Author: Jack Marshall

A Final (I Promise!) Academy Awards Note On The Topic Of Hilarious Incompetence With A Big Scoop Of “Bias Makes You Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This made my head explode. It’s still exploding.

The New York Times has a poignant article today headlined, “With Its Future at Stake, the Academy Tries to Fix the Oscars (Again).” It begins, “The awards telecast has been losing viewers for years. New leadership wants to reverse that starting Sunday, and ensure the financial well-being of the organization.” The article goes on to explain how new leadership at the Academy realizes that desperate measures need to be taken to regain the interest and trust of the audience. It goes on to say,

To secure a distribution contract of similar value when its deal with ABC expires, the academy must reverse viewership declines. A less lucrative deal could imperil some of the organization’s year-round activities, including film restoration. “This is so important to the livelihood and future of the organization that we better confront it,” Ms. Yang said….

The academy is hopeful that Nielsen’s ratings meters for the Oscars will tick upward on Sunday. Big musical stars, including Rihanna, are scheduled to perform their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz will perform during the “In Memoriam” segment. Lady Gaga will be absent, though, with Oscars producers saying on Wednesday that she was too busy filming a movie to perform her nominated song from “Top Gun: Maverick.”

The nominee pool for best picture has never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there are two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. The front-runner for best picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” generated $104 million in ticket sales. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)…“It should be about unity and celebrating this industry,” Mr. Kramer said. “People are still consuming movies. People love movies. Perhaps they’re doing it on streaming more than they did a few years ago. But our art form is as relevant as ever.”

Oh…the article casually drops in this bit of information, almost as an afterthought:

Jimmy Kimmel will return as the host on Sunday…

KABOOM!

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Ethics Dunce (yawn!): Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I know, I know…designating Donald Trump an Ethics Dunce again is in the “dog bites man”category. Nonetheless, I couldn’t let this pass.

Presumably as part of his advance PR as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, thus ensuring the ugliest campaign since 1860 and maybe ever, the Once and Future POTUS is about to unveil “Letters to Trump,” a book revealing 150 private letters sent to him by celebrities and VIPs, among them Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan,  Princess Diana, Ted Kennedy,  Mario Cuomo, Arnold Palmer, Regis Philbin and more; those are the dead ones. Tradition and law holds that that they have no privacy rights now, so I can’t find fault with the inclusion of their letters in the book, which will also include Trump’s comments about the letters and their authors.

However, the book will also include letters from the living, like Bill and Hillary Clinton,  Jay Leno, Liza Minnelli and Oprah Winfrey. I think its fair to assume, since Hillary is on the list, that Trump did not ask for or receive permission to publish their letters. He doesn’t have to, of course: once they are mailed, they are his to do what he wants with them. Nonetheless, common respect and courtesy demands that sharing such communications presumed to be private at the time they were sent—you know, just like President Trump expected that communications he had with advisors, Cabinet members and others during his presidency would be treated as confidential. What about the Golden R..oh, never mind. Continue reading →

And The Award For “Most Ethical Decision Made For The Worst Possible Reason” Goes To…The Oscars!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has intruded via satellite at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, the Berlin Film Festival last month, the Grammy Awards, the Golden Globes, and even the New York Stock Exchange’s Opening Bell. Yet the most overtly and tastelessly political of all the awards shows, the Academy Awards about to be broadcast on ABC this coming Sunday (sadly, I have sock drawer duties) rejected Zelenskyy’s overtures to appear for the second straight year.

Good. It is an award show about movies, and it is inappropriate and an abuse of trust to use the audience’s interest in films to lobby them for any political interests; Heaven knows Hollywood and its artists do too much of that as it is. I’m sure Sean Penn is disappointed; at the Golden Globes in January, the part-time actor/full-time activist Sean Penn introduced Zelenskyy, who again made a plea for public and financial support for his war against Russia.

Next they’ll be showing him on the Jumbotron during the seventh inning stretch at Fenway Park. To hell with that. I hope Ukraine beats Putin flat and that the Russians finally send him to Elba, but I don’t need to find the Ukrainian president’s hand in my pocket at every turn, and the Biden administration is tossing money away like its confetti as it is.

So the Oscars have done the ethical thing two years running, which might be a record. However, Ethics Alarms can only provide the acclaim of one hand clapping at best. The principle here is that ethical conduct is ethical conduct no matter how mixed, venal, stupid or the product of unethical reasoning the impetus for that conduct is. Still, when ethical conduct comes about in warped ways through the ethically-obtuse calculations of the ethically-handicapped, praise has to be restrained.

I’m presuming that the Oscars have rejected Zelenskyy this year for the same reason it did last year…do you know what that was?

Variety reports that its sources say that the show’s producers felt that Ukraine is too white, and that Hollywood has ignored many wars over the years that affected “people of color.”

Open Forum: Spring Cleaning Edition!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

It may be that Spring is officially ten days off, but here in Alexandria, Virginia, Dogwoods are blooming, the Bradford Pears have exploded with brilliant blossoms, the cherry trees have popped, and I’m worrying about the Red Sox (who are undefeated after eleven Spring Training games, meaning that they must be really bad). Damn climate change!

I thought it was a rather turbulent week ethics-wise, and I know that, as usual, a lot was missed here. It was another one of those weeks that I found myself full of self-loathing for not figuring out how to make ethics more profitable without making it unethical—ye olde “ethical vs non-ethical considerations dilemma.

That’s enough blather from me, though: You’re on!

