Month: February 2025

Unethical Quote of the Month: Pope Francis [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Pope has issued a letter (It’s in larger type at the link than what you’ll see below) to the “Bishops of the United States of America.”

Ethics verdicts: Abuse of position, abuse of authority, grandstanding, hypocrisy, breach of responsibility and intellectual dishonesty.

Nice job, Your Holiness.

Because you are likely to be semi-conscious or have your brains splattered on the ceiling from serial head-explosions after reading this thing, I’ll make my other ethics observations now:

1. I’ll pay attention to the Pope’s dictates about how my country handles illegal immigration when the Vatican lets anyone who feels like it move into Vatican City because it will give them “a better life.” Instead of sending the “worst of the worst” to Guantanamo, let’s send them right to the Pope. Based on this screed, I’m sure he’ll welcome them with open arms in the spirit of recognizing the inherent human rights of “the most fragile and marginalized.”

2. Anyone who uses the migration practices that existed in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago as an analogy to 21st century policy issues in the United States of America is either a con artist, a liar or an idiot. The same goes for comparing Jesus to fentanyl smugglers. Fans of the Pope can take their pick. It’s an indefensible, insulting, reductive argument. Nobody should make such comparisons who are over the age of six; for a major world figure revered by millions to stoop to it is signature significance for demagoguery.

3. The Pope admonishes Americans not to equate illegal conduct with criminal conduct. Funny, I just looked up “criminal conduct” and the definitions all boil down to “Criminal conduct is an unlawful act that breaks the law.” Call me a nit-picker, but it sure seems that  breaking our laws to come into and stay in the U.S. is the equivalent of a criminal act.

Maybe it’s a language thing. Does “not criminal” in Italian mean “lawbreaking that the Pope regards as excusable if one is ‘poor and marginalized’? Continue reading →

Why Does Ann Althouse Think Axis Media Headlines Like This Are Funny?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yesterday, the blogging Madison, Wisconsin, retired law professor began a post titled with this from Mediaite, “Elon Musk Gives Rambling Explanation of DOGE’s Work In Oval Office Address” by by stating, “I’m laughing at that Mediaite headline.” Then she goes on one of her trademarked rants about a tangential detail in a serious topic, the fact that the website used the word “rambled.”

It was the first thing I read this morning, and, to use vernacular that Anderson Cooper might use, it pissed me off. This is typical Althouse, but I have about reached the metaphorical end of my rope with her elite, arrogant, “Oh, the things you lesser proles concern yourself with!” approach to vital national controversies that normal Americans—you know, people who don’t have generous pensions and an estimated net worth of around $5 million dollars—have good reason to be very concerned about. She just sits on her “fiercely” non-partisan and laughs from her scholarly “What fools these mortal be!” perch.

I watched Musk’s unusual Oval Office monologue while he let his kid climb all over him. By any legitimate standard, his performance, while eccentric, was impressive, and compared to the bottom-of-the-barrel rhetorical standards of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and, yes, Donald Trump, it was dazzling. The man is obviously intelligent and focused, and, unless you are blinded by ideologically inspired hate, likeable. Most people don’t have or take the time to watch things like Musk’s off-the-cuff explanation of what DOGE is doing, so they rely on their supposedly astute and engaged friends and, because it is supposedly why they exist, news sources like Mediaite.

The fact that most of these sources are furiously spinning and manipulating their accounts to turn public opinion against Trump and Musk isn’t funny. It’s a ongoing crisis that needs a unified, measured, forceful and unified response by the people who have the intellect to understand what’s wrong with an unethical and untrustworthy journalism culture and the time and resources to help everyone else understand it too.

Continue reading →

Stay Classy, Anderson Cooper!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, yes, journalistic professionalism! Those were the days! Walter Cronkite may have been a Democratic party mouthpiece when he wasn’t slamming the Vietnam war, but he never called Spiro Agnew a “dick,” at least in public. Neither did Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Barbara Walters. But that cute Anderson Cooper on CNN, he’s the face of broadcast journalism today and one of the cool kids, so he can talk like this while he was arguing about DOGE attacks on FEMA on a news show that airs coast-to-coast (this happens right before the two minute mark in the video above)…

COOPER: Some of the details, like millions for hotels, it’s actually not…

CHRIS SUNUNU: You mean the FEMA money for migrants? That’s OK now?

