Author: Jack Marshall

KABOOM! “Innocent Illegals????” “Just Want a Better Life????”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I want to get a July 4th weekend Ethics Alarms multi-issue post out, and this probably belongs there, but for the love of God, I can’t wait.

I just heard one of the MSNBC talking heads agree with a typical guest on the network (“you know: morons”)by pointing out that Joe Klein, the “legendary TIME columnist” (who wrote “Primary Colors,” the best-selling roman a clef about the Bill Clinton cabal and lied about his authorship), had written on his substack that ICE deporting “innocent illegal immigrants” who have been living here for many years and “only came here to have a better life” “makes the country weaker.”

Will we never be able to sound the death knell for that hoary, dishonest rationalization? How can anyone still be saying that, and worse, how can anyone be so cretinous as to quote it as if it is some kind of revelation?

ONE: There are no “innocent illegal immigrants” who are adults. It is impossible to “innocently” enter the United States illegally. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be repeated or explained.

TWO: The fact that one of these illegals has been living here for “many years” means that a non-innocent individual has been violating our laws that entire time, even if they haven’t engaged in drug-dealing, rape or other felonies. They are just as culpable as they would have been in they were nabbed in the act of breaking out immigration laws.

THREE: ALL thieves, embezzlers, traitors, adulterers, bigamists, identity thieves, extortionists, blackmailers, frauds, drug dealers, counterfeiters, tax cheats and even murderers commit their crimes to “have a better life.” If that’s an excuse for illegal immigrants, it’s a mitigation for illegal immigrants too, and it’s not.

The next person who says any of that garbage in my presence had better be ready to duck, because I’m going to train myself to projectile vomit at will as my automatic response to “innocent illegal” or “They just want a better life.”

UPenn Capitulates in the Trans Swimming Scandal, If In a Weaselly Way…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Well, it’s still progress. Conservative, Trump cheer-leading outlets are pushing the “So much winning!” line, but anyone progressive, conservative or otherwise who couldn’t see that UPenn’s “transitioning” swimmer Lia Thomas (above: guess right or left) was a cheat had his or her brain eaten by the Woke Virus.

UPenn announced yesterday that it would no longer allow transgender women to compete on its women’s sports teams and erased Thomas’ records from UPenn’s list of all-time school records in women’s swimming. “Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season,” the UPenn weasels injected as a footnote. That’s part of UPenn’s spin. A cheating swimming coach (who should be fired) let Thomas, a mediocre male swimmer who saw a loophole to exploit, be the star of the women’s team to enhance his coaching record. But UPEnn could get away with it then, so it was all right.

The change in policy was part of an agreement reached with the Education Department yesterday about two months after the department found that Penn had violated Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, when it allowed transgender athletes to compete on women’s sports teams. The Trump administration had frozen millions of dollars in federal funding for the school over its transgender athlete policies. AUTOCRACY! No, this is called “using legitimate government power for justice and the public good.” As part of the deal, UPenn says it will “apologize” to the women placed at a competitive disadvantage by its allowing a penised swimmer with male-puberty musculature to slaughter competing female swimmers in one pool after another last year.

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Ethics Villain CNN Pushes the First Amendment Envelope

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What this despicable “enemy of the people” is doing by deliberately publicizing an anti-ICE app may be legal, but it is undeniably unethical. The Trump administration should prosecute anyway.

Joshua Aaron (above: he looks exactly like I assumed he looks!) is a musician and software developer who, because he’s an anti-American, pro-lawbreaking asshole, created an app called ICEBlock. It’s a descriptive name: it allows advocates of open borders and opponents of law enforcement to post sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers across the country. Then the law-breakers they are seeking can more effectively avoid capture, and those who want to attack, harm, kill, or impede ICE agents have a metaphorical “leg up.” That’s nice.

