Author: Jack Marshall

Stop Making Me Defend Eric Adams!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

PIX11’s Dan Mannarino interviewed New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week and at the end asked a Barbara Walters-ish question. “Mr. Mayor, we’ve come to the end of what was a very eventful 2023. So, when you look at the totality of the year, if you had to describe it in one word, what would that word be? And tell me why.”

Adams answered, “’New York.’ This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center, to a person who’s celebrating a new business being open. This is a very, very complicated city. And that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

Republicans, conservatives, the social media mobs and even some on the Left “pounced.” “Eric Adams gives the worst answer any politician has ever given to a softball question,” MSNBC contributor (and you know what THAT means) Tim Miller tweeted. echoing the reactions of many Adams critics. (Adams is also being mocked this week for joking that he will occasionally “look at myself, and I give myself the finger.”)

Refreshing as it is to see a Democrat getting the Donald Trump treatment for an off-hand remark that critics deliberately interpret as negatively impossible, Adams doesn’t deserve the brickbats for the 9/11 gaffe. It’s obvious what he meant, isn’t it? Searching for contrasting extremes that illustrate what an exciting and unpredictable place his city is, his mind jumped to the most shocking of all Big Apple events, putting him in instant peril. It reminded me of a scene in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” when the baseball team’s manager (played by one of my favorite character actors, Vincent Gardenia) is trying to give an inspirational speech to his players, who have just learned that their back-up catcher (Robert DeNiro) is dying. He’s determined not to mention that metaphorical elephant in the locker room, but the first words out of the manager’s mouth are “When I die..” Gardenia’s eyes roll in disgust with himself as soon as he hears what he said—the perfect expression of someone thinking, “I can’t believe that I did that!” But it’s like trying not to think of a hippopotamus.

Anyone who speaks often in public and spontaneously is going to have these moments. I speak unscripted for a living, and I think I’m good at it, but now and then the words I hear coming out of my mouth are horrifying. Talk show hosts, reporters, politicians, stand-up comics, teachers—this is an occupational hazard. Most of the social media-dwellers attacking Adams have never given a pubic speech or an unscripted public statement in their lives.

What Adams was trying to say was that his single word description of 2023 from his perspective was “New York” (that’s two words, by the way) because you never know what’s going to happen, and have to be ready for anything. Sure, he would have been safer breaking into a verse of the theme from “New York, New York,” but he didn’t, and once he committed to the “good vs bad” approach, he was stuck. (If he had chosen the Jets losing their starting quarterback on the first play of the season instead of 9/11, he would have been attacked by Jets fans.)

Mayor Adams has had a rocky year to be sure, but as failing Democratic big city mayors go, he’s been lapped in incompetence by the mayors of D.C., Chicago and Boston, among others. He deserves a break.

Ethics Quiz: The Christmas Flash Mob

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A group of about 60 Christmas carolers the the local Cure Church staged a good cheer invasion at a Kansas City, Kansas, Walmart last Sunday. Shoppers and employees stopped to listen and some sang along. Naturally the scene was caught on video, and, predictably, the video “went viral” on social media.

Also predictably, Scrooges were out in force on social media. Reddit patrons were especially hostile. “Not the Bee” was depressed at the reaction, sniffing, “This is Christmas we’re talking about! We used to understand that things were a little more magical and glorious this time of year.”

Well, yes, I am certainly sympathetic, but it was still a disruption in a private business without prior consent, and if anything flies in the face of “diversity” cant, it’s a public demonstration of a particular religion’s beliefs to a captive audience. After all, the group wasn’t singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One person’s Christmas magic is another’s inappropriate proselytizing.

Your Ethics Alarms Christmastime Ethics Quiz is…

Was the Christmas caroling flash mob ethical?

Musings on Jesse Otero, the Human Broken Window

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

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Christmas Countdown Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Presumably you know what to do by now…

About the song: apparently Harry Belafonte never performed this classic for TV; if he did, no one’s put it on YouTube. Every year, I admire his rendition of “Mary’s Boy Child” more. The singer introduced the song into the popular Christmas canon in 1956, after hearing it sung by a choir. It has been covered many, many times by singers ranging from Andy Williams to Charlotte Church, but is one of the very few Christmas songs without an interpretation by Bing Crosby.

Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

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Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Business Ethics Dunces: Best Buy and Geek Squad

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, they are not ready to help, or at least not yesterday, when I gave the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy an opportunity to live up to its claims on the Best Buy website.