COOPER: I’m not saying it’s OK, don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t be a dick!

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I hate to throw an ethics flag on Musk while he’s doing such essential work and being attacked for it. Still, this kind of stuff doesn’t help. At all.

Yeah, I know, I know. Musk is one the autistic spectrum and in some respects is a bout 10 years old, and like Donald Trump, he enjoys trolling and doesn’t care who he alienates. Conservative pundits and wags were crowing about CNN’s Dana Bash saying solemnly on the air, “”Now the ‘Disruptor in Chief, Elon Musk, who apparently has adopted the alias, at least he changed his social media handle, to ‘Harry Bōlz’, tweeted this morning, ‘Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. An activist judge is not a real judge.”

Indeed this thrust us into Poe’s Law hell, where it is impossible to distinguish reality from satire. Musk was mocking the breathless doxxing of one of his fuzzy-cheeked geeks as “Big Balls” by the Axis media, and I’m sure he got a good laugh out of it; I’m sure Trump did too. Nonetheless, what he is doing with DOGE is too important to be vulnerable to the accusation that the man in charge is just fooling around, having fun, and not taking seriously decisions that effect the lives and livelihood of so many people.

It is easy to make the news media look foolish because they are foolish. Still, Elon Musk (and the President, but he’s beyond reforming) can’t afford to go after this low-hanging fruit and behave like Bart Simpson tricking Moe into calling out in his bar, “I.P. Freely ! I.P. Freely on the phone here! ” He must be seen as the serious analyst that he is if the DOGE effort is to have any chance of succeeding.

“The Meat Axe”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had some amusing bloody meat-axe graphics all ready to go for this post, but it is really about flat learning curves: the Democratic Party’s, the Axis news media’s, and maybe, frighteningly, the public’s.

Yes, once again we have a looming test of just how stupid the public really is. Democrats are betting their very existence on the public being as dumb as a box of Joe Bidens, and the biased, anti-Trump news media, having already been completely exposed as the enemies of the people Donald Trump said they are, have predominantly fallen back to the same tactics that served them so well in Trump 1.0. The unethical “advocacy journalists” are gambling that propaganda will prevail, and that the 2024 election was just a blip because the Democrats ran a babbling fool—but a historic one!—for President.

Trump’s tsunami of executive orders along with the relentless DOGE assault has the Axis searching for a magic bullet or two. They settled on two old unethical stand-bys: ad hominem attacks, aka. “kill the messenger,” and “It’s a constitutional crisis!” Trump being elected at all was a constitutional crisis for the Angry Left, and the phony “He’s breaching traditional democratic norms!” trope was core to both impeachments and the “Trump is Hitler” campaign refrain.

Elon Musk is being vilified by using classic Democrat class warfare tactics: he’s been successful and is rich, so obviously he’s only helping Trump cut spending because he greedy and he’ll make money from it somehow. How dumb does someone have to be to buy that logic? If there is anyone in the world who can be trusted not to be serving his country for the money, it’s Musk. I heard some mouth-foaming contributor on CNN screaming this morning that “Trump is a liar and criminal” and “Musk wasn’t even born here!,” an odd argument from a defender of illegal immigrants.

But the EA “Flat Learning Curve” graphic is up there because I heard Chuck Schumer—is he really an idiot or does he just play one on TV?—say that sure, everyone agrees that there is too much waste in government spending, but “this is a meat-axe!” Yup, it sure is, Chuck, and if you don’t know by now that the only way to seriously address systemic corruption, waste, incompetence, dishonesty and obstruction is with a meat-axe (or blow-torch, or metaphorical nuclear bomb), you’ve never successfully managed anything.

Experienced managers know this, and both Musk and Trump are experienced managers as well as successful ones. Good leaders know it too. Heck, I know it.

