Author: Jack Marshall

Open Forum: Go For the Ethics Gold!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Ugh. I always forget that the Olympics inevitably sparks lots of ethics controversies that I have to cover here despite finding the spectacle boring, corrupt and annoying. So I’m bound to miss some juicy issues—like this one, Australian swimming coach Bret Hawke accusing the Chinese team of cheating because a swimmer’s performance in the pool was “not humanly possible.” They used to say that about the four minute mile, if I recall. Or is this just more “Don’t trust China; China is asshole” stuff?

You don’t have to write about Olympics ethics, of course. But the starting pistol is loaded…

Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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Presenting a Continuing Ethics Alarms Series Until November: “This Is Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I couldn’t get the video to embed, but here’s the link to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate for President angrily chiding Americans for celebrating Christmas because children illegally transported across the border “won’t have a Merry Christmas.”

Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House. Meanwhile, of course, each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible. (Sometimes he will deserve it.)

Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. The mainstream media is the enemy of the people. Ethics Alarms pledges to do its best to help foil them.

Before Offering Second Thoughts J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy, These Relevant Horror Stories:

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was literally in the middle of a preparing a post about the cultural sickness J.D. Vance was allegedly trying (and failing miserably) to focus public attention on when he mocked “childless cat ladies” dictating U.S. policies when these two awful stories came across my screen.

In the first, I learned that Parker Scholtes, 2, was found dead in her parents’ Honda SUV parked outside their home in the Tucson suburb of Marana. Her father, an irresponsible man-child named Christopher Scholtes, had left the baby “to nap,” that is, to broil, for more than three hours on July 9. He said he left her in the car with the air conditioner on (like a good dad, or his warped idea of one), but got involved playing PlayStation video games and didn’t check on her until three hours had gone by. He confessed to police that he knew the car’s engine would automatically shut off after 30 minutes, but just got, you know, carried away and lost track of time. You know how it flies by when you’re having fun.

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Flagrant Virtue-Signaling of the Year: CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services Yiannis Exarchos

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m sure glad I ignore the Olympics as the corrupt, greed-infested fiasco it had been for decades, because if I gave a rip, the Paris Olympics would have my head exploding more frequently than Old Faithful blows. The whole enterprise appears to be run by silly, incompetent, unethical bureaucrats and con artists.

Here’s a particularly nauseating example: the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) Yiannis Exarchos decided to burnish his woke creds by telling reporters in Paris that his organization updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to inveigh against “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “Unfortunately, in some events they are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos said, making no sense at all. “Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.” Exarchos said that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

Oh, shut the HELL up! TV editors favor more close-up shots of women than men because women are more attractive than men, the demographics of Olympic viewing for many events slants male, and there is nothing offensive or disrespectful about showing Olympic athletes like this German sprinter,

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No, NPR, Trump Was 100% Right About Kamala Harris’s Race, And You Are The Liar

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

In the process of being grilled at yesterday’s conference of black journalists, Donald Trump noted the constant fluctuating of Kamala Harris’s racial identification according to what audience she’s addressing and what will best serve her ambition at the time. In the cooking show segment above, for example (I apologize for Juanita’s vulgarity), Kamala pronounced herself “Indian.”

Ethics Alarms generally refers to her as “sort-of black” [I now see that WordPress’s AI bot presumes to challenge my use of the term “generally.” It can bite me.] Trump said, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

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Yet Another Baseball Ethics Hero: Seattle Starting Pitcher George Kirby

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Popular former Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield died of an inoperable brain tumor in his 57th year at the end of last season. Wakefield was famously a knuckleballer, a rare breed in the game, and a athlete admired and loved by fans and all who came in contact with him, another rare breed. One of those admirers was Seattle Mariners pitcher George Kirby, known for being a virtuoso with pitch grips.

Kirby was the starting pitcher in yesterday’s afternoon game between the Mariners and the Red Sox at Fenway Park. It was an important game for both clubs, which are among those battling for a playoff slots in the American League. Statcast now reads pitches instantly, announcing whether a pitch is a fastball, curve, slider, cutter, splitter, change-up, etc. based on its database on each pitcher and the speed, spin-rate and course of the ball. When Kirby began the game by throwing his first pitch to Boston leadoff man Jarren Duran, Statcast shocked observers by stating that Kirby had thrown a pitch that wasn’t normally in his repertoire: a knuckleball.

