Month: February 2024

Now, Both Sides of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” Performance at the Grammys

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I had decided, after exchanging views with EA columnist Curmie, that I would let this one go, but alas, I cannot. I have waited a long while to try to talk myself out of posting, but I won the argument with myself. Or lost.

There are few TV productions that interest me less than the Grammys, even in the narrow category of awards shows, which I abandoned for good after the quality of Broadway fare approached rock bottom (no more Tonys for me) and the Academy Awards decided to prioritize infantile politics over movies (Bye-bye Oscars!). The Emmys were always boring and terrible, and the Grammys interested me not one bit, ever. After the fact, however, two events at this year’s Grammys broadcast two weeks ago pinged my ethics alarms. First was the spectacle of a triple winner being arrested at the ceremony and hauled off in cuffs: silly me, I thought the police only set out to arrest people in the most embarrassing manner possible on “Law and Order.” The second was superannuated stroke victim singer/song-writer Joni Mitchell singing at the Grammys for the first time and getting an ovation for staggering through a mournful rendition of her most famous composition, “Both Sides Now.”

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Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Sound (or Were Never Installed): Comedian Paul Currie Emulates Michael Richards

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

What was this guy thinking?

It is decidedly strange for any stand-up comic to decide to emulate Michael Richards, the talented physical comic who played “Kramer” on “Seinfeld.” Richards inexplicably blew up his career and reputation during a stand-up appearance on November 17, 2006, at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Richards was annoyed by some heckling from a group of black and Hispanic audience members, and lost his mind, screaming “Nigger!” several times and making other racist references as the audience sat stunned and unamused. His career never recovered, nor should it have. Richards has never adequately explained the incident.

Australian comedian Paul Currie, however, must have been impressed, or something. For his finale to a stand-up show at London’s Soho Theatre, the comedian placed a Ukrainian and a Palestinian flag on the stage and invited audience members to stand and applaud. Hilarious! Wait, no, it had to be a set-up for a gag, right?

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Comment of the Day: “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Posting today has been a real chore, because I began it with a funeral and a Catholic Mass, both of which always exhaust me, and the old friends I saw there (most of them, anyway) looked so much older than the last time I saw them that I am afraid to look in the mirror.

That makes two reasons I’m grateful for Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal).” I’m exhausted, and the ethics issue he raises is a crucial one without an obvious solution.

Here it is:

***

The horrible thing about this conversation is that people like Lee have this nugget of truth, uncleverly hidden inside the fragrant package of their bullshit proposals, and that is that we need a plan going forward for labor. Workplace participation is going down, wages have been stagnant, cost of living is increasing, food back participation and foreclosure rates are rising… “Stock line goes up” be damned, the bottom seems to be falling out.

I don’t know what you realistically do about this. A “$50 minimum wage” seems like the kind of toddler thinking Democrats are good at: Address the problem by treating the most surface level of symptoms, realities of the market be damned.

Because the reality is that automation is already stealing jobs, and increasing the cost of labor just makes automation investment that much more appealing. That spirals into a situation where I think the average person is going to be unemployed.

And I don’t have the answer. This is a topic that keeps me up at night.

Frankly, I think that the decent into a laborless economy is unavoidable, it’s just a matter of time, regardless of whether or not we speed up the process with stupid policy. Right now, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in 29 out of the 50 states. As technology gets cheaper and as labor gets more expensive, eventually, I don’t think it’s impossible that in 20 years, self-driving vehicles will have made that job obsolete. What do you think that does to the market?

I think the fight that’s coming up is going to be whether we purposefully throttle innovation in order to preserve jobs, or we accept that the majority of people aren’t going to labor physically, and we start to conceptualize what that looks like. And again… Thoughts that keep me up: Even if we throttle our technology our adversaries won’t, so I don’t think that choice is viable, and I think the alternative is a deeply taxed, deeply controlled form of socialism. Which is obviously undesirable, but what else does capitalism look like when your average person owns nothing, and has no prospect to move forward with?

Unethical Quote of the Month: Illegal Immigration Activist Pedro Rios

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 “It represents denial, represents exclusion and is pushing people away.”

—“Migrant advocate” Pedro Rios, complaining that the devices recently installed on top of a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border are “inhumane.”

As the Texas Ranger (weakly, unfortunately) portrayed by Glenn Campbell in the John Wayne “True Grit” says at one point, “I don’t understand this conversation at all.”

And neither do I. If someone can explain to me how the whole concept behind Friendship Park at the US-Mexico border makes any sense when it spawns the kind of wacko protest enunciated by Mr. Rios, please do.

Until I saw this story, I was happily unaware of Freedom Park’.’s existance. Here’s the description of the place from the “Friends of Freedom Park” website:

“Friendship Park is a binational park located at the western end of the US-Mexico border. For generations people have gathered here to meet up with friends and family “across the line.” While this historic location remains fully open and joyously well-utilized in Mexico, the U.S. side is marred by a system of double walls erected by the Department of Homeland Security.  Since 2008, San Diego Border Patrol officials have severely restricted public access in the United States. In February 2020 they completely closed the Park to the public in the United States.  At present they have made no commitment to its re-opening.”

