Author: Jack Marshall

Disney’s Sunk Costs Fiasco, And Introducing “The Nelson”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Disney, which has completely lost its way as a cultural icon, story-teller, entertainment source and exemplar, recently announced that it will be delaying its release of the live-action “Snow White” for at least a year after terrible publicity and a big-mouthed star made its $300,000,000 plus investment look shaky at best. Initially, the thinking was that the studio, recently the victim of one high-budget bomb after another, was just hoping to let all the controversy fade away, but no. The plan, it turns out, is to spend as much as another 100 million dollars to add CGI dwarfs, modeled on the animated originals, to the film and to remove whatever the hell these were…

…which was the DEI-driven, uber-woke Disney replacement for the iconic little fellas after a single short actor had complained that keeping that feature of the classic fairy tale would be uncool. The company really made an artistic decision this way. It really did. Morons. Walt would have rolled in his grave if he weren’t frozen stiff.

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Updates: The Lewiston Shooting And “Arghh! Biden Has A Primary Challenger!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

bias

The fact that so many loyal Democrats and smug progressives will still look you in the eye and say that mainstream media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory speaks eloquently of the corruption of American politics, individual integrity and democracy. Two depressing examples:

1. The missing mass shootings.

Kevin Downey reviews the large number of mass shootings since the Lewiston massacre, and points out that even though one would assume that a) they are all newsworthy and b) that the anti-gun journalism establishment would want such tragedies to be known, only the Maine shooting ticked off the right boxes to advance the agreed-upon MSM narrative without undermining some part of it. In addition to the high body count, the Lewiston massacre featured a white male shooter using a semi-automatic weapon (that they could call “an assault weapon”). And he apparently liked some conservative social media posts, meaning that the shooting was really Donald Trump’s fault.

Maine authorities were also warned about Robert R. Card II in plenty of time to stop him if they had followed established policies but didn’t. Oh, never mind: as with the Uvalde shooting and others, it’s the guns, the victims and the shooter that matter, not the fact that existing laws and competent law enforcement should have been sufficient to prevent the disaster.

Since the Lewiston shooting (October 25) there were ten more mass shootings, leaving 14 dead and 65 wounded. Two took place in Chicago (of course) and left 19 people shot.In one shooting involving a handgun, 15 victims were hit by gunfire. That there weren’t more deaths is moral luck. The mostly ignored shootings involved shooters “of color,” drug gatherings, parties substantially attended by non-whites, and weapons that couldn’t plausibly be called “weapons of war.”

Downey also cited the amusing idiocy of, again, Joy Behar on “The View,” produced by ABC News, showing abject gun ignorance ( I missed it–sock drawer…). She said (and no one on the set had the wit, integrity or knowledge to contradict her),”If you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it because you basically demolish the animal.” She “doesn’t know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka,” writes Downey. That’s fair.

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Insulting Chutzpah Of The Year: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Donald Trump may win the Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce of the Year title (he has several entries in the field, and the year is young) as well as the Unethical Quote of the Year distinction (ditto). He has already won Asshole of the Year in record time. But with this one, he has forged a new category entirely.

During a rally over the weekend, following Mike Pence’s inevitable withdrawal from the Presidential race he never should have entered, Trump said, “People are leaving now and they’re all endorsing me. I don’t know about Mike Pence. He should endorse me. You know why? Because I had a great, successful Presidency and he was the Vice President. But people in politics can be very disloyal. ”

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Ethics Dunces, Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Division: Any American Jew Who Reflexively Supports Today’s Progressives And Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I shouldn’t have to expound on this, as the news and rhetoric from college campuses, academia, Black Lives Matter and “The Squad” ought to make the case. I’ll just note this, among many equally persuasive examples:

York City Mayor Eric Adams has appointed as the chair and executive director of the city’s Commission on Racial Equity Linda Tigani, previously acting chief equity and strategy officer for the city’s Health Department.  Tigani has posted pro-Hamas propaganda on social media, including the slogan “From the river to the sea,” which is explicitly anti-Semitic, a call for the elimination of Israel.

Nice. But she is hardly an anomaly. “Never again!” sounds hollow when Jews willingly ally themselves with those who seek their destruction.

Ethics Hero: Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The United Nations General Assembly voted on a non-binding resolution calling for an immediate “humanitarian truce” in Gaza. 120 countries voted for the measure, with 45 abstaining. Only14 nations voted against it: Israel, the US, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga. Eight EU members supported the cease-fire, including Belgium, Ireland, France, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain.

The vote was not surprising, but disgraceful nonetheless. One might think that Belgium, France, Luxembourg, which suffered so at the hands of the Nazis, might have a greater appreciation for the need to take a strong stand against evil-doers, but no. The UK, disgustingly, abstained, but anti-Semitism is popular there.

Of course, a cease fire or truce simply means that Hamas and Iran advance the ball a little further up the field, with a touchdown meaning the eradication of Israel. Those 120 countries know it, too, or should, especially since the resolution didn’t even bother to condemn the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, or to call for the release of the 230 hostages the Hamas took captive on that day.

