Author: Jack Marshall

“Incompetent and Irresponsible State of the Decade” Nomination: Minnesota [Expanded!]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

What, not New York? California? Oregon? Washington? Oh, they are all in the race too: “failed states” we might call them if they were foreign countries. But lately the enormity of how badly Minnesota residents have exercised their voting rights has been throbbingly obvious.

Of course we already know that the state has Keith Ellison (EA dossier here) as its Attorney General. It also has a criminal and anti-Semitic House member, Rep. Omar, who committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother and lying about it, who has stated that her loyalties are to a foreign nation (Somalia) first, and who has, among other outrages, attempted to minimize the international crimes committed on 9/11/2001 (“some people did something”). But look at the clowns— figuratively, not literally, but it’s a close call [Added: but see below] —Minnesota has elected as its governor and lieutenant governor.

Minnesota’s lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, a Catholic, wore a hijab to express solidarity with Somalis in a local TV appearance. Massive fraud in the Somali community has stolen taxpayer funds to the tune of at least $9 billion. “I know that things are scary right now,” said Flanagan, alluding to the fact that ICE is correctly cracking down on a deliberately unassimilated community rife with members who have broken the law to get here, and then broke the law some more.

It was exactly Flanagan’s kind of pandering that appears to have led Democratic politicians like her to avoid interfering with the Somali scammers, because it is such a large voting bloc. Eh, so they are taking money that was supposed to help struggling, law abiding citizens. Corruption is a tradition in Somalia! Multiculturalism!

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Last Head Explosion of 2025 (I Hope)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.

There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.

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Unopened Ethics Gifts, December 26, 2025…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On the topic of Christmas movies: I missed several this year, despite leaving it to Hollywood to make up virtually my whole celebration. I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” (really a Thanksgiving movie), “White Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “The Bishop’s Wife,” and “Home Alone 2.” Also “The Santa Clause,” and lesser modern efforts like “Four Christmases.”I did not see “The Homecoming” (but will, tonight), and also missed the original “Christmas in Connecticut,” all of the Dickens “Christmas Carols,” “Elf,” which I object to because Ed Asner is a terrible Santa Clause, and “Die Hard,” because it is not a Christmas movie just because it takes place during an office Christmas party. I’d concede that “Die Hard 2” is more of a Christmas movie because the whole plot revolves around holiday air travel gone horribly wrong. (“Sleepless in Seattle,” the Dead Wife movie that I foolishly continue to watch, is a Christmas movie because the plot is set in motion by a child’s Christmas wish.)

I also watched three Christmas horror movies: the excellent original “Black Christmas,” the surprisingly good “You Better Watch Out,” and the violent black comedy “Santa’s Slay,” in which Kris Kringle morphs into a super-powered serial killer, putting a real cramp in the Christmas spirit.

But Amazon Prime Video was responsible for an almost equal Christmas horror: the streaming service has been offering a butchered version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that is 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film because it cuts out the whole sequence when George sees how awful everything turns out in a world where he’s never been born. He goes to the bridge to kill himself, Clarence the angel intervenes, then George goes back into town to find that his friends and neighbors have chipped in to solve his crisis. That’s like showing a version of “Titanic” without the part where the ship sinks, or “Old Yeller” where the dog doesn’t get rabies.

The excuse has to do with some copyright disputes, but Amazon Prime carries both the full and abridged versions—I know because I watched the full version to write this year’s Ethics Companion. The platform does not clearly explain the difference, however, leaving unsuspecting viewers to click the wrong one.

Meanwhile…

1. A “Don’t Confuse Me With Facts, My Mind’s Made Up” classic! Here MS Now (formerly MSNBC) host Paola Ramos resolutely and condescendingly tells two unusually nerdy guests that there is no scientific evidence of any genetic differences between the black and white races.

The duo is understandably aghast and frustrated as this progressive shill frames their factual statements as vestiges of white supremacy, and that’s that. In addition to being unethical because it’s terrible journalism and science to be spewing into the public discourse, I suspect that the former MSNBC chose those two stereotypical geeks to make them easy targets.

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Christmas Hangover Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I had a really strange Christmas Day, being a guest of two strangers as I was asked to play the role of surrogate father to a fiftyish neighbor who wanted me to be her guest at dinner with her new boyfriend and his incredibly old mother. My neighbor would not take “no” for an answer, so what the hell. It was better than sitting around in a bleak house having a lot of memories sitting around staring at me.

I had neglected to include Nat King Cole’s signature Christmas song among the ones I highlighted this month, but it’s one that’s appropriate for the whole holiday season, so here it is. I wonder if anyone else noticed that “The Christmas Song,” by Nat, the Carpenters, Dean Martin, among others, or its author, Mel Torme (How must it feel when you are a renowned singer in your own right and the best song you ever wrote is identified with a rival singer?) seemed to get less play on this year than usual. Please tell me it isn’t because the song has been “cancelled” due to political correctness. You know: “Eskimos.”

