Month: December 2025

Another Christmas, Another False “Mary and Joseph Were Illegal Immigrants” Analogy…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Holy morons, Batman!”

The Lake Street Church of Evanston has erected a Christmas manger scene on its lawn that “reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices.”

Other than the reality that Jesus’s mother and her husband were not in any sense of the word refugees, as they were traveling from one part of the Roman Empire to another, and the even more relevant reality that this was over 2,000 years ago in a different culture and time that make attempted comparisons with modern immigration policies, problems and legal enforcement ludicrous, it’s a great point!

Defaulting to the Bible and religion as the cheapest “appeal to authority” imaginable is persuasive evidence of a lack of genuine arguments and an IQ deficit, or perhaps a cynical desire to confuse the intellectually deprived. In either case, its an abuse of Christmas. Indeed, the defenders of illegal immigration literally have no valid justification for their beliefs at all. A church that would engage in this cynical, ahistorical deception can’t be trusted.

And now…a song!

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Diego Garcia entered an instructive description of an interaction with a bank on credit card matters that nicely illustrates a theme Ethics Alarms has been commenting on for quite a while. It is not exaggerated, because I have been enmeshed in dozens of these maddening experiences almost every month since my wife died last year. The practices are cruel, frustrating, time-consuming and hostile, and, I am convinced, often intentional. They are the product of multiple unethical conditions and practices, including incompetent management, needless technology complexity, sloth, poor hiring criteria, poor training, the public school system, lack of sufficient emphasis on English proficiency, corporate arrogance, outsourcing of jobs, inadequate staffing, and more. I also believe these systems and the factors creating them cause serious stress-related health problems among the public and even domestic and urban violence as well as mass shootings.

People have been conditioned to just shrug it all off as “how we live now.” We shouldn’t do that.

Here is Diego Garcia’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”:

…I do have a recent BoA experience regarding account setups.

My sister has had a BoA credit card for something like 50 (!) years. She is very much not tech savvy, and is someone who always wants paper statements mailed to her.

On this card, she had made arrangements for her payment to be automatically drafted each month — the payment would be $150 or the statement balance, whichever was smaller. She had made this arrangement by phone as she never had set up an online account for this card. Well, a couple months ago they wrote her to say that they were cancelling this automatic payment and she would have to go online to set it back up.

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Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

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The Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I am officially designating the improvidently admitted legal immigrant ethics train wreck as merely an extension of the Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck, particularly since so many progressives refuse to acknowledge the distinction between legal and illegal in this matter. They also refuse to acknowledge that time marches on, and that policies that made sense in the past often do not make sense, or are not even responsible, today.

Item: One of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends whom have mentioned here several times, as part of one of his daily attacks on the President, cited as authority this section of a speech given by Ronald Reagan shortly before leaving office…

My friend was responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to pause immigration from 19 nations whose culture may not be wise to introduce into American society. The speech, however, cuts against the argument—pro-Somali as well as other immigrant groups uninterested in assimilation—he thinks he is making. Rep. Omar (D-Minn), quite properly excoriated by President Trump (though not in the measured terms he should have used), has said repeatedly that she regards herself as representing “her people,” Somalis first. Omar’s people, like the Congresswoman herself, generally have no intention of becoming Americans in the sense that President Reagan meant. They want to continue to embrace the toxic culture of their failed state but in a more prosperous and accommodating environment among, to be blunt, “suckers.”

Item: I recommend this useful and well-reasoned blog post. Key section:

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Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Not feeling smurfy this morning, but I have to get a few issues covered with dispatch. First up….

The Merrick Bank is incompetent. (Just my informed opinion, now! Don’t sue me!) For reasons irrelevant to this post, I recently acquired a Merrick Bank credit card, and now have my first bill to pay. After an absurdly involved registration process (including a glitch in the programming that I already registered a complaint about—the website registration asks for a first and a last name, but not a middle initial or a suffix. However, the application for the card DOES include spaces for middle initials and suffixes. So to register to use the “convenient website” to manage one’s account, entering what is asked for, first and last names, results in an error message.

After 25 minutes of fighting with the automated Merrick phone zombie, I finally reached a human being who explained that I was supposed to include my middle initial in the “First Name” space and the “Jr” suffix where it asked for my last name. “Oh. And how was I supposed to know that?” I asked. “I can understand your frustration, sir…” Yeah, bite me. FIX IT, assholes.

After deciphering the stupid system (which included deciding on three secret questions) I got to my current charges page. It stated that I owed $645.60 and asked if I wanted to pay “entire amount owed.” However, there seemed to be no way to learn what the charges were that totaled up to that amount. All I could get was the record of $67.00 in charges.

Again I went through automated phone zombie hell and eventually asked of the human representative who appeared after my being on hold for ten minutes the simple question, “I want to pay the entire amount owed. How do I discover on your ‘convenient’ website what those charges are? What’s the secret link?”

First, the guy had a virtually impenetrable accent. He spoke like Balki Bartokomous (Bronson Pinchot) from “Perfect Strangers” trying to do an impression of Bill Dana’s José Jiménez character imitating Curly Howard in the Three Stooges’ Maharaja routine. Repeatedly I asked him to slow down and speak clearly, which he couldn’t do. On top of this, he couldn’t give me a straight answer to my question. Finally I gave up and ask to speak to Balki’s supervisor.

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Comment of the Day: “On the Venezuelan Drug Boat “Double-Tap…”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As I have stated periodically here, few things make my heart soar like a hawk more than when I awaken feeling punk and have the comforting knowledge that a worthy Comment of the Day awaits to be posted, giving me precious hours to become coherent, if not wise.

