Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Dunce: NY Mets Catcher Luis Torrens

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you play a sport professionally and make 1.5 million dollars to do it as Luis Torrens does, you are obligated to know the damn rules. Torrens, if he knew them, forgot one of them in the play above that occurred yesterday in the Mets’ game against the Atlanta Braves.

You see, baseball players can not use their equipment or uniforms to affect the movements of a baseball. One’s bare hand, sure; one’s foot even. A player’s glove, of course, is used to catch the ball. But not equipment or parts of the uniform. A player can’t legally catch a ball in his hat, for example. Players have thrown their gloves at home run balls to deflect them back on the field, and a special rule forbids even that.

With runners on second and third, a pitch in the dirt from Mets starter Paul Blackburn forced Torrens to slide to block the ball from rolling away and allowing the runners to advance. But as he hustled over to the ball, the catcher used his mask to stop it from rolling further before grabbing it with his glove.  The umpires declared that Torrens had violated MLB Rule 5.06(b)(3)(E), declaring that it is illegal when “a fielder deliberately touches a pitched ball with his cap, mask or any part of his uniform detached from its proper place on his person.” The Braves runner on third was awarded home plate, scoring an unearned run, and the runner of second advanced to third base.

Juneteenth Ethics Inclusion [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Juneteenth is our first, and one hopes, last DEI holiday. The idea of having national holidays contrived to celebrate particular racial, ethnic and gender groups in an outburst of white male guilt is anti-American to the core and profoundly offensive. True, Rationalization #22 (“There are worse things.”) provides some solace; the holiday is hardly the worst thing that the national freakout over a drug-addicted black thug resisting arrest in Minneapolis and running into the wrong cop inflicted on the U.S. But the year Biden’s autopen established it, 2021, speaks volumes.

Meanwhile….

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Who Didn’t See the “Whataboutism” Defense of the Biden Dementia Cover-up Coming?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I call this pathetic, and depressing evidence of just how low the Axis and its supporters are willing to stoop to avoid admitting their obvious wrongdoing.

Desperate Democrats in my life started resorting to this in early 2024, despite its being strained and unethical. Trump, you see, was just as mentally fading as Biden. Sure, whatever you say, Trump Derangement Face! Maybe they even have convinced themselves that they believe this. “Listen to his rambling! The crazy things he says!”

Of course, Trump has always been like this, at least for as long as I’ve paid attention to him which has been several decades now. Nevertheless, no one can miss his extraordinary energy, his willingness to be seen and interviewed, and his resilience. There is, literally, no comparison with Biden’s obvious physical and mental deterioration, nor does it seem plausible that anyone would be able to hijack Trump’s power in the White House like Biden’s aides did to poor Joe.

But here’s Mediaite this week with a headline identical to several other Axis propaganda sites—yup, a memo must have gone out!—“Trump Drops Papers He Just Signed and Mistakenly Refers to the U.K. as ‘The European Union.’”

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The Battle For Most Unethical Big City Mayor Heats Up: Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson Says “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Oh yes, another reparations con from a Democratic mayor. What a surprise.

Arguably the most racist of all U.S. mayors, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, signed an executive order this week establishing a task force that will make recommendations for slavery reparations that would supposedly compensate black residents for policies long gone, while penalizing non-black residents for having the wrong color skin. These proposals “will serve as appropriate remedies and restitution for past injustices,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.

Sure.

Johnson is wasting $500,000 on this popular progressive pipe dream, which is certain to actually help black Chicagoans not one whit, but he’ll be able say “I tried!” That will be worth half a million wasted dollars to this grifter, apparently.

The Mayor’s executive order does not put a dollar amount on any potential reparations, and it does not say who will be eligible if the task force recommends any payment in the city, because, just like San Francisco and California’s reparations virtue-signaling (at least to those who think giving away money based solely on the basis of skin color is virtuous), Chicago’s stunt will just cause more racial division.

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Another Botch From “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Bad ethicist. BAD ethicist!

I don’t understand what warped ethics dimension the latest column [Gift link!] from “The Ethicist” hails from, but I wouldn’t recommend going there.

An inquirer wants to know if she should alert a new renter of a neighborhood home that the previous tenants left after telling her that the place has black mold, which can be deadly. “Our concern is that we’ve seen families with small children looking at the house. We believe that we might be in legal jeopardy if we were to inform prospective tenants about the mold issue, but what is our moral obligation?” she asks.