Of course not! It shouldn’t re-open, because the thing was always an open invitation to Mexicans to illegally enter the country. Right now, people on the Mexican side can only communicate with those on the American side by touching fingers through the fence and speaking. It would be nice if citizens of both countries could meet unrestricted in a neutral zone, but the Mexicans can’t be trusted not to abuse the park to sneak into the U.S. Betrayal of trust has consequences.

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Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was all set to designate Rep. Lee as the Incompetent Elected Official of the Month when I realized that this month, even more than most, President Biden had that honor locked up. So Rep. Lee only gets second place. The long-time California progressive has a substantial dossier at Ethics Alarms, much of it for her habitual race-baiting, but I hadn’t written about her much lately because of the Julie Principle: she’s an idiot, even most Democrats can see she’s an idiot, and thus there is not much to be gained by repeatedly pointing out that she’s an idiot. However, Rep. Lee is running for the Senate to replace the recently departed and slightly less-recently dementia-afflicted California Senator Diane Feinstein, who even at her most reduced mental state was a more trustworthy and responsible public figure than Lee on the best day of her life. Someone like Barbara Lee should be kept out of the Senate with razor wire, but this is California, so you never know.

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Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

My sister, a rational liberal except on the topics of Donald Trump and Wuhan masks, now ends every phone conversation we have as it drifts into current affairs by exclaiming “Everything’s going to Hell! I can’t stand it!” and hanging up.

Speaking of damnation, did anyone take the time to watch the hearing yesterday (continuing today) on the Fani Willis conflict of interest allegations? Nothing happened that would justify an ethics post, although the episode again demonstrated that we have no news media organizations that can be trust to convey objectively any event with partisan implications.

Then there’s this from NBC: “Aides and allies close to former President Trump have discussed the former president giving the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address…two of the sources said that Trump himself has discussed it, but both said he is leaning against the high-profile gig.” 

Why wouldn’t the GOP do that, and why in the world would Trump not want to? Normally, nobody pays much attention to the rebuttals, because, among other things, they aren’t rebuttals but rather per-determined speeches usually delivered by blah elected officials. A Trump response would be boffo political theater, especially since in another month Joe might be reciting nursery rhymes.

But these are the things going through my fevered brain right now.

Write about any ethics topic running through yours.

A Super-Woke Book and Wine Store Just Went Belly-Up: Good! It Deserved to Fail…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Isn’t that a friendly, young, diverse group? It’s the staff of Paradis Books and Bread in North Miami. Aww! Too bad. The place is closing, the cafe and wine bar announced. And that fate is entirely, completely, because those nice welcoming people are intolerant bigots, and proud of it. Their fate couldn’t happen to more deserving people.

I don’t know how I missed this story, and I apologize for that. The “nationally acclaimed” North Miami establishment (according to Axios…Seriously?) opened in 2021. Last year, it told Fox News commentator Gianno Caldwell, who had been meeting with friends at a table, that he was not welcome in the establishment because their “views did not align” with his. Caldwell was stunned (he’s a black conservative, as if that matters) and tweeted,

“I can’t believe what just happened. I met up with friends for breakfast at Paradis Books and Bread in North Miami & while we were having discussions about politics we were told by the owner that we were not welcomed there because we aren’t politically aligned. Outrageous.”

The owners gave their own spin to the episode, writing,

…”a group of people came in, ordered food, sat in the inside corner, and talked quite loudly for over an hour. A lot of what they were discussing was very troubling, specifically when talking about women in degrading ways as well as using eugenic arguments around their thoughts on Roe v. Wade… Once it was clear that they were finished with their meal, we told them that our views don’t align, and that the language they were using was unwelcome in our space.”

Caldwell disputed their characterization of his discussion with his friends to Sean Hannity on the air, saying,

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Conservative Pundits Flogging Rationalization #28 In Response To Losing George Santos’s Seat Show Why Nobody Trusts Either Party

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That bit of res ipsa loquitur was vomited up by the disgusting George Santos after a Democrat won this week’s special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District to replace him. Santos, you recall, had been elected to represent the district in 2022 despite having no qualifications whatsoever, because he lied about, almost literally, everything. It was a genuinely fraudulent victory, far beyond the typical campaign false promises, fake positions and embellishments the American public is used to. Republicans were as accountable as Santos for allowing such scum to run in the first place.

The Republican Party seldom does anything right, but kicking this creepy-crawly out of the House was one of the few times it has been ethical (and I’m including “competence” is that description) in recent years. Both parties are responsible for upholding the dignity and honor of government institutions, particularly Congress and the Presidency. Right now, I fell secure in saying that the current crop of House members is the least qualified, the least trustworthy and the least ethical by far, and that condition is dangerous. There are probably ten or more members who would greatly enhance the body by leaving it, but Santos was unquestionable the worst of the worst. (As I wrote in the last Santos post, Rep. Bowman, the Mad Alarmist, would probably be next on my list, “Bowman should be sanctioned, “but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.”)

Congress has to insist on standards, and a political party has to insist on standards. At least the GOP demonstrated that it has some. It’s about time.

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Trump’s NATO Comments and the Contrived “Axis” Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC, the collective leftist and antiTrump allies consisting of “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media, certainly had themselves a pounce orgy when Trump said over the weekend that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute its fair share of defense funds to the alliance.

“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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