Thus I am thrilled to post 77Zoomie‘s invaluable and informed commentary on the controversy surrounding the deaths of two apparent drug smugglers. [I am sorely tempted to note that the Axis of Unethical Conduct is routinely outraged at the well-earned fates of illegal immigrant criminals and drug runners, but have been oddly reluctant to express similar concern for the many citizen victims of illegals who never should have been allowed enter and stay in our country. But I won’t…

Anyway, here is 77Zoomie’s Comment of the Day in response to “On the Venezuelan Drug Boat ‘Double-Tap’ Controversy”…

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Former JAG here–I’ve taught the Law of Armed Conflict and Operational Law to active duty special operators at one of our special operations schools, as well as advised on use of force to some local commanders. A couple of observations:

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this appears to be some kind of shaping operation directed at not just the President, but members of the armed forces. The original report of this incident was back in September in a publication called “The Intercept.” That report lay dormant until the National Lawyers Guild, a far left legal organization, published an information piece on the military’s obligation to disobey “unlawful” orders, on November 11. The tendentious video by the six congressmen followed shortly thereafter, followed immediately by the posting of billboards outside several major U.S. military installations urging soldiers to question the legality of their orders. This was immediately followed by the pick-up of the Intercept story and its publication by the corporate press.  Draw your own conclusions.

A key point in this discussion that seems to have been omitted by most if not all commentators is that we are engaging our military forces against a state-sponsored narco-terrorism operation. The Maduro government is supporting, sponsoring, and profiting from drug importation into the US, and is working hand in glove with Venezuelan cartels.  In other words, this is not a law enforcement operation but rather a state-versus-state confrontation involving what are effectively unlawful combatants on one side.

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Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this an appropriate—responsible, ethical— use of a minister’s position?

As a secondary question, is it ethical for him to announce to the congregation that his parents are not supportive of his son?

On the Venezuelan Drug Boat “Double-Tap” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

President Trump’s controversial policy of destroying vessels from Venezuela smuggling drugs into the U.S. is now the latest example of the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s desperation search for bogus issues with which to impugn the President and his administration. Let’s see, we have: not “bringing down prices” that cannot come down after the last Administration caused 9% inflation; “cruelly” deporting illegal immigrants, including criminals; improving the White House with a long-needed ballroom; the President saying exactly, if intemperately, what six Democrats did by urging the military to defy its Commander-in- Chief; the Department of War requiring journalists not to leak sensitive information illegally provided by Deep State operatives…I’m sure I left out some. Now the Trump is defending the legality of a September 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea where a second missile strike was ordered that killed survivors of the first strike.

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I Know There Are More Important Ethics Issues Today, But Harvard Is an Ethics Dunce (Again) and It Ticks Me Off…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Bias makes us stupid, and being disgusted with one’s alma mater makes one likely to prioritize kicking it in the metaphorical nuts when it screws up more than one should, “one” in this case being me.

Harvard grad student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo (above) faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel “die-in” protest at the university. He had been caught on camera accosting a first-year Israeli student during a 2023 “die-in” protest held outside of Harvard Business School. Tettey-Tamaklo was removed from his position as a proctor overseeing a freshmen dorm in Harvard Yard after the incident, and he received a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last May. A Suffolk County judge ordered the student to take an anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service as his punishment for the assault.

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Clarence Darrow’s Reflections on His 61st Birthday

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Last night I suddenly recalled this speech that I first read when Ed Larson and I were considering what to include in our book, “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow.” It seems like an appropriate item to publish today on Ethics Alarms.

I am considerable older than Clarence was when they gave him a gala birthday party in Chicago on April 18, 1918, even if one doesn’t take into consideration the Spanish Flu that was then ravaging populations here and abroad. The average age of mortality for men was about 55 in 1918, so Darrow was past his pull date. I’m almost as far under the 2025 average mortality number for men as Darrow was over his. Darrow, however, made it clear in his speech that he didn’t feel old. Neither do I.

One should note that Darrow, despite issuing his own testimonial, had not yet participated in the three sensational cases upon which his current reputation as the Greatest American Trial Lawyer Ever rests: the Scopes trial, the Sweet case, and the defense of “thrill killers” Leopold and Loeb. His career still had a lot of “kick” left. It is also revealing that Darrow was already considered a major celebrity before his legal exploits shifted into territory that would be mined extensively by books, plays and movies over the next century.

I find it fascinating that Darrow claims to be modest—-he always thought he was the smartest one in the room, because he usually was—and that he claims to despise “moralizing.” Darrow, whose secret weapon in so many of his trails was jury nullification, promoted his vision of right and wrong aggressively and effectively; it was what drew me to Darrow as a student of ethics. The speech is remarkable in how completely Darrow neglects to mention, thank or acknowledge his long-suffering wife Ruby, his virtually abandoned son, or even any friends. Not surprising, however. Darrow was a narcissist. I am not sure that he had any close friends for any length of time, or missed having them.

Darrow didn’t prepare this speech, evidently. It rambles and leaps from topic to topic, but Clarence Darrow rambling is more entertaining and thought-provoking than all but our most brilliant historical figures speaking after days of preparation. By today’s standards the speech is far too long, but these were times before attention span had been decimated by modern media, the speeding up of life and inferior education. And this was a lawyer who once won a case with a twelve-hour closing argument. Guests at the party probably weren’t even squirming in their chairs.

Darrow (he hated being called Clarence) was by all accounts a riveting speaker, and that certainly helped. As you will see, he also was incapable of speaking for long without uttering a memorable quip or a trenchant observation.

Now enough from me…Here’s Darrow:

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