Around the World

Who Had “Trump Turning Into James K. Polk” On Their 2025 Bingo Card? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This is the kind of thing that even die-hard Trump true believers should find, if nothing else, odd.

Although it was barely discussed during the campaign, President-Elect Trump is sparking head-explosions and headlines by talking about expanding American geography and territories. He says he wants to take the Panama Canal back; he says he wants Denmark to hand over Greenland, and he also wants to make Canada a state.

The U.S. hasn’t added any significant geography to its dominion since the Spanish American War, and gave up the Canal Zone to Panama during the Carter Administration. James K. Polk, the Democratic President who came into office as the herald of “Manifest Destiny,” had well-publicized designs on the Oregon territory as well as Mexican holdings from the start of his administration, and was threatening both Great Britain and Mexico to get his way. In the end, Polk got most of the Oregon territory in a compromise deal the English, and although it took a war with Mexico to do it, snatched California and the New Mexico territory. Then Polk retired and promptly died, his mission complete. Whether one ranks him as one of our most successful Presidents depends on how one feels about American imperialism, or perhaps whether one believes that, upon reflection, acquiring California was a mistake.

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Boy, One Of Our Most Deified Presidents Sure Agreed To Some Bone-Headed Ideas…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

As I have mentioned here many times, there is no way around ranking Franklin Roosevelt as one of our top five Presidents: his handling of World War II from the U.S. perspective and his leadership during the Great Depression, which didn’t so much fix the economic problems as raise the public’s faith in our system of government when it easily could have collapsed, are so important and momentous that all of his missteps and blunders pale by comparison. Nevertheless there were many of these, some quite damning.

I only recently learned about one of them that I somehow had missed all these years—probably because our historians have been and are still overwhelmingly left-biased and inclined towards hagiography where FDR is concerned.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 until FDR’s death. He was a trusted advisor whose scope of interest and influence far exceeded the usual territory of his office. In 1944, Morgenthau got far over his metaphorical skis and proposed a scheme for the post-war world, specifically, as he said, “I want to make Germany so impotent that she cannot forge the tools of war – another world war.”

You know, because that strategy worked out so well the first time, after World War I…

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I Don’t Understand This Story AT ALL, I Don’t Understand the Biden Administration At All, I Just Don’t Understand…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

From Israel news sources: “Despite heavy pressure from the United States, Israel refuses to allow the transfer of weapons to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA)…According to a report from Army Radio, the U.S. requested that Israel approve the transfer of AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition and armored vehicles. After discussions among security officials, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi decided to recommend the political leadership not approve the transfers….Under the terms of the [Oslo] Accords, Israel must approve the transfer of heavy weaponry to PA security forces, which occasionally confront terror group members that are armed with superior weapons smuggled with Iranian assistance…

“Israel Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and the chairman of the Yesha Council, praised the ‘correct decision’….’Transferring ammunition and weapons to the enemy, especially during wartime, is complete madness and a breach of security for the citizens of the State of Israel….The Palestinian Authority is a terrorist organization – and a terrorist organization should be defeated,’ Ganz declared.”

Ya think?

My favorite quote is “Transferring ammunition and weapons to the enemy, especially during wartime, is complete madness.” Whether or not the Palestinian Authority is fairly described as a terrorist organization, the official position of all the various Palestinian organizations, convoluted and unstable though they are, is that Israel has no right to exist.

I will admit to the possibility that I am missing something, but it seems to me that pressuring Israel at this time to hand over weapons to any Palestinian group is as responsible as pressuring them to make the official language of their nation Swedish and have Israelis wear their underwear on the outside.

Just because the President is demented doesn’t mean we should try to make other countries behave irrationally too.

Final 2024 Ethics Round-Up, 12/29/24: Of Jawbreakers, ‘Thinflation,’ Weasel Words and Prison Sex

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(You’re going to have to wait until the end to learn who that is in the photo above….)