An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Disney Continues Its Transformation Into The Great Stupid’s Cultural Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Disney’s animated/live action feature “Song of the South” (1946) is, to say the least, not a metaphorical hill worth dying on. The animated sections are excellent, but Walt, for reasons known best to him, decided to ignore good advice from various members of the black community who advised him not to use the movie to romanticize plantation life, with happy slaves singing away in the Land of Cotton where old times are not forgotten. “Song of the South’s” version of the Old South makes “Gone With The Wind” seem like the “1619 Project” by comparison; shame on Walt, who spoiled any chance of Joel Chandler Harris’s American folk tales being preserved in our culture.

Of course, Walt’s lapse of judgment doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, that people who want to see the movie (and the screen legacy of African-American actor James Baskett, who deserves to be remembered) ought to be prevented from doing so. 21st Century Corporate Disney, however, has fully embraced the paternalistic view that big media companies and the government know best, so “Song of the South” has been treated like those photos of old Soviet leaders who fell out of favor: erased, banished. Nope, sorry, can’t see it, folks: it will make you racist, or if you are properly woke, cause an aneurysm, or something.

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Addendum: “Further Musings On The Tucker Carlson Car In The Capitol Riot Aftermath Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I took three Tylenol, thought happy thoughts, and subjected myself to Tucker Carlson’s “opening statement”—I find the use of the term by a non-lawyer in a non-trial context precious and pompous, but then that’s Tucker—last night via YouTube this morning.

Observations:

  • When you are making a distinction between liars and yourself, you should probably eschew gross generalities like “people who get angry and wave their arms around are lying.” Tucker, meanwhile, remained calm, which is his style while lying. Yesterday we saw some of his email exchanges while he and the rest of the Fox News crew was giving support to then-President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent, like ,

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait…. I hate him passionately.” (Jan. 4, 2021), and “Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters….He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.” (Jan. 7, 2021)

Of course, the New York Times article that revealed these (and others) also described the Jan. 6 riot as an”insurrection.” Continue reading →

Insidious Stealth Mind-Control Is Spreading And I Have No Idea What Can Be Done About It

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is well-established that when a mind lacks the linguistic tools to conceive of certain thoughts, those thoughts become impossible to conceive. This is why tight control of the language was so central to Big Brother’s control of the populace in “1984,” and, it seems clear, why current aspiring power-mongers on the Left are increasingly employing censorship and linguistic manipulation to herd a lazy, badly-educated and apathetic public into virtual pens where they can be controlled and relied upon to support their betters.

In the last couple of weeks we learned that woke-infested publishers have been stealth editing the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming; this week, “Goosebumps” author R.L. Stine announced that his popular series has been similarly edited “for sensitive readers” without his consent. Who knows what other classic books are having their original authors’ words, ideas and messages altered by anonymous political correctness hacks in the pursuit of “social justice”?

Now comes the news (via The Spectator) that a prime online news source and political analysis site is also in the business of restricting language. Here is a list of  “non-inclusive words” that Politico’s reporters have been instructed to avoid using: Continue reading →

Further Musings On The Tucker Carlson Car In The Capitol Riot Aftermath Ethics Train Wreck [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Having read more in the last 24 hours about this fiasco layered on a fiasco, I have reached the following conclusions:

1. I was right: Speaker McCarthy choosing Tucker Carlson as the vehicle to educate the public regarding the bias and slanted coverage of the January 6 Capitol rioting was a truly incompetent decision. If Rush Limbaugh weren’t dead, it was the equivalent of that, giving all of the Trump Deranged, progressive brain-washed and dishonest propagandists all they needed to spin the security footage into incoherence. Carlson is a proven liar and a cynical, untrustworthy charlatan who can’t even be trusted to believe in what he says on national TV. McCarthy walked into a cognitive dissonance perfect storm: if you wanted to ensure that no one who already hadn’t swallowed the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct) “insurrection” narrative would dismiss the new video, that was the way to do it.

2. Sure enough: Carlson and the Republicans are being widely accused of trying to excuse the riot, which was inexcusable. Chuck Schumer’s lie—on the Senate floor— that Carlson claimed the attack on the Capitol was not violent has more currency with those who don’t watch Fox News than anything Carlson said, and those who do watch Fox News already had concluded that the insurrection narrative was garbage. What is essential to begin clearing away the deception and corruption this episode epitomizes is to find someone whom the non-Fox News watchers will trust to carry the message. Handing the job to Carlson was simply dumb—but about what I expect of Kevin McCarthy.

3. The Big Lie is not that the 2020 election was stolen, but that the riot was an “insurrection.” Schumer and the Axis are using a Big Lie while accusing their adversaries of using a Big Lie. You have to admire the audacity: the 2020 election was a lot closer to “stolen” than the riot was to an insurrection.

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Comment Of The Day: “Regarding Tucker Carlson’s Newly Revealed J6 Surveillance Videos”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Here is Steve Witherspoon’s Comment of the Day on the post, Regarding Tucker Carlson’s Newly Revealed J6 Surveillance Videos:

***

Personally I don’t care who the video evidence was released to as long as it is released to the public in a responsible manner. I’m not a big fan of Carlson’s tactics but he’s the one who now has all the video. We can’t do a damn thing to change that fact so, so be it. He had better take this responsibility to the people of the United States very seriously.

The government and the political left has had an absolute monopoly on the evidence to support their narrative since January 6th, 2021. It may be the tit-for-tat rationalization, but it’s fair political gamesmanship for an opposing narrative to be presented (using the video evidence) that completely contradicts the narrative that has been pushed by the political left.

Jonathan Turley has a blog post out this morning about the QAnon Shaman, The Curious Story of QAnon Shaman: Fox Footage Raises New Questions Over the Chansley Case.

In the midst of all the internet trolls commenting on Turley’s site, I wrote,

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