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Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I would say that DEI has more rapidly than most reached the final evolutionary stage noted by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who famously observed that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The problem with that is that DEI was never a great cause to begin with. However, it has definitely entered its racket stage, and maybe its certifiably insane stage. Behold…

Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice—no, I’m not making that up— at Boston’s Berklee College of Music has issued the results of a study that claims to show that because “male-identified jazz educators” outnumber “female-identified counterparts” six to one, it is proof that jazz “remains predominantly male due to a biased system.” The Institute’s website asks,“What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” One wag’s answer: “Probably like nothing at all.”

Indeed most jazz musicians and composer are male. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if any variation from demographic equality proves bias, oppression and discrimination in your DEI worldview, then this phenomenon is sinister. Researcher Lara Pellegrinelli PhD is an “ethnomusicologist” who contributed to the study. She blathers, “To identify each jazz faculty member by gender, we examined the pronouns we encountered in these sources—and found only “he” and “she” in reference to the educators in our study. This is why we use the terminology “female-identified” and “male-identified” for our data, as opposed to sex assigned at birth or the descriptors “female-identifying” and “male-identifying,” which suggests a more active process of participant self-identification.”

Oh.

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On Gallup’s “American Pride” Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In four graphs, here are the result’s of Gallup’s latest survey…

Here is Gallup’s (weak, superficial, misleading, cowardly) analysis…

“At the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. adults were nearly unanimous in saying they were extremely or very proud to be Americans. But that national unity has eroded over the past 25 years due to a combination of political and generational changes. Democrats today are much less likely than in the past to express pride in their country; in fact, their national pride has hit a new low. Additionally, Generation Z and millennials are much less proud of their country than their elders are.

These changes have occurred mostly over the past decade, and have done so amid greater pessimism about the economic prospects for young people, widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, greater ideological divides between the parties, unfavorable images of both parties, and intense partisan rancor during the Trump and Biden administrations.”

Gee, what happened at the beginning of the 21st Century that could have triggered a down-turn in pride in the nation? Well…the nation was slowly coming out of a slimy sex scandal in the White House in which the President lied to the nation (“I did not have sex with that woman”…because, see, where I come from blow-jobs aren’t considered “sex,” see…), his wife enabled the lie (“a vast right-wing conspiracy”), and an entire political party reversed its supposed concern for feminism and women’s rights to deny their POTUS’s flagrant sexual harassment guilt, nominating as his successor the Vice President who had participated in that gaslighting. Meanwhile, the opposing party nominated a weak. mush-mouthed candidate whose main credential was being the amiable son of his former President father, and the election ended in a virtual tie with the key state’s popular vote confounded by multiple instances of incompetence (the “butterfly ballot”), and the subsequent recount marked by Florida (partisan, Democrat-dominated) courts ignoring the state’s laws, with the resulting mess having to be fixed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The election ended up with the winner losing the popular vote for the first time since 1888, which meant to large chunk of the under-educated American public that Bush was an illegitimate President. Then the Democratic Party began a still-running false narrative that the election had been “stolen” with the complicity of the Supreme Court.

THAT’s what.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Prof. Glenn Reynolds

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Most of the economic benefit of colleges and universities, and especially of elite ones, is distributional in nature — that is, wealth flows toward people who have the credentials they offer, but the credentials don’t actually promote wealth, they just get you past the gatekeepers.”

—-Conservative law professor and pundit Glenn Reynolds on his substack essay, “What is College Good For?”

Essentially Reynolds, who is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law can be fairly called a representative of our system of higher education himself, so his searing critique deserves some attention an thought. I appreciate the essay because I have long held the conviction that college itself is a fraud on the American people, distorts our power and economic structure away from merit and talent and toward wealth, elitism and purchased credentials that don’t mean what they pretend to mean, and a lifetime of experience as a student, graduate, employer and organization creator and leader supports and continues to confirm that conclusion.

Reynold is right. His analysis would have been right 40 years ago, when I stood up at a D.C. conference of “educators” and asked why all the discussion had focused on secondary school and college diplomas being essential to get “well-paying jobs”and none of it—literally none—about making our rising generations curious, competent, diligent, literate, analytical, creative, erudite, better thinkers and better citizens. The whole conference room booed me! It’s one of my most cherished memories. It also was signature significance regarding the fraudulent nature of the American education system.