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Just In Case You’ve Forgotten, April Ryan is Still an Ethics Dunce, the News Media Is Still Biased, and Trump is Still Not a Weenie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I guess there is still some hope that race-baiting, anti-white racist, Trump-Deranged, dumb-as-a-shoehorn journalist April Ryan is slowly sliding into oblivion where she belongs. Once she was a CNN correspondent, which admittedly is nothing to be proud of, but now she toils for the Grio, a racist, race-baiting, American television network and website that says its area is “black news.” Funny, I thought news was news for everyone! Oh well, live and learn. Next on Ryan’s career freefall? Oh, maybe Hip Hop Weekly? But never mind.

April has a long Ethics Alarms dossier, the most recent entry in 2020, when she reprimanded reporters for writing about a leaked recording of Joe Biden making unpalatable comments about the “defund the police” movement. As Jonathan Turley said at the time, “[W]e are moving dangerously close to a de facto state media with the cooperation of Big Tech companies.  Ryan believes that it is outrageous to rely on unapproved material if it is critical of Joe Biden (despite her use of such material for the last four years against Trump).”

Indeed she does. My favorite Ryan episode was in 2017, when she hectored Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the end of a press briefing in which Sanders confirmed the administration’s position that toppling statues of historical figures is both bad history and bad civics by shouting, “Sarah, is slavery wrong? Sarah, is slavery wrong? Does this administration think that slavery was wrong? Sarah, does this administration believe slavery was wrong?”

A class act, to be sure.

The latest April Ryan sighting came as Donald Trump bravely and appropriately agreed to take questions in Chicago today from members of the National Association of Black Journalists. Ryan, of course, was in the camp of the members who have pledged to follow the “Trump is a racist” narrative, contrived though it is. “The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ryan tweeted, or Xed. The group’s co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, resigned in protest: after all, why give a Presidential candidate a chance to change minds that have already been made up? Yeah, this is the perfect group for April Ryan.

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Addendum: “Ethics Hero: Orioles Catcher James McCann, No Weenie He!”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I just heard a commentator on MLB’s cable channel describe James McCann’s now famous act of continuing play after getting a fastball thrown in his face as “the John Wayning of the catcher position.”

Perfect. I enthusiastically endorse the transformation of “John Wayne” into a verb: it’s a much needed one. To John Wayne is to continue to pursue the completion of one’s commitment, assigned task, or duty despite obstacles, threats, pain, personal hardship and danger—even to the point of fanaticism, futility or certain failure.

The Duke would have loved his creation becoming a word to describe that iconic American character. I plan on doing my part to see that John Wayne, verb: John Wayned/John Wayning/ catches on.

Light-Hearted Ribbing or Taunting? The Pineapple Pizza

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Whatever else they may be, the Paris Olympics are definitely….strange.

Hong Kong (is that China or not? I can’t quite figure it out…) won a razor-thin fencing Gold over Italy, 15-14. There was a bitter dispute over the final, decisive point: referees replayed the video three times, and each competitor was convinced he had won. Cheung Ka Long of Hong Kong was ultimately declared the victor, and became the first athlete from Hong Kong to win two Olympic gold medals. He’s historic, see, so that must mean he deserved to win.

The Italian Fencing Federation, meanwhile, said it would file a formal complaint over what it called “unacceptable refereeing.” “Filippo Macchi is the real winner,” Paolo Azzi, the federation’s president, wrote on social media. “He was denied the gold he deserved.”

The New York Times immediately declared that the claim the fencing gold was stolen is “baseless.” (Kidding!)

To slap back at Italy, Pizza Hut’s Hong Kong and Macao branch announced that it is offering free pineapple toppings on its pizzas, a desecration of the dish that, understandable, Italians consider blasphemy. I think it’s funny, but maybe not. Italy truly feels it was robbed. Is the pineapple pizza ploy more like taunting than good-natured joshing? Is Hong Kong disrespectfully rubbing in the pain of a close defeat, or sending a message of “Come on, let’s laugh and be friends!”?

If I ran a Chinese restaurant chain in Italy, I’d announce new menu items like Peking duck with tomato sauce.