Month: November 2023

The Worst President Ever? Part 4.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Surprise! You thought I had forgotten, didn’t you? It has been a long time, almost a year, since the last installment of this series, inspired by President Joe Biden’s spectacularly awful, divisive, incompetent and destructive first two years. Now it’s approaching three, and Biden looks worse than ever. I admit to being paralyzed after considering Woodrow Wilson in Part 3. It is hard to imagine a President being much worse than Wilson, which is remarkable, considering how long Democratic historians maintained the myth that he was one of our greatest chief executives. This fills me with hope that eventually history’s verdict on Barack Obama will align itself with objective reality, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Since May on 2022, when I began this inquiry, the performance of President Biden has only worsened. Nonetheless, he still has more than a year to go, and that’s assuming that he does not get re-elected to a second term. To be fair, I should have divided this competition into two divisions, one for single term Presidents (or less), and the other for those who served more than one term. After all, Woodrow Wilson, the current head of the leaderboard, couldn’t possibly have done as much damage if he hadn’t been re-elected in 1916 with the now mordantly ironic slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” I must admit, however, Biden has done a spectacular amount of harm in less than three years. It’s impressive.

Following Wilson came a President now routinely ranked as one of the worst, Warren G. Harding, #29 (1921-1923), and he didn’t make it through even three years, dying suddenly of cardiac arrest at the youthful age (by today’s Presidential standards) of 57. I began my lifetime fascination with the Presidency reading that Harding was tied with Buchanan and Johnson for the bottom of the barrel. The record just doesn’t support that assessment. While Harding was alive, he enjoyed more popularity than all but a few Presidents while in the White House. His low ranking is attributable to first, the eruption of several scandals, notably the Teapot Dome scandal, in his cabinet after his death, and second, the sordid accounts for Harding’s remarkable sexual profligacy and adultery. While no historian has asserted convincingly that Harding was himself corrupt or complicit in the scandals, he did appoint the crooks, and was accountable. Like Donald Trump, he appointed many cronies and allies who lacked the character and qualifications for public service. There was plenty of smoke that a more attentive POTUS would have sniffed out. As for the sexual misconduct, presumably post-Harding revelations about Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy should place this in proper perspective. As several commentators have noted in recent decades of Harding historical rehabilitation, many of his accomplishments are impressive.

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The Rest Of The Story: The Mother Of That Six-Year-Old Who Shot His Teacher Is In Prison. GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.

Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.

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Fairfax County Public Schools Join The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck In Damning Fashion

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Fairfax County, just a short trip from my home in Alexandria, Virginia, is supposed to be one of the elite public school systems in America. Consider that, as you ponder this story.

Above is a photo taken of two Fairfax High School students during a meeting of the county’s Langley High School Muslim Students Association, in which they hold up a crude drawing in which the stars on the American flag are replaced with swastikas, and the message “Free Palestine!” is written in between the squiggly stripes. This took place on school property, in a sanctioned extra-curricular activity. [Supplementary questions I’d like to see answered: 1) Why are there religion-segregated activities in a high school? Isn’t allowing that inherently divisive? 2) Where is the faculty advisor?] An Asian American student leaked the photo to the public on social media, thus allowing the community to see what a bang-up job Langley was doing educating its young charges. The inflammatory image inspired pro-Palestine ( that is, pro-Hamas) students to stage a “walkout” on November 10, as students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Rep. Tlaib’s lie to the contrary, that slogan is a call for Israel to be wiped off the map.

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How DEI Is Systemic Racism: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology essentially addresses “systemic racism” by enforcing and advocating systemic racism. It would be difficult to envision a scenario that better illustrates this than the scandal now being revealed at the University of Washington, where the Department of Psychology hired a black candidate for a professor position despite the hiring committee’s assessment that an Asian applicant and a white one had superior qualifications, with the white candidate rated the strongest of the group.

The decision violated a university policy barring discrimination on the basis of race and sex, as well as the law banning affirmative action practices—that is, racial discrimination for “good” reasons— in the state of Washington. An investigation was launched after a whistleblower complained about the process, and the resulting report by the university’s Complaint Investigation & Resolution Office found that the psychology department distorted its hiring process to give the black applicant an assistant professor’s position titled “Diversity in Development,” though it had ranked a white academic first out of 84 applicants.

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Everyday Ethics Dilemmas: The Abandoned Tools

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was walking Spuds down a street in our neighborhood when I noticed a group of tools, five or six, lying in the grass on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. They looked new: I’d guess it was about 50 dollars worth, maybe 75. There was no automobile in front of the house, though that didn’t necessarily mean no one was home.

What’s a good neighbor to do?

These were nice tools, and kids are walking around the neighborhood constantly: maybe no one would take the tools, but maybe someone would. There’s a useful but dishonest rationalization in such circumstances: they’re abandoned! I thought about picking them up and carrying them up to the front door. I considered picking up the tools, carrying them home with Spuds, and driving by later to see if the owners were home. I was tempted to just toss them from the strip to the lawn, where nobody could argue that the strip between the road and the sidewalk is public territory.

If I had not been struggling to keep my exuberant dog under control when the cooler weather makes him especially rambunctious, my calculations might have been different. In retrospect, I see that this was a Golden Rule test: what would I want someone to do if it were my tools being left behind and left to their own resources?

