Month: November 2025

Ethics Quiz: HBO’s “John Adams”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I just have to boycott Ken Burns’ new documentary on the Revolutionary War (that all of my friends are watching). Burns has become so partisan and his editorializing so blatant in his recent production that i won’t trust him any more. Instead, I decided to view HBO’s acclaimed “John Adams” series, which originally watched in 2019. At the time I wrote here,

“I watched this seven part HBO series for the first time since it premiered. I’d love to know how many public school students are shown the series in class, or at all. It is an superb civics lesson, despite some historical liberties. Come to think or it, I wonder if any of the “Squad” has seen it; or any of the Parkland anti-gun shills, or, for that matter, President Trump. The series vividly shows what a miracle the creation of the United States was, the ethical values that formed its philosophical foundation, and the brilliance of the Founders that by the sheerest moral luck, the infant nation, happened to be in the right place at the right time, over and over again. Now, 240 years later, lesser patriots with inferior minds think it is wise to undo their unique and fortunate creation.”

I pretty much hold the same opinion today after seeing the series again last week. But have some new doubts about the showing of the series in public schools. It still is inspiring and justly so; the acting (and casting) is impeccable, and the personalities of the Founders portrayed are vivid and generally accurate. Among other contributions to historic literacy, the series demonstrates how remarkable Adams’ wife and advisor Abigail Adams was, and how essential she was to his success. In historian Joseph Ellis’s book “Founding Brothers,” he includes Abigail as a Founder, so influential was she on Adams, his public speeches and his writings.

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Employee Ethics and Professonalism: The Anthony Rendon Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Los Angeles Angels (it’s a baseball team. Sheesh…) are in talks with long-time disappointment third baseman Anthony Rendon about buying out the final year of his contract. Rendon wants to retire, but doesn’t want to forfeit the final year, $38 million bucks of it in his seven-year, $245 million long-time contract that has become an albatross for the Angels and a bonanza for him. Rendon spent the entire 2025 season recovering from hip surgery, as was typical of his Angels tenure. He was paid all the same.

The 35-year-old has been limited to playing in only 205 of a potential 648 games since 2020, due to injuries to his left groin, left knee, left hamstring, left shin, left oblique, lower back, both wrists and both hips. He has never played as many as 60 games in any of the four 162 game seasons. When Rendon was able to play, he wasn’t very good. The Angels had made Rendon the game’s highest-paid third baseman in December 2019, whereupon he performed well in the pandemic-shortened 2020 MLB season (which I don’t think counts) and that was the end of his productivity.

Rendon has famously stated that he doesn’t really like baseball, he just happened to be good at it. It’s just a job to him, not a passionate pursuit that he cares about; he doesn’t care about the accolades or attention either. Did his lack of passion contribute to his failure to suit up and take the field because of all the injuries? Nobody can say.

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Obviously Unethical Plot of the Year: “Plan One From North Texas”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, 21, of Allen, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, 20, of Argyle, Texas were indicted this month by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Texas. It charged them with conspiracy to murder, maim, or kidnap in a foreign country, a charge you don’t see every day. Weisenberg and Thomas had been plotting for over a year to recruit and army and lead an invasion of the Island of Gonave, which lies off the coast of Haiti. It has about 870,000 residents.

The plan:  Weisenburg and Thomas would purchase a sailboat, firearms and ammunition, then recruit homeless people from the District of Columbia to make up their mercenary army. They would all sail to the island, stage a surprise invasion, and complete a coup d’etat.  After taking over the government, their army would murder all of the men on the island, leaving the women and children to be the duo’s sex slaves.

Wait, what?

The indictment states that Weisenburg and Thomas took “overt acts” to accomplish their dastardly plot.They learned the Haitian Creole language. They had begun recruiting. They had visited the island, which is how they determined that taking it over would be easy. Then they enrolled in various classes to acquire the necessary skills for the take-over.  Thomas, for example, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force to acquire military skills, and got himself transferred to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland so he could sign up the homeless in D.C.

One must concede that the two men were creative, ambitious, able to think out of the box, and were not afraid to dream big and aspire to greatness. This is truly the American spirit! Unfortunately, they are also unethical, irresponsible sociopaths.

This may make a great movie, though.

The federal conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country carries a sentence of life in federal prison. Their defense lawyer is going to argue that none of the things the two men actually did do in furtherance of the murderous plan was illegal.

Oh…they have also been charged with child pornography.

A.I.Comment of the Day: Grok on “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I hope this doesn’t become a habit, but Willem Reese quized AI bot “Grok,” Ann Althouse’s pal, on the matter at issue. His question: Do immigrants from some cultures, like Somalis, have relatively lower compatibility with American mores? How can large groups, like 80 people, get together to scam hundreds of millions of $?