What Schumer is really saying is, “We don’t want to solve this problem, we want to look like we want to solve this problem, and we are confident that you out there listening are so uneducated, inexperienced, naive and gullible that you’ll fall for it…again.”

When a system is broken, corrupt and incorrigible, and because of its dysfunction causing constant harm, the technique of carefully trying to extract the jewels buried in the shit pile never works. It takes too long. Every inch of the shit will have advocates claiming that it isn’t really shit. Paring down the bureaucracy gets delegated to the bureaucracy, and improvement is minimal if you are lucky. Most of the time, the inefficiency, waste and corruption just gets worse. Nobody can deny that this is the futile path the United States government has been treading.

Continue reading →

EA Text Box Crash Update!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Breaking: I have heard from WordPress regarding the site malfunction yesterday that made commenting either a chore or impossible. This morning Happiness Engineer Gary P. wrote in an email,

“Hi Jack, thank you for your patience. I really appreciate you reporting this issue. It’s been very helpful! As my colleague mentioned, our team has identified this as a bug and is actively working on a permanent fix. The latest update from our developers is that the comment box should now be working again. I took a look at your site and can see that the text box appears to be functioning normally. I’ve also recorded a short video showing that typing is now possible: https://cloudup.com/c1W5oqw88Qm.

Whenever you have a moment, could you check from your end and let me know if everything is working as expected? Do note that while the text box is working, our developer is still actively looking for a cause for the issue itself, and what’s working now might not be perfect.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions. I’d be happy to help.

Well, Gary had better be happy to help…he’s a Happiness Engineer!

I’m so sorry this happened yesterday. It obviously frustrated a lot of you and wasted your valuable time, as it did mine. If its any consolation, I deal with WordPress bugs constantly. I can no longer comment directly as a host on my own posts for example: I have to log in as a commenter. When I’m in the favored “Paragraph” block, I can’t post pictures or quotes. When I’m in the “classic “mode links don’t work. Recently, whole sentences just disappear while I’m finishing them. But that’s my problem. You shouldn’t have to deal with any posting issues. Again, I am sorry.

Special thanks are due to Diego Garcia and Alicia who blew the whistle on this right away via email.

Maybe I’ll be able to get some paying work done today, after I finish shoveling snow…

Guest Post: ‘We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Car’s Extended Warranty…’

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

by WallPhone

[From your host: This is an epic post about something I know absolutely nothing about, except that I received the calls and marketing materials Wall Phone is writing about—JM]

***

“Well, not that. Actually, I have been trying to reach you about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, TCPA for short. If you’re reading this, someone connected to your company, someone who cares about your company, and someone who cares about their career and livelihood, has been told that your company is violating at least one provision of this Federal law.

“If you don’t listen to them, it would be prudent of them to begin looking for another job. They shouldn’t want to go down with your ship. If they need to maintain some kind of licensure, they also don’t want to lose their credentials for whatever wrongdoing was going on that got them in contact with the person who gave them this webpage.“

Have you ever wondered why those auto warranty calls stopped? It’s because the government has fined the people connected to that advertising campaign more than six and a half million dollars. The fine came with a lifetime ban on any form of telemarketing. What would happen to your company if this kind of fine and ban were to be imposed on you?

“But we don’t make outgoing calls, let alone robocalls!”

And yet you have appeared to have done so. What you thought was a prospective customer told you about this page because they want you to stop harassing them.

“But our company is not harassing them!”

And yet you have appeared to be doing so. And worse, much worse, you appear to have been doing this for years.

“Years?”

Yes.

“But we only recently adopted this marketing partner/strategy!”

And you had better stop. Yesterday. Hopefully your contract has some sort of an enforceable indemnification clause that MIGHT protect you, but it probably won’t. If your marketing agreement does have such a clause, its actual purpose is to pacify any possible reservations at the signing stage of your marketing agreement with them, not the actual true purpose of these contractual things–to avoid the creation of moral hazard.

“Moral hazard” is explained below if you’re not familiar with that term. It’s high time you were.

