Author: Jack Marshall

Capitol Riot Responsibility Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

On  December 12, the Senate unanimously passed a measure to remove authority for calling out the National Guard from politicians like Nancy Pelosi, handing the authority over to the Capitol Police. Naturally, this was virtually ignored by the news media, but the reason for the move was clear.

Despite dire predictions by federal authorities before January 6, 2021, the authorities responsible for  calling out the Guard, Speaker Pelosi  and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, were more concerned with partisan optics than security. Bowser had opposed President Trump regarding National Guard presence during the BLM riots in the past and wasn’t going to create a marshal law-like atmosphere on her watch.  in D.C.  She decided the Guard should be unarmed on the 6th and relegated to traffic control.

Good call there, Mayor.

Pelosi, meanwhile “was heavily involved in planning and decision-making before and during the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and micromanaged the Sergeant at Arms,” according to texts and other communications that were revealed after the rioting. While the report of the partisan and Trump-deranged House January 6 Star Chamber completely ignored Pelosi’s role in allowing the debacle to occur, the Pelosi team’s negligence was exposed in an investigative report by the House Republicans Pelosi removed from the “J6 Committee” so there would be no distraction from the mission, which was vilify Donald Trump ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections. The exiles were Jim Banks (R-IN), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Troy Nehls (R-TX). The final intelligence threat assessment issued three days before the riot warned of a violent scenario in which “Congress itself” could be attacked by armed Trump supporters, but the warning was buried at the end of a 15-page document and was not included in the introductory summary.  Then the the warning was omitted in three subsequent daily intelligence reports.

Shades of Pearl Harbor! Continue reading →

Nah, There No Progressive Social Media Platform Bias!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The British political commentary magazine “The Spectator” has published a nearly1400 word explanation for why the cover above was rejected for a Facebook advertisement (an “advert” in Brit-talk) as not complying with the platform’s policies, while these covers…

…were deemed acceptable.

Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading →

Cowardly And Unethical College Administrators…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The ethics of this controversy are easy. How could Hamline College administrators screw it up so badly? That’s easy too.

An adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University (in Minnesota, where strange things are always happening), Erika López Prater, knew that Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, so before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder, she alerted any Muslim students taking her class through her course syllabus that images the Prophet Muhammad would be shown and studied in the course. She directed students with any concerns to contact her. No student did.

Before the class in which paintings of Muhammad were about to be shown, she again alerted students in case anyone felt they needed to leave. No student left. But after Dr. López Prater showed a painting featuring the prophet, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Then Muslim students who were not in the course argued that the class was an attack on their religion. Guess what?

Hamline officials told Dr. López Prater that she was out. Emails to students and faculty pronounced the episode “Islamophobic.” Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email saying that respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Ethics, 1/8/23: Lots Of Next Shoes Drop! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 85 Comments

You learn something every day. Despite years of studying Clarence Darrow’s career, cases, life and courtroom oratory (and despite co-authoring “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow” which you can purchase for a pittance here), I only learned today that the great defense lawyer is credited with inventing the tactic of arguing for a lesser sentence because of what a guilty criminal had suffered in his childhood. Before Darrow’s defense of Nathan Leopold and Dickie Loeb in 1924, such an argument was unprecedented. It didn’t really work in that case, since the judge based his refusal to condemn the two teenage “thrill killers” on their youth alone, but the strategy caught on.

1. Thanks, “Federalist”! Saved me a post! I have considered writing ethics comments about the inconvenience caused by people who insist on backing their cars into parking spaces several times, most recently last week,and rejected the impulse as too trivial even for Ethics Alarms. Then “The Federalist” publishes this: “For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces.” It concludes,

“….the people backing into spaces are so selfish they haven’t even tried to imagine the levels upon levels of “just because you could doesn’t mean you should” that we decent citizens are dealing with every day on the mean streets of our local strip mall. If you’re still backing into spaces, just cut it out and pull straight into the space the way basic geometry demands.”

I heartily concur.

2. More on the six-year-old school shooter...Today’s Times article at least mentions the mystery of the child’s parents’ involvement, and reminds us that “Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded gun where it is accessible to children under the age of 14.” The article also examines school shootings generally and the usual gun availability concerns, none of which are very relevant to what is a freak incident. The fact that a first-grader somehow got control of a loaded gun and brought it to school reveals little about the strengths or weaknesses of gun policies or school security. It is irresponsible to base policy proposals on incidents that virtually never occur. “When will the shock of gunshots in school be enough to inspire the action necessary to prevent guns in schools and the shattering of lives it causes?” said reliable demagogue Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Laws won’t make dumb, irresponsible and reckless parents smart, responsible and careful. All you can do is hold them responsible for the damage they do, and then try to protect the children. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“We will never compromise our principles. House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy. Benevolence over bigotry. The constitution over the cult. Democracy over demagogues. Economic opportunity over extremism. Freedom over fascism. Governing over gaslighting. Hopefulness over hatred. Inclusion over isolation. Justice over judicial overreach. Knowledge over Kangaroo courts. Liberty over limitation…..”

—-New Democrat Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries following Republican Kevin McCarthy’s election as   Speaker of the House

 Is this the greatest gaslighting speech of all time? I can’t imagine a more blatant one. Let’s see: Continue reading →

Gilbert & Sullivan, The Great Stupid, And Me

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

OK, That’s IT! Now The Great Stupid is messing with me personally.

This is war!

Among my many useless and unprofitable areas of expertise are the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, which I performed in, directed, produced, adapted and lectured on for most of my life. Maybe there is someone who has as much experience in the genre as I have, but I doubt it, frankly.