Because the exchange between one of Ethics Alarms 5 regular commenters and the AI raises several ethical issues, including some regarding artificial intelligence, I feel the answer is worth pondering. Grok replied,

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Comment of the Day: “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The New York Times has a relatively fair explication of the astounding Somali scam in Minnesota, a perfect storm of the state allowing a “Somali diaspora” to become established there, too many products of a terrible culture, an intellectually lazy, woke culture in Minnsesota presided over by a knucklehead governor (Tim Walz, naturally), and an irresponsible immigration policy.

Best quotes:

1) “Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.”

2) “Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.” [See how the Times tries to use an “Everybody does it!” framing to minimize focus on the Somalis?] 3) “Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.” [ Gee, they figured that out, did they?]

4) “Kayseh Magan, a Somali American who formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said elected officials in the state — and particularly those who were part of the state’s Democratic-led administration — were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations in the Somali community.” […because it was a reliable voting bloc for Democrats.]

5) “As a trial in the meals fraud case was coming to a close last summer, an attempt to bribe a juror included an explicit insinuation about racism, prosecutors said. Several defendants in the trial were found to have arranged to send a bag containing $120,000 to a juror along with a note that read, ‘Why, why, why is it always people of color and immigrants prosecuted for the fault of other people?'” [Always the same playbook…]

6) “Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread. Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”

Here is A M Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”…

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We Now Know Scientific Pronouncements Are Frequently Garbage, So We Also Should Know “The ’60s Parenting Practices We Now Know Were Terrible For Kids’ Brains” Is Mostly Crap…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Being raised in the Sixties, I was naturally curious about the article in Media Feed titled “The ’60s parenting practices we now know were terrible for kids’ brains.” What I discovered, as one usually will with social science essays with an agenda, is carefully cherry-picked research being used to support an author’s already pre-determined position. You know, “Science!”

“Science” has been so thoroughly polluted by the political left to justify its objectives and claim absolute authority for propositions that are far from determined (or determinable) that the public should be conditioned to doubt any claim that begins, as this one does, “This article explores a dozen once-standard practices and uses modern research to explain why they were tough on a child’s developing brain, emotional health, and long-term well-being.” Here is what modern research as revealed in recent years: it can’t be trusted. It can’t be trusted because researchers and scientists can’t be trusted, and interlocutors like Kaitlyn Farley, the gullible (or dishonest) author, don’t know enough about science to interpret studies with appropriate skepticism. (I just checked: Kaitlyn claims to be, among other things, an AI trainer who specializes in “content creation.” That explains a lot about the article.)

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Gee, I Wonder Why People Don’t Think College Is Worth the Time and Money Any More?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Maybe the President’s assault on partisan colleges and universities is having the desired (and necessary) effect.

A new NBC News poll claims that only 33% of American agree that a four-year college degree is “worth the cost.” 63% believe that it’s “not worth the cost” because “people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”

Four per cent don’t know what college is, are too dumb to compose any answer, or answered “Fish!” or something.

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On the Shooting of the Two National Guard Members [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As you doubtless know by now, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in an ambush-style attack in Washington, D.C. before Thanksgiving. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, has died; the other victim,
Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition. The shooter is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national.

He shouldn’t have been here. Simple as that.

It is mordantly entertaining to see the despicable Axis news media spin like dervishes to try to somehow blame the President and Republicans for what is 100% the result of progressive madness. The presence of the National Guard in D.C. can’t reasonably be blamed for violent attacks on them, but Democratic rhetoric irresponsibly describing their deployment as the equivalent of a hostile occupation or an autocratic fascist take-over can be held responsible, and should be.

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Post Thanksgiving Open Forum [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I’d be interested in anyone’s anecdotes from yesterday about their confrontations over dinner with family on political matters. At the (fantastic) Shirlington Dog Park in Arlington, VA, I chatted with a freind with whom I have never discussed politics (and never will), who said she was spending the holiday alone because she wasn’t speaking to any of her relatives. They feel, she said with a voice dripping with contempt, that “the public should respect an elected President even if he did probably rape a 14-year-old.” Hey! Look at that beautiful Vizsla!

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Thank Goodness For Experts, or “If You Can’t Figure Out This Is Wrongful Conduct By Yourself, You’re Not Trustworthy…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times has a column by a wellness expert who reveals that Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, has found that giving a loved one “the silent treatment” is cruel and constitutes punishment. So do a bunch of other experts quoted, but this guy has supposedly studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years. That’s his big takeaway? Apparently so. As my old dead friend Scott Wheeler used to say (ironically, I lost contact with Scott because he engaged in conduct I could not forgive or forget so I cut him off, and he knew exactly why) “Who doesn’t know that?”

Slow day at the Times? From the article: “Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. But it isn’t, she explained. ‘The silent treatment is a punishment,’ she said, ‘whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.’For the person who is being frozen out, it creates “anxiety and fear, and feelings of abandonment,” Dr. Saltz said, and it often causes a “cascade of self-doubt, self-blame and self-criticism.”

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