The reason this indemnification clause on your contract won’t help you is the telemarketing company will be gone when the time comes that you’ll need it. They are betting that by the time it takes for you to figure out that you need to use indemnification, it will be too late. This page is here to help you figure it out sooner, help you recover as much as possible, and make their scam less profitable.

You need to—as soon as possible!—FIRST ask your bank how many of the past payments you made to your marketing partner that you can reverse, THEN ask the marketing partner for refunds. If you think you handling this business with them politely will work, then you have already lost. They will transfer all funds out of their accounts. They will disappear. You’ll lose more than if you IMMEDIATELY reverse as many payments as you can, because they’re not operating in good faith and they’re not intending to refund anything.

You are the victim of a scam. Victim of a crime. It’s literally an organized crime syndicate you are dealing with and they hav done this before, perhaps dozens of times before. They’re counting on you being polite and patient so they have time to disappear, whitewash a new business name on their operations, then start over. They don’t care that they destroyed your agency or business, they have thousands of other prospects they can milk this scam on. They have been doing this for years.

“But why do you want to help my company?”

Continue reading →

Administrative Alert: Are You Having Trouble Posting Comments? [UPDATED!] [AND Updated Again!]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

I have now heard from three veteran commenters that they can’t post, and so far, Word Press’s “Happiness engineers” (gag) have no useful answers or advice. If you have found a fix for this problem—nothing has changed from my end—please post it. To those of you who are locked out, I’m sorry, you haven’t been banned, and I’m working on it.

UPDATE: WordPress has replicated the problem and I am informed that an engineer is working to fix it.

5:05 EST Update from Word Press: “We’ve heard back from our team and have confirmed that this is a bug. We have a team actively working to resolve the issue. While I don’t have an exact timeframe, I am hopeful we’ll see a fix soon.”

Ethics Quote of the Day: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“I feel a little sorry for the sector of America that feels that whatever Trump does must be bad.”

––Blogging ex-law prof Ann Althouse, in a post about how the New York Times criticized Trump’s order to get rid of the penny despite “what we’ve known for 40 years we needed to do but we couldn’t do because some people whine about the nostalgic and symbolic value of the Lincoln-stamped copper-plated disc.”

Why “sorry”? My Facebook friends who are doing this are educated, adults, and behaving like spoiled brats while writing social media posts worthy of sixth graders. MSNBC and its various propagandists are actively working to subvert an elected President. One should only have pity if one honestly believes that there is an excuse for someone being brainwashed and deceived by transparent media propaganda. There isn’t.

These people don’t know history, don’t understand the nation or its culture, ape the opinions of others without critical thought, and advocate anti-democratic policies and attitudes. I’m not sorry for them; I’m sorry that they are so gullible, weak-minded, and unable to process information that proves they were wrong, an essential life skill. I’m sorry that our society and civic discourse has been so poisoned by their biases and cognitive deficiencies. They deserve to be discouraged. They deserve to be humiliated. They deserve to be mocked. They have been incompetent, destructive citizens, and harmed their nation by allowing themselves to be ruled by emotion and manipulated by liars and ideologues.

Ethics Quiz: Honoring Roland Bragg

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The North Carolina military base long called Fort Bragg was stripped of its familiar name in 2023 and changed to Fort Liberty by the Biden administration. With this Democrats joined forces with and essentially endorsed the statue-topping and historical airbrushing that removed statues, street and school names and other memorials to Americans judged insufficiently dedicated to the woke values that hadn’t surfaced until long after their deaths.

Particularly targeted were Confederate generals and other major figures in the Confederacy. Fort Bragg was named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Of all the Confederates stripped of honors in 2020 as The Great Stupid spread over the land, Bragg’s might have deserved that fate most. Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War, with most of the battles he engaged in, Shiloh, for example, ending in his army’s defeat. He was also unpopular with both the officers and soldiers under his command. Why he had a fort named after him is something of a mystery. Well, maybe not so mysterious: the North Carolina fort was named during the Wilson administration while that President was undoing civil rights advances for blacks.

Continue reading →