Month: March 2024

It’s a Simple Rule: If You Are an Important Public Figure, Don’t Try to Hide a Health Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This has always been true, though some figures have been substantially successful at doing it.

We are reminded of the rule once again as Catherine, Princess of Wales, announced that she was undergoing chemotherapy after a cancer diagnosis in a two-minute video released yesterday. That announcement only came after weeks of wild speculation about Kate’s whereabouts, marriage status and health. It was, therefore, too late—too late to prevent the damage to her reputation and that of the royal family by proving that she and Prince William were capable of avoiding transparency when it suited them. The official excuse was that it had taken “time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them,” as she said in the video. As explanations for deceiving the public go, a “think if the children!” strategy is as good as one is liable to find, but even it leaves a scar.

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Is This Temple University Announcement Peak DEI Stupid? We Can Hope…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Students who identify as diverse in some way.”

!!!!

How can someone pay tuition to be educated by an institution that would publish something that ridiculous? How could qualified administrators read that and not throw themselves into a wood-chipper? How could anyone even think such nonsense and not realize that something had gone seriously wrong with their internal wiring?

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Ethics Dunces: The Murrieta (California) Police Department

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh yeah, this will improve public respect for law enforcement and the rule of law.

The Murrieta Police Department is posting hilarious arrest and lineup photos with suspects’ faces replaced by Lego heads. This is its response to a new California privacy law that forbids the posting of mug shots and other photos of individuals arrested for non-violent offenses. The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, went into effect on January 1 of this year. It also requires police departments to remove other mugshots from social media after 14 days….or replace them with Lego heads, I guess. So those risible images above are not gags or the product of a Babylon Bee wag. The police actually posted them.

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Stop Making Me Defend James Carville!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I really hate this. Conservative bloggers and pundit declare the treatment of Donald Trump or another Republican by the mainstream media, unfair, dishonest and biased, then complain when the news media doesn’t treat someone else in the same unfair, dishonest and biased manner. This is always certifiably moronic, but this most recent case is especially so.

Nobody could listen to what James Carville said on CNN and honestly think the old Clinton political consultant was threatening to assassinate Donald Trump or advocating that someone else do it. Carville, who despite his Mayberry accent is a lot more articulate and clear about his meaning than the previous President, was making the case that Joe Biden shouldn’t be the one attacking Trump and that eh should leave that gutter-level task to surrogates “like me,” that is, Carville. He is simply stating his support for what used to be established, conventional political wisdom, and was a wise practice that kept the President from appearing nasty, partisan and petty, like Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Carville said that “he called” such attacks “wet work,” meaning, again obviously, the dirty work of Presidential politics. It was a metaphor, and a good one, unless a listener was either a complete paranoid dolt or determined to misrepresent Carville as revenge for the Axis deciding to try to make Trump’s use of the word “bloodbath” to describe what faces the auto industry if he is defeated a threat to encourage actual violence in the streets.

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Bitter, Chicken and Narcissistic Is No Way To Go Through Life After Baseball, Curt…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I will always be grateful to Curt Schilling. Along with David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and a few others (Dave Roberts, of course, for that clutch stolen base), he was among the most prominent Red Sox heroes in 2004, when the team I have spent far too much time thinking about and following finally won the World Series after 86 years of sometimes Greek tragedy-level frustration. I will also forever advocate Schilling’s admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame, an honor he more than deserves and has been so far robbed of receiving because of politics and woke biases against him rather than any lack of accomplishments on the field.

Make no mistake about it, however, Curt is an asshole. The last time I wrote about Schilling here it was to excoriate him for one of his worst a-hole outbreaks, when he betrayed his supposed friend and team mate Tim Wakefield by announcing that the former pitcher and his wife were both battling terminal cancers, a family tragedy that the Wakefields had wanted to keep private. That ethics alarms fail by Schilling was so serious that the Red Sox organization felt it necessary to repudiate their 2004 championship hero’s behavior.

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No, Taylor Preparatory High School, There Is No “Rap Singing Teacher Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I want to credit esteemed EA commenter JutGory for both the headline and the pointer. He properly identified this ethics tale out of Detroit as an important contrast to the “Naked Teacher Principle” and its many variations. The NTP et al. (like the the “Drag Queen School Principal Principle,” “the Porn Actor University Chancellor Principle,” and many others) holds that if you are a teacher or in some other position that requires the respect and trust of your employers and stakeholders, having photographs of you appearing naked or in other sexually provocative conditions appear on line justifies your separation from your job and leaves you no leave to complain.

Domonique Brown, however, a recent “Teacher of the Month” at Taylor Preparatory High School, did not have any naked photos or anything close on the web. She was fired from her job as a history teacher because the school learned that she had a second career as a rising rap artist named “Drippin’ Honey.” Brown had proven herself to be a skilled and popular teacher for seven years, and is pursuing a master’s degree and a doctorate. But when a parent alerted the school in an anonymous complaint last October that Domonique was also a rap artist, she found her fitness to teach being questioned.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Lawrence Martin

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”

—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”

Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting  journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.

For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law,  Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading →

Dishonesty, Cowardice, Fantasy and Hypocrisy in the Democrats’ Response to the Hamas-Israel War

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Could there be a more disingenuous statement than Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer insisting that Republicans are “politicizing” the Gazan conflict and support for Israel? While the Republican Party, and especially Donald Trump as President, have been absolutely steadfast in their support for Israel, Democratic Party support has been equivocal at best, the equivocation highlighted by President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran returning millions in Iranian assets in exchange for a promise (from one of the most duplicitous regimes on earth) to delay its development of a nuclear bomb. (The most likely recipient of said bomb would be, naturally, Israel.) Iran, as was widely predicted by critics of Obama’s sell-out, used the assets it has to seed terrorist groups in the Middle East, including Hamas.

Although the Biden Administration has dutifully gone through the motions of sending financial and weapons support to the only democracy in the Middle East, it has also been smarting from the clear signs that a large segment of its base sympathizes with the Palestinians, even to the extent of excusing Hamas terror. One of the so-called “battleground” states in the upcoming election, Michigan, has a potentially decisive Muslim population that would be pleased to see a Palestine state extend from the river to the sea. If one would be an eager purchaser of the London Bridge, perhaps one would see no connection between that problem and the ridiculous, self-contradicting decision by Biden (or his puppeteer), announced in the State of the Union message, to go to elaborate lengths to deliver “humanitarian aid” to Gaza. You know: pay for Israeli military attacks on Gaza, pay to help Gaza suffer from those attacks as little as possible. Brilliant! But of course that insane decision has nothing to do with politics—just a desire to undermine Israel’s interests just enough to keep the White House.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Talk about smoking guns…

Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”

On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”

But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..

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