Recently I was engaged to prepare a program on my exploits with the great Victorian musical comedy team for a private club in Washington, D.C. I assembled a capable cast of experienced Savoyards to assist me, including in the planned program numbers from 12 of the 14 performable operettas. I will be emphasizing how many of the songs make still valid satirical observations on current societal foolishness; that number above is included in the program and is from “Princess Ida,” in which Gilbert pokes fun at early feminism. The song is sung at a women’s college where the faculty and students have forsworn male contact and regard the opposite sex as inferior in all respects. Here are Gilbert’s lyrics:

A Lady fair, of lineage high,
Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by.
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one,
The Ape was a most unsightly one
So it would not do
His scheme fell through,
For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,
Express’d such terror
At his monstrous error,
That he stammer’d an apology and made his ‘scape,
The picture of a disconcerted Ape!


With a view to rise in the social scale,
He shaved his bristles and he docked his tail,
He grew mustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club,
He paid a guinea to a toilet club
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through
For the Maid was Beauty’s fairest Queen,
With golden tresses,
Like a real princess’s,
While the Ape, despite his razor keen,
Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots
And to start in life on a brand new plan,
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man! 

But it would not do,
The scheme fell through!

But it would not do,
The scheme fell through!
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey crav’d, 
Was a radiant Being, With a brain farseeing
While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d!

Continue reading →

Gee, Can We Lock Up The Parents For THIS Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ethics Alarms has always maintained that when a child gets control of a real firearm and shoots it, the parents must be held criminally responsible, not only for the consequences of the shooting, but for allowing the child access at all. I also believe that this should be strict liability: I don’t care if the child is a whiz at picking locks or a precocious little Michael Corleone. If you own a gun and your kid gets a grip on it, you’re the menace to society.

I can’t imagine a more perfect illustration of the need for this policy than the story out of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News Virginia. A 6-year-old boy shot and wounded his first grade teacher yesterday. He apparently did it intentionally—he had some dispute with her, we are told—and is a good shot: she is in critical condition.

The Washington Post story about the shooting is infuriating:

“Newport News Police Chief Steve R. Drew said at a news briefing…’We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting.’”

Oh, the first grader wasn’t an active shooter then! We could guess that. What about the parents?

Continue reading →

Two Unethical Headlines…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s a faked headline. No such op-ed ever ran in the Times, but it nearly got me. I saw it on several conservative sites, some quite reliable, but something in my softly pinging ethics alarms warned me that I should check it out before referring to it anywhere. Sure enough: “No such article exists. A fabricated headline about bullying was made to look like it came from an opinion piece by the outlet, a spokesperson with The New York Times confirmed.” It should be plain why any regular reader of the Times would assume that headline above was real. It is no more ridiculous than any number of Times op-ed headlines. A few years ago, one Times “expert” advocated allowing children—like sixth graders—to vote. A headline from 2021 read, “Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it.” Another: “Want to Get Rid of Trump? Only Fox News Can Do It.” Here’s one: “Trump’s Nacissiam Could Cost Us Our Lives.”

Add to the many examples of Times punditry bordering on lunacy the rampant Wuhan virus phobia and hysteria promoted by the Times itself (among others), and the widespread “ends justify the means” embrace the political Left has favored of late. In this context, a Times column advocating the position that we have to bully kids in order to save them is completely plausible. Continue reading →

On Speaker McCarthy’s Travails And A Smoking Gun NYT Op-Ed

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Rep. Kevin McCarthy didn’t take the Ethics Alarms ethics advice to withdraw from the race to become the next Speaker of the House. Instead, he hung on to barely squeak by on a 15th ballot, the most required to anoint a new Speaker since before the Civil War. To accomplish this, he made so many concessions to his GOP opposition that he evoked memories of the 1968 Presidential race, when it was said of Hubert Humphrey that he so wanted to be President that he showed himself unworthy of the office by the manner of his pursuit of it. McCarthy, it must be said, is no Humphrey: he is now a small, undistinguished and petty politician in a big job, the very epitome of the Peter Principle in action.

Observation 1: It tells you all you need to know about the state of the slim GOP House majority that Matt Gaetz, one of the truly creepy members of Congress, was a power broker in this mess. Just look at this guy. And in order to get the job he so covets, McCarthy gave him more power than he already had, and he already had too much because his brain dead district sent him to D.C. One of the concessions McCarthy made to flip the party members voting against him was to alter House rules so a single member could trigger a challenge to his leadership. This not only gives tremendous leverage to Gaetz, but other incompetent and untrustworthy Republican members, like Margorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and even the unimaginably dishonest George Santos. Yes, McCarthy has to ask “How high?” when Lying George tells him to jump too, or risk another 15 ballot siege.

Observation 2: Democrats and the news media (but I repeat myself) enjoyed blathering about how the McCarthy floor fight showed the lack of leadership in the Republican Party. I submit that this is an accusation Democrats have a lot of gall making against anyone, with a half-conscious Democratic President, an embarrassingly inept Vice-President, and the just-exiting antediluvian Speaker Nancy Pelosi as their party’s most prominent leaders. This is more than the pot calling the kettle black: this is the kettle calling the kettle black. The leadership of both parties and the nation as a whole is weak and corrupt, arguably as weak and corrupt as it has ever been. In hindsight, Lyndon Johnson looks like a giant, and Ronald Reagan a colossus. Who can Democrats point to today as respectable, credible party leaders? Elizabeth Warren? Pete Buttigieg? Old School hack Chuck Schumer?

Continue reading →