Month: October 2023

Oregon Again Proves You Always Hurt The One You Love…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

…at least you do if wokeness has eaten your brains and you have the common sense of a shallot. This is just tragic, nauseating news. (Spike Jone’s rendition of the 40’s hit, in contrast still makes me laugh, and that’s why I need to hear it right now…)

The Oregon Board of Education decided unanimously—unanimously!—that high school students won’t need to demonstrate basic skills in reading, writing or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029. The state instituted the elimination of the basic graduation requirements in 2020. The pandemic, you know. It justified wrecking everything, and the more infected with the Great Stupid a state is, the worse its carnage.

Many Oregonians submitted public comments insisting the standards should be reinstated, arguing that pausing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. 1) Gee, ya think??? 2) NONONONONO. The reason for an education is not “the value of a diploma,” but the value of being educated.

ARRGGH. The delusion that the credential is what matters and not what the credential should signify is how we end up with policies like this.

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(Pssst! Democrats! Grandstanding And Seeking The Approval Of Dummies Isn’t Governing…Or Ethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This is bad even in the rotten “Jeopardy!”category of “Bills that can’t possibly be passed and that will probably be over-turned as unconstitutional anyway.”

A witch’s brew of some of the most unethical and incompetent members of the U.S. Senate ( Senator Cory “I am Spatracus” Booker, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and it was co-sponsored by Sensator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), easily the dumbest member of the Senate, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have entered a court-packing bill allowing the President to appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years, with that justice hearing every case for 18 years before the law would limit his or her authority to only hearing a “small number of constitutionally required cases,” a smaller subset under the court’s “original jurisdiction,” such as disputes between states or with foreign officials.whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The Hill explains the alleged reasons for the proposed law as “ongoing concerns over court ethics and its increasingly conservative makeup.” The ethics issue wouldn’t be addressed by the law at all, and “its increasingly conservative makeup” is at once over-stated and not a valid justification for weakening the Court. Head dolt Booker made this inadvertently clear in his statement, as Democrats want to hamstring this Court because they don’t like its decisions:

“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process. This crisis has eroded faith and confidence in our nation’s highest court. Fundamental reform is necessary to address this crisis and restore trust in the institution.”

(Which party politicized the confirmation process beyond repair, Sparty? Which party has pursued the tactic of dredging up dubious accusers to smear nominees with unproven allegations?)

Whitehouse—boy, this guy is awful—added,

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Next, SAG-AFTRA Will Tell Its Members To Paint Themselves Blue And Wear Ducks On Their Heads…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I would quit any union that started behaving in the fascist manner of The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

The labor union representing approximately 160,000 media professionals worldwide is currently on strike, and as labor unions seem inclined to do, is making nutsy-cuckoo demands of its members. They have been assimilated, after all, and resistance is futile.

Yes, as that graphic from the unions shows, members have been told that they are doing a bad, anti-labor thing by dressing up as characters from “struck content,” meaning any movie or TV show, recent or ancient. That means they can’t be King Kong, Dracula (but a generic vampire is OK), Abe Lincoln, or Barbie, or else.

Morons. Worse than that, autocratic morons abusing their power.

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Ethics Quiz: Remember The Ex-Bank Robber Law Professor?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is weird.

So…there I was last night, teaching an evening CLE legal ethics seminar centering on the career and lawyering of Clarence Darrow (I co-edited a book on this, remember, and wrote a one-man Darrow show for actor Paul Morella, who’s been performing it around the country for 20 years), and discussing the importance of character in the practice of law. In one segment, I asked the class to vote on whether various applicants for bar membership were “fit,” all of whom, like disgraced journalist Stephen Glass, I have discussed here. One of those unusual lawyers in my poll was Shon Hopwood, who served more than a decade in federal prison for bank robbery, became a “jailhouse lawyer,” went to law school after his release, passed the D.C. bar exam, was admitted to practice, and became a professor at my old alma mater, Georgetown Law Center.

I wrote a post about Hopwood in 2017, an Ethics Quiz in fact, meaning that he now has the distinction of being the only person to be the subject of an Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz twice. Though the question was, “Should a convicted bank robber be teaching law students?,” I was unusually adamant in my position: “Hell no.” I wrote in part,

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

Go into the light! Talk about ethics!

Which reminds me, somewhat related to this post: why in the world did Hollywood re-make “Poltergeist”? After years of avoiding the bad copy starring Sam Rockwell, I finally saw the thing, and it was even worse than I had heard. With the exception of Sam, the cast was inferior, the special effects weren’t so much better that they justified a new version, and the movie lacked any humor or quirkiness, which were the major reasons the first “Poltergeist” was fun despite being completely off-the-charts absurd. Why change the little girl’s name from Carol Ann to “Madison”? Who thought replacing the odd Little Person female psychic (Zelda Rubinstein, above) with a male actor reminiscent of an aging Richard Harris would be an upgrade?

Why not come up with an original idea?

Finally, The Evidence That Proves “Shoeless Joe” Wasn’t Just An Innocent Dupe (And That Hollywood Has Been Glorifying A Creep)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Don’t you love it when new evidence is discovered that casts new light old historical controversies, or better yet, show that the popular version of history is dead wrong?