Prof. Reynold gets it, and, not to diminish his essay, but it shouldn’t be so hard to get. The scam continues to thrive because the people who haven’t been to college don’t realize what a waste of time, resources and money it is in so many ways, and those who use the degrees as golden ticket credentials don’t have the integrity to admit the truth.

Reynold begins,

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Being Married Without Your Consent? Yeah, I’d Say This Is “Toe in a Plug of Tobacco” Level Unethical: “Someone Has Been Very Careless”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Alarms has often cited the dry desiccated toe in the plug of tobacco that is the essence of “res ipsa loquitur,” or “the thing speaks for itself”: “Someone has been very careless.”

This leads me to the bizarre experience of a Texas man, whose name so far has been withheld, presumably because he feels like an idiot. He says he was married to his ex-fiancée without his knowledge. The 42-year-old victim was in a committed relationship with 36-year-old Kristin Marie Spearman. They were about to get a Wayne County marriage license but got into a heated argument that culminated in his breaking off their romance. His ex-fiancée was not one to give up without a fight, however.

Her ex- received a gift bag from Bath & Body Works containing some products along with a copy of an officiated marriage license with his and Spearman’s names on it and a photo of his ex-fiancee holding up the document legally declaring them to be husband and wife. Kristin had managed to get a local pastor to certify the marriage even though the groom wasn’t in attendance. She then took the certified marriage license to her local county clerk’s office and filed it with officials. As far as the records go, it’s a legal marriage.

Spearman has been arrested and charged with third-degree felony stalking. The pastor, meanwhile, has a lot of explaining to do.

New York City’s Democrats Remind Us Why It’s an Ethical Duty To Vote (and They Didn’t)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Apparently less than 5% of all New York City residents voted for Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic, anti-Israel, slick crypto-communist who is now poised to become mayor of the City That Doesn’t Think—oops! I mean “sleep.” Never mind though: winning the crowded primary last week made him an instant celebrity, gave him a platform to spew his toxic ideology far and wide, confounding the dim, the gullible, the uneducated and the America-haters, and makes him a genuine threat to take over the drowning Democratic Party by apathy.

People who are stupid, ignorant and don’t care shouldn’t vote, but when a majority of potential voters who aren’t stupid and ignorant and do care also don’t vote, democracy not only doesn’t work, it is dangerous.

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Why People Don’t Trust Lawyers…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A personal injury law firm whose name will remain unspoken “explains” on its website why exorbitant contingent fees are justifiable and ethical. The page says that a lawyer receiving a higher potential fee will probably do a better job representing the client than one who will receive a lesser proportion of the settlement or damages: more motivation!

This is exactly the opposite of what the ethics rules of every jurisdiction mandate. A lawyer is obligated to represent a client to the best of his or her ability regardless of the fee, including when the representation is pro bono, that is, for no fee at all. A lawyer who calibrates the effort and passion he or she puts into a case based on the size of the fee, negotiated or potential, is an unethical lawyer, an untrustworthy lawyer.

A bad lawyer.

And yet here is a law firm stating, “The more you pay us, the better job we’ll do.”

Disgusting.

But, somehow, not surprising….

On the Illegality of Illegal Aliens

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Guest column by Ryan Harkins

We have this report from HotAir explaining that that the ICE raid on the meat packing plant in Nebraska was not simply due to the fact that the plant hired so many illegals. Instead, the focus of the raid was on an identity-theft ring running out of that plant.

I want to make it clear I am all in favor of whoever in the world who wants to come to the United States to make a better life for themselves should have the opportunity. I’d give top priority to those who wish to become US citizens, but I’m generally in favor of letting into the country far more people than our current immigration system allots. How many more, I can’t say, as I’ve not crunched the numbers. But in general more immigrants means more workers, more production, higher demand for services, all which contribute to a growing economy that enriches everyone here.

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