ProEthics had an emergency yesterday. Grace’s laptop, from which she runs our business, wouldn’t start; we couldn’t get the power to go on. We know we need to replace it because it is old and has been having hiccups more frequently recently, but the end-of-year cash flow being what it is, were hoping to deal with the issue in January. My son has the magic touch regarding all forms of technology and anything mechanical, but he was at work, and I decided that we should deal with the crisis without interfering with his life. My neighbor has maintained a Geek Squad service contract for many years (though her computer needs do not involve a business), so I decided to give them a try. A corner of the local Best Buy is devoted to the computer repair and service company, which they acquired some time ago.

There was a bad omen at the start: two people were waiting, and no one was behind the counter. “She said she’ll be back in a minute,” one of the customers told me. As you know, almost every establishment, doctor’s office, restaurant and retail business is understaffed now, thanks to foolish minimum wage increases and businesses trying to keep costs down with epic inflation by hiring fewer employees. Customer service is virtually extinct. Best Buy, which once was notable for its plethora of employees on the floor who could answer questions and guide you through your visit, has now joined the trend.

When the Geek Squad staff member on counter duty returned, it was not a smiling man or a women professionally dressed in the Squad uniform pictured, but a strutting young lady with her hair in a durag with some kind of big bow on top. She had false eyelashes so thick and long that she appeared to be in party attire, with extreme make-up.

Well, heck….I decided that if Geek Squad felt she was a computer expert, she was a computer expert. I tried to explain my problem, including that my business relied on this laptop and that trying to get it working was crucial, but she cut me off saying, “Well let’s plug this in and see if it starts.” As I tried to say, “Yeah, it’s been plugged in all morning and it won’t…” she left the counter again, leaving me gaping like a fish. She returned in about five minutes, saw no sign of life and said, “It’s dead, sir. You need to buy a new computer. They’re over there…” She started to leave again. I said, “Wait. I told you this was an emergency. If I buy a new computer, I need you to transfer the data from this one.” “We can do that, but it’s going to take two to four days,” she said. “As I said, this is an emergency,” I replied. “Can’t you do the job faster than that?”

“Sir, we have our people working on other computers; that’s the fastest we can be,” she said dismissively, and left again. I was going to ask for assistance in sifting through the options, but didn’t have the chance. I took back the laptop and left.

Well, guess what? When my son got home from work, he took the laptop and returned it a few hours later. It’s working fine.

Well…

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Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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At Least Newsweek Is Trying

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Newsweek has been trying to find its way for some time now, sometimes reading like part of the “conservative media,” other times staying in step with the mainstream media leftist bias. Now it is including the device above after all of its articles.

It’s a start. The weaknesses of such subjective ratings are obvious: true ideologues and the hopelessly biased can’t see any news story that isn’t slanted to support their worldview as “fair.” The data presumably can also be rigged by repeat ratings. Nevertheless, I applaud Newsweek’s effort, and would like to see more publications and news organizations use such a ratings system on their stories. Maybe the mere presence of such a check-point will provide incentive to reporters to cool the “advocacy journalism.”

We can help encourage other publication to use a ratings system by rewarding Newsweek. I’m going to use it as a source more often on Ethics Alarms.

What Is The Ethical Way To Compensate Glynn Simmons?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Hint: There isn’t one.

Glynn Simmons, 70, was convicted of murder in 1975. Yesterday he was exonerated in court after he had spent more than 48 years in prison. Well, on the plus side, he now holds the record for the longest time served by a wrongfully convicted inmate in the United States. That’s something, isn’t it?

Judge Amy Palumbo of Oklahoma County District Court declared Simmons innocent of the crime that had occurred during a liquor store robbery. As is often the case in such episodes, an eye witness got it wrong. As is also too often the case, it was determined that prosecutors withheld important evidence from the defense. It’s not all good news for Glynn: he was just diagnosed with cancer. The last time he was free, Simmons was 27 years old.

“Don’t let nobody tell you that it can’t happen, because it really can,” Simmons said a news conference after the ruling. Depressing but obviously true. The man’s life has been taken away from him. Those primarily responsible, a careless witness and unethical prosecutors, can’t be punished. It will take time for Simmons to get significant damages from the state, and time is what this justice system debacle robbed from him. There is no remedy.

No system is or can be perfect. The justice system has failed before and will fail again. That, however, does not mitigate the tragedy of Glynn Simmons’ ruined life. It only makes it more frustrating.

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[Note: WordPress’s AI-recommended tags on this post; “Ben Simmons,” “NBA,” Brooklyn Nets”]