I’ve been trying to figure out an ethics angle for the best news story I saw today; the best I can come up with is “life incompetence.” The headline was “Woman Breaks Jaw After Biting into Jawbreaker Candy.” Apparently Canadian student Javeria Wasim wondered if someone could bite through a giant jawbreaker, and took it on as a challeng. She barely made a dent in the candy when she felt a pop followed by piercing pain in her lower jaw. Yup, it was a jawbreaker, all right! She had fractured her mandible in two places and also loosened her top and lower front teeth. Now her jaw is wired shut.

1. You’ve noticed “shrinkflation,” but have you picked up on ‘thinflation’? It appears that clothing manufacturers are using thinner, lighter fabric for such staples as T-shirts and chinos. “Pretty much everything is lighter and thinner,” Sean Cormier, a professor of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told Slate. He said chinos that used to weigh 8 ounces per square yard of fabric might be only 6 ounces today.

“It’s a trend in the industry, and not one that’s sustainable, because obviously the thinner the garment, it’s not going to last as long,” Cormier says. Two decades ago a T-shirt might have weighed 8 to 10 ounces per square yard of fabric. Today, experts report, it’s half that. Clothing doesn’t last as long as it used to, fabrics are generally thinner, and the quality of clothing has decreased. Not the prices, however. The garments also don’t have as much “covering power,” meaning that not only wet T-shirts but the dry ones too are revealing.

2. Apparently some people have a problem with this statement. Not me! An Illinois homeowner’s surveillance camera detected motion on the side of the home and he spotted two masked men. After instructing his wife to seek cover, he grabbed his gun. Then he shot shot and killed Jorge Nestevan Flores-Toledo, a 27-year-old from Mexico with a long criminal record. The second man, an illegal immigrant, aka. “a visitor” skedaddled but was tracked down by K9 dogs and arrested a few blocks away. Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said, in describing the incident, “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.” I don’t see why you shouldn’t expect to be shot when you want to break into anyone’s home in any state.

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Wow! Apple’s AI Bot Is Already Acting Like Real Live Journalists! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…by making stuff up and publishing it!

From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”

This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?

Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!

The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?

Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”

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So It’s Come To This…The Great Stupid Still Reigns!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A trigger warning for “The Pirates of Penzance”! I suppose we should be grateful that the weenification of Britannia has advanced so far, as we Colonists can now witness what lies ahead if we don’t get control over the culture and rescue it from the maw of The Great Stupid but quick.

“The Pirates of Penzance” is, of course, one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular operettas, written during the Victorian era when almost everything was considered a justification for pearl-clutching. I have directed the show twice, performed it once, and seen it, oh, maybe 15 times not counting the mostly excellent film version starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt. A child above the age of three showing alarm at this silly, satirical musical comedy about tender-hearted pirates who kidnap young maidens to marry them with the assistance of a “doctor of divinity” and the conflicted buccaneer apprentice who is the victim of a legal technicality ought to provoke a visit to the kid’s home by child services. An adult traumatized by the show belongs in a rest home.

If “The Pirates of Penzance” gets a trigger warning of even two sentences, the average Shakespeare tragedy must require a brochure. “Titus Andronicus” would need a recitation of possible PTSD side effect like at the end of a TV drug commercial.

Seeing symptoms like this makes me despair of ever freeing Western civilization from The Great Stupid. I fear that it is now embedded in the human species’ DNA, just as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the chemical found in Teflon, is believed to be contaminating every American’s blood.

Regarding Whether Canadians Are “More Free” Than Americans…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, a government agency, decreed that the township of Emo must pay damages to Borderland Pride, a Canadian LGBTQ+ activist group, for refusing to proclaim “Pride Month” in 2020. Borderland Pride had “requested” that Emo declare June of that year as Pride Month—now it is clear that this was no mere request— and display a rainbow flag for one week. The township refused, the bigots. How dare they! Now it must pay the organization $10,000 with the other $5,000 coming from Emo mayor Harold McQuaker. The tribunal also ordered McQuaker and the Chief Administrative Officer of the municipality to complete a “Human Rights 101” training course offered by the Ontario Human Rights Commission within 30 days.

In case you missed a class or two, the damages are called “compelled speech,” a cornerstone of totalitarianism. The “Human Rights 101” training course is called “re-education,” or “brain-washing.” In the United States, such a result would be unimaginable, or at least is right now, since Kamala Harris wasn’t elected.