The inquirer means ethical obligation, though “Love thy neighbor (and thus don’t let him walk into a death trap)” is part of the most famous moral code of them all.

But I digress. After his usual long discourse, Prof. Appiah says, “You’re not under a moral obligation to act, and you wouldn’t be wrong to stay out of it.”

The inquirer would be absolutely 100% wrong, just as “the Ethicist” is! Of course there’s an obligation here: The Golden Rule, or reciprocity, dictates warning the new neighbor. So do absolutist principles, which hold human life to be the highest priority. We all share ethical responsibilities for our fellow human beings’ health and welfare. How many analogies do we need here? “Should I tell my new neighbor that I think I saw an escaped mass murderer in the house’s window?” “Should I tell my neighbor that I think I saw his landlord burying a body in the back yard?”

All the inquirer has to say is: “The previous tenant said that she believed your house is infested with black mold. I have no idea if that’s true, but I thought you should know.” There’s no legal jeopardy, and even if there were, the ethical mandate is to be principled and courageous: the health and welfare of innocent parties are at stake.

The supposed expert is paid to opine on ethics and reaches this indefensible conclusion? The New York Times need to find a new columnist for “The Ethicist.”

“What’s Going On Here?” I Have No Idea, and Neither Do You

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Two maybe major news stories have broken on conservative news media this week, but neither of them appear in the nation’s most prestigious newspapers this morning. I haven’t checked, but I’m reasonably certain that I won’t hear about those “BREAKING!” developments on NPR, PBS, CNN or MSNBC either.

Why would that be? Well, one explanation is that the stories are fake news. The other…Come on now, you should be able to figure it out by now!

In Story One, FBI Director Kash Patel turned over to Congress a declassified intelligence report involving a Chinese plot to mass-produce fake U.S. driver’s licenses to facilitate Chinese nationals in the U.S. obtaining fake mail-in ballots that would be cast for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The intelligence reports from August 2020 weren’t corroborated or fully investigated, but were taken back from intelligence agencies by the FBI at about the time that then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified there were no known plots of foreign interference ahead of the 2020 election. Some sources report that the FBI tried to destroy the evidence. The investigation was stopped even though U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted nearly 20,000 fake licenses, a possible corroboration of the buried report.

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And the First “Terry Moran ‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ Award” Goes To…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jim Acosta!

Hardly an upset, but wow, what an asshole. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?

Acosta was riffing on a “No Kings” Day episode of “The Contrarian” podcast hosted by fellow-Stage 5 Trump Derangement sufferer Jennifer Rubin, and attacked President Trump for having ICE enforce our immigration laws. Then he made the bizarre argument that the President is a hypocrite because two of his three wives were immigrants. They weren’t illegal immigrants, mind you, but progressive Democrats like Acosta pretend that they don’t understand the distinction.

“Where are the ICE raids at the Trump properties? Could somebody call ICE on the Trump golf course in Virginia? You’re telling me there’s nobody in there that is undocumented or has some kind of squirreliness going on with their paperwork?” he asked. “Give me a break. How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one [that would be first wife Ivana, who died in 2022] buried at his golf course in New Jersey! Isn’t she buried by the first hole or the second tee or something like that?” he asked. Rubin’s guest April Ryan, another unethical reporter, cackled along with Rubin at Acosta’s wit. “Immigrants always doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do!” he joked.

This guy was CNN’s primary reporter on the first Trump administration. His bias was palpable, and Acosta is now revealing what kind of vicious hate-monger CNN allowed to distort the news in pursuit of his–and its— own partisan agenda.

Someone can try to amuse like-minded resistance fanatics with absurd anti-Trump bile, and one can be a tough journalist speaking “truth to power.” But a reporter who indulges in the first has no credibility trying be the latter. What are the chances that Acosta’s disqualifying contempt for Donald trump wasn’t common knowledge at CNN while he was posing as a journalist? My guess? None.

Commenting on his outburst, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Jim Acosta is a disgraceful human being.” Why yes, Karoline, I believe you are correct.

Case Study: How Broadcast News and “Experts” Deceive the Public

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

As I have mentioned here before, I usually sample broadcast news by simultaneously watching CNN, Fox News, BBC America and MSNBC on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel, never staying with any of them for more than a few minutes because they all are unethical, biased, and untrustworthy and it drives me CRAZY!