A long-buried trial transcript that has been withheld from public consumption for almost a century has finally been published. The case was Joe Jackson v. Chicago American League Baseball Club, a two week trial held in Milwaukee in early 1924. “Joe Jackson, Plaintiff, vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club, Defendant—Never-Before-Seen Trial Transcript” thoroughly disproves the popular image of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the greatest player among the eight Chicago White Sox players who were banned from the game for life after accepting money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series.

According to “Field of Dreams” (which also has the .400 batting left-handed hitter hitting right-handed) Joe is wise, passionate, and dedicated to the game. “Eight Men Out” the 1988 film about the scandal, based on author Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book, shows Jackson as an illiterate scapegoat who was not involved in the planning of the scheme and who only agreed to participate after the fix was in, The movie shows a conflicted Jackson telling “Black Sox” manager Kid Gleason that he does not want to play in the first game of the Series. Gleason orders Joe onto the field.

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When Is The Best Apology The Worst Apology?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

One of the few benefits of the Hamas premeditated murder strike on Israeli civilians and Israel’s perfect response to it (‘OK, enough. You’re toast.’) is that it simultaneously ripped the masks off the corruption and the ethical vacuums in our two most ideologically compromised professions, journalism and education. Of course, the former will do its utmost to avoid reporting on the latter, but who knows? Maybe the truth will finally permeate the walnut shell-sheathed brains of the gullible and apathetic public.

Nah. What am I thinking?

Several professors have announced, often in truly disgusting terms, their belief that the Hamas terrorist attack was justified, and that it is “murder” for Israel to respond with deadly force. One poisoned school, CUNY, apparently has a faculty stuffed with such anti-Semitic fools: here’s a letter signed by over 80 professors and lecturers, including the celebrity ethics dunce Marc Lamont Hill, asserting the whole panoply of anti-Israel talking points. Any parent who allows their children to be indoctrinated at a college that would employ such intellectually dishonest activists as these as teachers is incompetent and irresponsible.

But I digress. Mika Tosca, an associate professor with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, went way, way beyond CUNY’s credentialed leftists in a rant on Instagram:

Yikes. Israelis are pigs, savages, and shit, disgusting and grotesque, and should rot in hell. How do you really feel, professor? Apparently, based on her subsequent post on the matter, she really feels completely differently:

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Enemy Of The People: “Journalists” Promote A Hamas Propaganda Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Breaking! Yet this was entirely fake news..and ABC wasn’t the only major news organization reporting it as fact.

Before we go into that, however, here’s one more disgusting tidbit related to the fake news, widely disseminated by our incompetent news media, that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza killing 500 Palestinians. Long after it had been decisively proven that a) Israel had absolutely nothing to with any such bombing, 2) no 500 people were killed and 2) the rocket that landed outside the hospital in Gaza was a misfire by Hamas itself, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of the “Squad” told a pro-Hamas rally outside the Capitol today that Israel bombed the hospital. She even broke down in tears over the fictional tragedy. When will the Democratic Party take punitive action against Tlaib for her pro-terrorist conduct as a virtual agent of Hamas? If it doesn’t (and it won’t) when will voters take the responsible course?

Video evidence showed that a rocket was fired from Gaza, exploded mid-air, and then fell down onto the hospital grounds, but Hamas reported the fake story anyway. By early today, more proof had turned up, notably an intercepted conversation between jihadists admitting that a rocket had misfired near the hospital and caused the damage. Video showed no craters, and no massive damage. The hospital itself was not hit because the rocket fell into the parking lot. What damage there was—some burning cars— appears to have been from by burning rocket fuel. The report that 500 people were killed was a fabrication. There were some deaths in the parking lot.

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Cartoon Ethics Quiz: Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The British newspaper The Guardian fired its long-time (over 40 years) cartoonist Steve Bell after he submitted what is being called an anti-Semitic political cartoon (above).

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does that cartoon justify termination?

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Comment Of The Day (2) : “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Now comes the second of three Comments of the Day on the screaming inhabitant of a “gayborhood” and what her outburst means. (We now know this is not a 2023 episode, but that is irrelevant to the issues at hand.) True to his quixotic mission, Extradimensional Cephalopod weighed in with a formula to deal with such people civilly and effectively. I can picture him (it?) trying these methods out on adversaries like Robespierre, Joe McCarthy, Ted Kaczynski and Abie Hoffman: I’d pay to see it. Nonetheless, EC’s methods are worth considering, as EC’s prescriptions always are. This comment launched a substantial thread with much more commentary from “The Squid”: I highly recommend checking them out at the link.

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

***

As it happens, I do have some tools that can help with a situation like this. For starters, both of these people are foolish, but probably not as cripplingly so as it may seem from this incident.

Relevant concepts:

Habits:
Street preacher believes gender/sexual/romantic nonconforming people are hurting themselves.
Person in the neighborhood is stressed when someone shows up in their neighborhood and tells people they need to conform, and thinks others will feel the same way.

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