Whew! Close call, eh?

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No Wonder Today’s Great Britain Is Choking With Woke Insanity, Censorship and Weeny-ism…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Hollywood version of the Broadway cult musical “Wicked” appears to be a holiday box office smash. I suppose I’m going to have to see it, though “Wizard of Oz” worship alienated me long ago and how they can justify making a two hour, 45 minute film of just Act I of a three hour musical mystifies me. However, there is something to be learned from the nanny state’s British Board of Film Classifications (BBFC) felt that it had to put out these ridiculous trigger warnings for what is essentially a family movie:

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Ethics Villain: Ryan Borgwardt

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In “Double Jeopardy,” a 1999 thriller co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd plays a woman whose apparently loving husband fakes his own death while on a romantic yachting trip with her, leaving behind manufactured evidence that gets Ashley convicted of murdering him. To be fair, Wisconsin resident Ryan Borgwardt wasn’t quite that diabolical. He just faked his death while  pretending to be on kayaking fishing trip and fled the country. Then again, Ashley Judd’s husband only inflicted his plot on his wife and a single child, while Borgwalt has three kids.

On August 12, Watertown, Wisconsin’s big news was the disappearance of devoted family man, Borgwardt, 44. An emergency search found his capsized kayak on Green Lake and his vehicle and trailer parked nearby. A local fishermen found Ryan’s fishing rod and a tacklebox containing his wallet and other belongings. Such a tragedy!

But Borgwalt was not as clever as the husband in “Double Jeopardy,” however, so an investigation eventually uncovered evidence that he was alive and had crossed into Canada. Border authorities confirmed that they had checked his passport a day after his “drowning.” After that, Borgwardt’s elaborate plot to abandon his family, apparently to begin a new life with another woman (this was also the motive of Ashley’s evil spouse), began to come into focus.

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Stop Making Me Defend Katy Perry!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pop singing star Katy Perry has one of the longer and less complimentary Ethics Alarms dossiers among overly-influential celebrity types. Let’s see: her last appearance was as an Ethics Dunce in 2023, when she freaked out on “American Idol” over the fact that a contestant had survived a school shooting. Katy screamed, “This is not OK!,” announced that the country had “fucking failed us” and that she was “scared too.” I wrote, in part,

“That’s fine, Katy. Now go along with these nice men in the white coats, and they will help you. This is just the latest example of how celebrities degrade both the level of civic discourse on important issues and the intellectual abilities of anyone foolish enough to take them seriously. I’m pretty sure that no one, literally no one, believes that mass shootings anywhere, not just in schools, are “OK;” Perry was seeking virtue-signaling points for stating the screamingly obvious. Moreover, I am 100% certain that Perry doesn’t have the tiniest clue about how the U.S. has “fucking failed us” because of this school shooting or any schools shooting. What do you want, Katy? Martial law? No Bill of Rights? Everyone stuck going to school via Zoom forever? And if Katy Perry is ‘scared too,’ she should hire better bodyguards.”

Now Katy is being attacked from the conservative side because of a trademark dispute she won in Australia. The Daily Caller wrote in an editorial that Perry had “successfully bullied a woman in court and won, marking another unfair victory by a pretentious celebrity.” The story: An Australian woman named Katie Perry launched a fashion label using her name. Katy Perry’s real name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, which the Daily Caller seem to think is significant. (It isn’t.) Perry also had a trademark for clothes using Katy Perry, and sued Katie for trademark infringement, not for, as Katie describes it, using her own birth name for her brand. Katie beat Katy in the initial round, but Katy filed an appeal and won. “Now the designer has lost everything she worked so hard to build,” sobs Tucker Carlson’s news and commentary site. “This is everything that’s wrong with Hollywood.”

No, this is everything wrong with conservative media. “An innocent person can no longer operate her long-time business with her own legal name. Fake Katy Perry for the win — seriously?” says the Caller.

Ugh. The Daily Caller chose to leave out some rather important details, I’m guessing because it’s open season on show biz celebrities now that Donald Trump’s win has them seeking exile, BlueSky, or rest homes. Among the relevant facts absent from the editorial:

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