Just now, I saw Wolf Blitzer (has anyone ever parlayed a cool name into such a long, undeserved TV career despite persistent mediocrity?) interview an “expert,” clearly another Trump-hating law professor. She opined that President Trump “might” be violating the Constitution ( “KING! FASCIST!”) by directing ICE to again focus their illegal immigrant raids on restaurants, farms and hotels. It’s a likely violation of the Tenth Amendment, she opined. “The Tenth Amendment reserves the policing power to the states.”

That’s funny, I thought. I don’t recall the Tenth Amendment saying anything about police, and indeed, it doesn’t. What it says is that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Like the Second Amendment, the Tenth was not the Founders’ most shining hour in terms of clear, unambiguous language. The Tenth continues to be a rich and never-ending target for the Supreme Court controversies, but SCOTUS did rule, in McCulloch v. Maryland, that there is a principle of implied powers where the federal government (Congress or the Executive) can exercise powers not explicitly listed in the Constitution if they are necessary and proper for carrying out its enumerated powers. Obviously the ability to enforce federal law would fall under that category, but okay ICE foes, take your best shot and see what SCOTUS says.

However, what the “expert” implied was that the Tenth explicitly included policing as one of the powers reserved to the state. Wolf, either as a deceitful accomplice or as an ignorant boob (I’m guessing the latter to give him the benefit of the doubt) just sat there nodding. Thus any viewer who wasn’t moved to check the Bill of Rights (I’m guessing that’s 99.9% of CNN’s audience) was left with the false impression that President Trump is being a dictator again by directing a Federal Agency.

Let’s see: fake news, misinformation, partisan spin, deceit. Take your pick. No wonder the Axis was able to gull thousands of citizens into wasting time on “No Kings” day.

New Ways To Cheat: The Fake Flight Attendant!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Tirone Alexander, 35, has been convicted of impersonating a flight attendant at least 120 times in order to get free commercial airline flights between 2018 and 2024 . He also doesn’t know how to spell “Tyrone.”

There is a common airline policy (that I never heard of before) allowing flight attendants and pilots from other airlines to fly for free. Alexander knew about the benefit because he had worked as a flight attendant for regional airlines between 2013 and 2015. He visited airline websites and checked the “flight attendant” option during the online check-in process. There he would find a form asking applicants to list their current employer in the industry, their hiring date, and badge number. Alexander faked all of it and counted on no one bothering to check. No one did.

Almost all examples of audacious cheating and grifting depend on 1) people trusting strangers to be honest, which is, sadly, a mistake; 2) people not doing their jobs diligently, which many don’t; 3) systems that have yawning loopholes that sociopaths can exploit, and 4) the cheater/con artist having boundless audacity.

Number 4 eventually gets most cheaters caught.

Alexander has been found guilty of four counts of wire fraud and one count of fraudulently accessing a restricted area of ​​the airport. He faces decades in prison at his sentencing, which is scheduled for August 25.

Meanwhile, the airlines will be tightening their free flight policies, and maybe eliminating them. As is so often the case, the rare cheat spoils a nice thing for everyone else.

Confronting My Biases, Episode 22: This!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Talk about res ipsa loquitur.

Another title I considered for this post: “Now THAT’S a comb-over!”

I know that it is wrong to take an instant dislike to someone because of his or her appearance. You can’t judge a book by its cover, after all, it is what’s inside that matters, and so on. A dear friend and theater world associate died this year, and he was a odd-looking, gay, neurodivergent costume designer who presented himself in public so bizarrely at times that it boggled my mind. He was also as kind a human being as you could find in a lifetime of searching.

But Kolby, Kolby, Kolby...the fussy mustache? The prissy smile? That hair? I find myself asking, “What are the chances that this guy is even barely tolerable? What message is he sending with all of this? Why is he sending that message?

Related questions include: How serious can Democrats be about attracting support from young men if they promote their embrace of this guy? Does the whole party reject the premise of the Cognitive Dissonance Scale? If he’s a secret political genius or something, shouldn’t they hid him in bunker or have him wear a mask like Mexican wrestlers?

Would you let someone who looked like this date your daughter? Your son? Would you trust him to babysit?

I’ll give Dana the last word…