“One must not stand silent in the face of a second Holocaust,” the Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová said, calling on her country to withdraw from the United Nations in protest. “The Holocaust is back, and we must not be silent again.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Really, New York Times?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Arthur in Maine, who doesn’t live there now but used to and for a long time, has typically astute reflections to pass along in this Comment of the Day on the Lewiston shooting and more. Here he is, responding to the post, “Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?”:

***

I am still trying to process what happened in Lewiston – a place in which I spent as little time as possible during the many years I lived in Maine. The town is gritty, an ex-mill town, and I rarely there unless I had business. In my last eight or ten years in Maine, I lived about 30 miles down the road.

Between 1977 and 2017, with a year or a season off elsewhere, I lived in northern New England – specifically, Vermont and Maine. I moved to Vermont in the autumn of 1977 and, with the exception of a year in France in the early 1980s, lived there until 1987, when I moved to Maine. And I lived in Maine far longer than I have lived anywhere else.

In 1983, when I was still living in a tiny town in Vermont, there was a murder. In a town of several hundred, in a state of less than a million, this was shocking news that stayed in the headlines for a week. The victim was a young woman. She was a sweetheart, had a Russian accent, and she and her common-law husband, ran the local gas station/convenience store. He was an Iranian immigrant, gruff and taciturn, but capable of great kindness, which I witnessed more than once. I liked them both very much.

He wasn’t there the morning that Bill Harvey walked into the store and shot her point blank. I knew Bill, too. He was quiet and mousy and shy; he was the guy who serviced the gas equipment at the area restaurants I worked in. He was odd, but he did know his trade; he brought more than one expensive piece of kit back to life over the several years I watched him work.

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Ethics Alarms Offers, For Your Halloween Ethics Horror Movie Viewing Pleasure, “Drag Me To Hell”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics horror movies comprise a sparsely-populated genre, but 2009’s “Drag Me To Hell” is a sterling example. It is at once scary, campy and clever, but its ethics lessons are valid and even inspiring.

The story involves a young bank loan officers who allows ambition to override her natural ethical instincts, resulting in the young woman being on the receiving end of a gypsy curse. On the way to the film’s surprising conclusion, she has several ethical dilemmas to solve, with mixed results. She also eventually takes full responsibility for her disastrous unethical act, for all the good it does her. (Lesson: Don’t expect a reward for doing the right thing.)

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Pre-Halloween Ethics Tricks And Treats, 10/29/23

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Things are piling up again on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, so let’s get into it, shall we?

1. Speaking of runways, will you feel better about your family dying in an airplane crash if you know a DEI hire in the control tower was at fault? Sure you will! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is placing a more diverse diverse workforce over the most qualified workforce even as the air traffic control system has been showing alarming holes, problems and failures including staffing shortages, mistakes, technological challenges and close call incidents. The Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated as part of President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy—what matters is how many minorities an agency has, you see, not how well it does its job. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022, and is headed to litigation. “Obviously we are talking about a line of work where merit and the need for skill are a matter of life and death,” Mountain States Legal Foundation General Counsel William Trachman. “No one cares about the race of the air traffic controller guiding in their flight.”

Wanna bet?

2. The ethics foul buried in the misleadingly-titled essay, “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night”: the news media, politicians and educators are trying to terrify children and gullible adults into accepting extreme progressive and Marxist policies. Causing clinical anxiety is just collateral damage to the activists. We’ve seen this before in the ’50s through the 80’s, when the “ban the bomb,” unilateral disarmament, “Better Red than Dead” and “Imagine” crowd was convincing children that they were going to die in order to advance the cause of pacifism.

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Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Well, to be fair, Stephen King is an acclaimed writer of horror fantasy, so he qualifies as a thoughtful authority on…wait, no he doesn’t, does he? King does live in Maine, though, so there’s that.

Here’s King’s entire opinion piece titled, “We’re Out of Things to Say.” (I’m not going to read the Times readers’ comments, because they will just send me to the wood-chipper.) as he pretends that a sloppily-conceived, virtue-signaling sigh is enlightenment:

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Serious Question: Has Vice-President Harris Not Read The Bill of Rights, Or Does She Just Want The Government To Ignore It?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This would be an “Incompetent Elected Official” post, except a) we already know Kamala Harris is incompetent, and b) her penchant for talking nonsense, gibberish or idiocy long ago reached Julie Principle proportions. But other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have appealed to ignorance, emotion and hysteria by doing what Harris did yesterday as part of the wholly predictable Democratic Party/progressive/mainstream media attack on gun rights after a mass shooting tragedy. This one, as you probably know already, was in Maine, and unusually deadly, so the gun-grabbing fanatics and the “Do something!” crazies were really licking their chops.

On stage with Australia’s Prime Minister at an event yesterday, Harris blathered, “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”

As usual, Harris required a translator. It doesn’t have to be “this way” in Australia? Have our communities been terrified there? How has Australia demonstrated what is possible or desirable in the United States? It hasn’t, of course: it hasn’t even demonstrated that it is possible to eliminate mass shootings in Australia, where the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 made semiautomatic weapons and shotguns illegal and mandated the confiscation of close to 650,000 firearms.  The NFA requires Australians to wait 28 days before they purchase a gun to allow extensive background checks. Applicants must obtain a license and a permit, be over 18 years old, provide documentation that the weapon will be stored securely and complete firearms safety training. They must also provide a “justifiable reason” for owning the gun, and self-defense doesn’t qualify. A requirement less stringent than this was just struck down as unconstitutional in New York.

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