for the need to take a strong stand against evil-doers, but no. The UK, disgustingly, abstained, but anti-Semitism is popular there.

Of course, a cease fire or truce simply means that Hamas and Iran advance the ball a little further up the field, with a touchdown meaning the eradication of Israel. Those 120 countries know it, too, or should, especially since the resolution didn’t even bother to condemn the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, or to call for the release of the 230 hostages the Hamas took captive on that day.

“One must not stand silent in the face of a second Holocaust,” the Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová said, calling on her country to withdraw from the United Nations in protest. “The Holocaust is back, and we must not be silent again.”

Continue reading →