Month: November 2024

Two Stupid Questions and One Damning Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If there areany lingering doubt about why the news media has no credibility with the American people and its influence is diminishing like an ice cube left of the sidewalk on a hot summer’s day, ponder these two questions at yesterday’s White House press briefing.

#1. TIME’s correspondent Brian Bennett asked the President’s incompetent paid liar, “President Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation in American history when he becomes president. Are there steps that President Biden is taking in the next 70 days to try to protect certain populations in the United States from deportation? Does he want to extend parole or take other steps that would protect people from that deportation?”

Good one, Brian. “What steps is the President taking to prevent President Trump from enforcing laws that his administration has refused to enforce?” To members of our woke journalistic cabal, this makes perfect sense.

#2. Bloomberg’s Skylar Woodhouse asked, “President-elect Trump — there’s reports that Elon Musk is having a lot of sway in terms of his decisions, in terms of who President-elect Trump is, you know, having come into his administration, sitting in on meetings with — with foreign leaders, and Elon Musk has said, you know, there’s parts that he wants to sort of reshape maybe the government. Is President Biden concerned at all over Elon Musk’s influence over President-elect Trump and potentially what that could look like for our country?”

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Ethics Dunce: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Nominee To Be Defense Secretary

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

This will not end well.

Oh, I get it. Trump ran through six Defense Secretaries in four years (a record) and had an adversary relationship with the Pentagon. As with so many other Departments, entrenched resistance to Trump’s leadership flourishes there, and there are cultural issues as well.

The sort-of new President has learned a hard lesson, and wants a loyal outsider to tackle the Defense Department. Harry Truman once described the department as a feather bed where you punched a problem in one part of the bed and another problem would pop right up.

DOD is huge, a labyrinth of interlocking bureaucracies, and managing it requires superb leadership skills, diplomacy, organization and more. There is no reason to believe that Pete Hegseth possesses any of these.

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Ethics Hero: Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.

But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?

It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)

At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.

“Shrinkflation” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In my latest trip to the supermarket, I picked up a couple of products that I hadn’t bought for a couple of months, maybe four, but no more than that. I was stunned to see how much these products had shrunk in such a short period of time. The Pepperidge Fram Milano Cookies were much smaller, maybe 20%. The Leggo toaster waffles weren’t even waffle size any more.

I had already noticed how frozen pizzas had become smaller. A year ago, maybe a little more, I didn’t have a pan big enough to hold a DiGiorno pizza, which unlike some other brands that you can put right on the oven rack, requires a pan for cooking. The pizza that didn’t fit in my pan once now does with room to spare, and I’m pretty sure that the pan hasn’t grown.

I’m sure there are many other items that have experienced the same shrinkage, even as the prices for them have gone up. For the three food items above, none of the packaging says “Now, smaller and less for your money!” Oh, maybe its buried in fine print somewhere, but that’s not acceptable. I remember the TV ads that proclaimed that familiar products were better than ever; I expect the same transparency when they are worse.

Shrinkflation without transparency is unethical: false packaging, a bait and switch. I know the counter-argument: the package has serving amounts and total weight, but it doesn’t doesn’t say “Now, cookies 25% smaller!” That’s what consumers have a right to know.

Ethics Dunce: Nils Von Kalm, Whoever The Hell He Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

For the second time in two days, Medium, to which I apparently have a minimal subscription to that allows me to read “public” articles, has sent me a “What are we going to do? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO??” piece in response to Trump’s election. It was titled, “Responding To The Reality Of Another Trump Presidency.”

As with the other one, I just got the beginning and was informed that “The author made this story available to Medium members only. Upgrade to instantly unlock this story plus other member-only benefits.” Yeah, bite me. As I did in this post, I tried to see if the article was available elsewhere. It began,

Well, it’s happened again. This time though, Trump’s election victory wasn’t the stunning upset it was in 2016. It’s still caused incredible shockwaves across America and the world though as we all ponder what it might mean.

So, strap yourselves in folks; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

As the world comes to terms with how the next Trump Presidency might impact us all, much has already been written about the best way to respond. I have to confess to probably going a bit over the top with some of my emotional responses. When someone as divisive as Trump comes along, emotions can be pretty overwhelming.

Whatever our reactions and thoughts though, now is a time of great opportunity, an opportunity to bear witness to the Gospel loud and clear. Not the dualistic gospel that says you can get to heaven when you die if you just believe the right things; nor the same gospel that says you’re going to hell if you don’t believe those things.

I’m talking about the actual good news of Jesus, the one who came to inaugurate God’s reign of love, justice, peace and compassion right here on earth as it is in heaven. I’m talking about the good news that another world is possible and another…

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A Super Nelson For These Smug, Obnoxious, Arrogant People Made Stupid and Unbearable By Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I can’t resist. I’m sorry. It’s unprofessional of me. But I am so sick of reading the whining, caterwauling, insults and ignorance on my Facebook feed, and this video hit me at exactly the wrong time.

It speaks for itself…

Pssst! MSNBC! Loyalty Is An Ethical Value…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Waiting for my oven to preheat, I watched a bit of MSNBC this afternoon. They were discussing Trump’s early appointments, and the talking heads and panelists must have used the term “loyal” close to a hundred times, all with the tone of voice one would expect uttering the word, “diseased.” The fact that Trump’s appointments suggest that he is only interested in departments heads and advisors who will be “loyal” to him and dedicated to advancing his agenda was relayed to the MSNBC audience as if the panel had discovered that all the individuals named so far are lizard people. Because, as we all know, other Presidents have reveled in appointing office holders who hated their guts.

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The Academic Cheating Problem: It’s Not Just About Education

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.

From the article:

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Comment of the Day: “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Let me begin by thanking commenter Edward for tracking down the source of the Maher quote, which at the time I posted I could not track, and my source, Elon Musk, didn’t help any by not bothering to include it in his post. It is the Ted Talk above, made when Maher was CEO at Wikipedia.

Not to leave you in any unnecessary suspense, I hate her talk with the fury of a thousand typhoons. Any time I hear the “you have your truth and I have mine” New Age blather, I tune out, spit three times, and have a stiff drink. It is a cornerstone of woke ideology and subjective ethics, and I say to hell with it.

Nonetheless, Extradimensional Cephalopod does his usual meticulously fair and open-minded response, this time to my question of whether the statement, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” could be justified. He does as good a job as I can imagine anyone doing, but I’m not buying. Before realizing I should post this as a COTD, I replied to EC’s post on the original essay’s thread; I’ll re-post it following his (its?) Comment of the Day on the post, “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”…

***

“…what possible context could justify it?”

I can’t guarantee that Maher meant what she said in a benign sense, but such a sense does indeed exist.

Allow me to rephrase the statement in question:

Before: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

After: “I think our obsession with forcing everyone to agree with our interpretations of the available evidence interfered with us finding enough relevant points of agreement that we could establish mutually acceptable approaches on important issues.”

The confusion lies in the conflation of “truth” to mean three different things:

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Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

—NPR CEO Katherine Maher

Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1856343280344010803

I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.

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