At the time, however, with promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, I decided to leave the tools where they were. I didn’t feel an obligation to do anything because there isn’t one (and also a useful rationalization that I need to add to the list: “This isn’t my problem”) , but clearly the more ethical course would have been to protect my neighbor’s property.

Baseball Tacitly Admits That Its Pulling The All-Star Game From Atlanta In 2021 Was Despicable Groveling To Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh no, ya don’t…Major League Baseball shouldn’t get off this easy, and neither should the major villains in this debacle that Ethics Alarms flagged from the very start (along with others): Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, good election denier Stacy Abrams (when Democrats reject election results, it’s OK), and the President.

Major League Baseball announced that it has awarded the 2025 All-Star Game to Atlanta, or as one conservative wag put it, “finally decreed that Georgia is no longer racist.” You will recall that the sport had removed the 2021 game from the city after Abrams lobbied the sport to do so on the grounds that Georgia’s newly passed voter integrity law disenfranchised black voters. This was done without anyone in the Commissioner’s office bothering to read the supposedly racist law, which we know because Manfred moved the game to Denver, and Colorado has a law essentially identical to Atlanta’s. Joe Biden encouraged the MLB boycott too— he hadn’t bothered to read the law, either, or he wouldn’t have said it was “Jim Crow on steroids.”

The best part, however, was when Abrams, having pushed for the move, calling Manfred to insist on it, learned that most of the small businesses and Atlanta residents who would suffer because of the boycott (Atlanta lost an estimated $100 million in All-Star Game-related business revenue), claimed that she opposed MLB taking the game away (Biden’s puppeteers also denied that he had said what he said), double-talking this deceitful word salad:

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Eye Black Is Not Blackface. Duh.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

[It turns out that Curmie and I were writing about the same issue more or less simultaneously. Shortly after I posted “The Great Stupid: Child Abuse Edition,” Curmie sent me this installment of his  periodic column, expressing concern that it was redundant. It’s not, and I’m putting up Curmie’s take for several reasons: 1) I love his writing and style; 2) he approaches the incident from some different angles than I did; 3) I believe this incident is an important one that involves many critical ethics problems: the public school disaster; hypersensitivity to racial offense, real or imagined; the indoctrination and intimidation of children; and more. The plight of J.A. is not just the metaphorical canary dying in the mine, but strong evidence of just how badly our society’s air is poisoned. It is worth more than one post. Finally, I especially want this essay read after Curmie commented recently that he disagreed with my analysis on “countless” topics. In fact, I find that his values and ethical navigation equipment are closely aligned with mine. If they weren’t, he couldn’t have dissected this story so expertly.—JM.]

***

A few days ago, I commented on Jack’s post on the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”

I hereby retract that characterization.  It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive.  So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money. 

The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents wouldn’t accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.

More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.  We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.

I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not.  There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—”boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.

Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above.  That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so.  Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate.  It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes.  I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A.  But that, of course, is irrelevant.

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The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Yeah, Thanks Lincoln Center, But I Think I’ll Skip “Jungle Book Reimagined”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Surely there are still some live theater production that are not arm-twusting agitprop and woke propaganda. Surely.

The production is described on the Lincoln Center website as a “rethinking of the Rudyard Kipling classic ‘The Jungle Book'” that “updates the original’s colonizer-centric perspective.” More specifically, the New York Times review tells us,

“Instead of a boy raised by wolves, Mowgli is a refugee girl separated from her family as sea levels surge. She is adopted by animals who have formed a peaceable kingdom in a city that humans have left behind. Many familiar characters appear, slightly altered. Baloo the bear is now a bear who was forced to dance by humans before escaping the humiliation. The Bandar-log monkeys are now former lab specimens, still traumatized by being experimented on but longing to replace their former masters. Kaa the python is dangerous and hypnotizing but also hung up on memories of captivity in a zoo.”

Gee-what-fun. Can a Disney version be far behind?

When Ethics Alarms Weren’t Even Installed: A TV Sports Sideline Reporter’s Admission

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On a recent episode of the “Pardon My Take” podcast, the Fox Sports and NFL on Prime Video host Charissa Thompson blurted out that when she was a sideline reporter in the late 2000s, some of her football halftime reports were just made up on the spot. “I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” she began. “I would make up the report sometimes, because … the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.’ Because first of all, no coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over … and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, ‘It’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.’”

[Sidebar: This alleged professional sports reporter said “I was like” and “I’m like” in one short statement. She should be fired for that.]

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The Great Stupid, Child Abuse Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Guess why the Muirlands Middle School student above was suspended and barred from attending future sporting events in the La Jolla school district. Yes, a hysterical school administrator, almost certainly pushed by racial-grievance obsessed CRT fanatics, said that the boy wore “blackface” at a school football game. The disciplinary notice describes the student, only identified as “J.A.” as engaging in serious misconduct because he “painted his face black at a football game” making the incident an instance of “Offensive comment, intent to harm.” 

That’s odd; I’ve studied blackface and its history, and I don’t recall any minstrel shows with performers painting only half their faces black. By that standard, Star Trek was using blackface in this episode…

…which was bad enough as it was.

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