I once tried to come up with a minimally disruptive lyric change to accommodate “Folks dressed up like Inuits” but the best I could come up with was “Jack Frost nipping at your tits…”

Uh, no.

Nat King Cole is another brilliant, unique vocal artist whose only hold on the culture’s memory is his single Christmas classic. Future generations won’t know what they’re missing. Cole died in 1965, still in great voice at 45. Here’s this marvelous balladeer at his best without chestnuts…

But I digress. If you had any disturbing or amusing encounters with the Trump Deranged yesterday, this would be a good place to relate them. (I did!)

Celebrating the 111th Anniversary of the Strange But Ethical “Christmas Truce”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Good morning! Was Santa good to you? I might as well repost this essay about the Christmas truce; since I only have published it on Christmas Day, some readers might have missed it, and EA, believe it or not, sometimes gets new followers from time to time…]

One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”

World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it,  led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.

The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols,  shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.

The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.

It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning  “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private  “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”

The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning,  “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,

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Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

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Christmas Eve Ethics Dunce: Jazz Drummer Chuck Redd

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Because he is angry at President Trump and the Kennedy Center board for adding the President’s name to the cultural center, musician Chuck Redd cancelled the Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center that has been a tradition for more than 20 years. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press . Redd is a drummer and vibraphone player who has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006.

Well, jazz musicians aren’t known for their critical thinking skills or ethics acumen. Let me get this straight, Chuck: you think a fair way to punish Trump and the board for the name change is to disappoint jazz fans in the Washington area who had nothing to do with the decision. Nice.

What an asshole.

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The Tide May Be Turning Against DEI, And It Had Better

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the post earlier this week, “Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part II: The Important Stuff,” one of the items I included as important was Jacob Savage’s disturbing essay on how white males of the Millennial generation were crushed by the DEI policies that even predated the term. He wrote in part,

“As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules…This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.”

The rest of the article was so powerful regarding how white males saw their ambitions and futures hamstrung purely because of their race and gender, with striking statistics to back up his narrative, that it landed like a splash of ice water on the still-raging policy debate. DEI was, and is, simply wrong, unethical, as well as being unconstitutional and illegal. My Trump Deranged Facebook friends keep calling the President “inhuman,” but, strangely, he was the only one with both the power, the guts and the perception to set out to end what has been a cruel form of societally- approved prejudice and discrimination.

I should have devoted a whole post to Savage’s article, but a substack called eugyppius: a plague chronicle did, and expands on what Savage began, well, savagely. He writes,

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Another Christmas Song With An Important Backstory: “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is one of those Christmas songs with multiple verses, like “Away in a Manger.” The first time I heard it was on one of the Christmas somg slection albums my father used to get free when he worked for Sears Roebuck in the Sixties. There were all sorts of strange selections on those records, like Mike Douglas singing “O Holy Night.” (He wasn’t bad, either.) Johnny Cash’s version of “I Heard the Bells” was on the same album as Mike, I think.

The song began as a poem by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Do they still teach Henry’s poems in the schools? I bet not; I bet he’s a cancelled Great White Man now, and they teach Maya Angelou. Henry wrote a lot more memorable poems than Maya: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Excelsior,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Village Blacksmith” “The Children’s Hour,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Arrow and the Song.” among others. Like other great American artists, it is Christmas that keeps his memory flickering, at least for those who know he wrote the words to “I Heard the Bells.”

The poet’s oldest son Charles, a lieutenant in the Union Army,  he was seriously wounded in November of 1863 during the Battle of New Hope Church. Longfellow had begged his only son not to enlist to fight the Rebels. When the terrible news arrived, the poet was still mourning the death of his second wife in a fire two years earlier.

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Stop Making Me Defend Chevy Chase!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I didn’t know until this morning that Chevy Chase was left out of Saturday Night Live’s anniversary reunion show this year, SNL50: The Anniversary Special, Chevy Chase. I don’t know because I stopped watching the show many years ago when it stopped being a cultural satire program without a political agenda and converted to an all-woke, all-progressive, anti-Republican Axis member like all the other late Night Shows. In SNL’s prime, however, when Don Pardo was still the announcer, I never missed an episode.

In CNN Films’ upcoming documentary, “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not,” the original “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” host reveals how hurt he was that he was left out of the program. “Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” Chase says. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?” “Why was Bill Murray [hosting “Weekend Update” on the show] and why was I not? I don’t have an answer for that.”

Oh, I bet Chevy does. He was disliked by much of the cast and regarded as a toxic asshole. But that shouldn’t have mattered, and it was petty and wrong for the producers to snub him.

By purest coincidence, I wrote and co-directed my own 50th anniversary reunion show this year. We invited everyone who had ever been involved in the organization’s productions, and if they were willing, I worked them into the performances, no mean feat if I do say so myself. Did I personally like everyone we invited? No, of course not, nor did several prominent performers care much for me. That didn’t matter, and shouldn’t have mattered. The production was a salute to the group itself and its continued success and longevity. Every single key figure in its history available should have been on that stage or participating in the project.

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