Around the World

This Doesn’t Mean Wine Aficionados Are Pompous Frauds But It Sure Points In That Direction

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Eric Boschman, once named Belgium’s best sommelier (that’s wine steward in English), now an entertainer, and the team at On n’est pas des pigeons, a Belgian consumer magazine and television program, bought a cheap supermarket wine and entered it at the prestigious international wine competition, Gilbert et Gaillard. To try to fool the experts with a wine that cost less than three bucks, they made up a name for the swill, calling it “Chateau Colombier,” and designed a phony label. They told the judges that it was made from rare grapes in Côtes de Sambre and Meuse (wherever they are). Along with the entrance fee and samples of the wine for tasting, the tricksters provided fake laboratory data of the acidity, alcohol and sugar levels borrowed from a genuine prize-winning wine. Boschman, meanwhile, praised the wine as exceptional to fellow sommeliers and wine enthusiasts, attempting to seed confirmation bias.

And it worked! The supermarket wine won the gold medal, with judges describing it as “suave, nervous (a quality of fresh wine) and rich palate with clean young scents that promise a nice complexity, very interesting.”

As with the wags who submit fake research papers to “peer-reviewed” scholarly journals, this wine charade was dishonest, but I will give it a utilitarian pass for exposing a process that has too little integrity to be trusted, for the benefit of consumers.

Of course, I say this as someone who couldn’t tell a real fine wine from a class of motor oil.

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Source: Oddity Central

Wait! Is THIS Peak Stupid In The Age Of The Great Stupid?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

It’s a now-familiar tactic when minority groups seek attention and enhanced self-esteem: find a universally admired historical figure of note and claim that he or she was a member of that group. Abraham Lincoln was gay! Cleopatra was black! (That worked out well…) Jesus was gay AND black! Still, I didn’t see this coming, but the Great Stupid knows no bounds, apparently:

Worshipers at a Trinity College at Cambridge were treated to a sermon by Joshua Heath, currently seeking a PhD in theology. He argued that Christ takes on a transgender body in historical artwork, appearing both masculine and feminine in different paintings.  As proof, he displayed Jean Malouel’s painting called “The Pieta,” in which the body of Christ is shown with blood running down his side. Heath noted that the blood coming down from the side wound of Christ to the groin in the painting “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.”  “[I]f the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath concluded.

Oh. So if someone paints a portrait of me a few centuries from now showing me with the head of an aardvark, that would be solid evidence that I had the head of an an aardvark? Good thinking there, Ace. Paintings of Jesus prove absolutely nothing, as the “Jesus was black” advocates correctly pointed out. The evidence indicates he was probably dark-skinned and swarthy, and less than five feet tall. But trans is “in,” so we now have to debate whether Christ “identified” as a woman.

The residents of Woke World are apparently incapable of saying, “That’s ridiculous” when an “in” group is the topic, so Michael Banner, the Dean and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College felt it necessary to endorse Heath’s fantasy. He wrote in response to a complaint about the sermon that Heath’s “speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation.” 

Can The Great Stupid get more stupid than this?

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Source: Campus Reform

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Fun At Auschwitz!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

That’s an ice cream stand just outside Poland’s shrine to the victims of the Holocaust, the Auschwitz death camp. Isn’t it nice that tourists there will be able to grab a delicious ice cream cone for refreshment? Now here…

…a woman posed glamorously on the tracks that brought the railroad cars stuffed with captive Jews to be gassed. If I had to wager, I’d say the couple is American. In my various adventures abroad, I wanted to hide my head under a bag many times as I saw American tourists behaving abominably at such locales as Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. But it isn’t just Americans: my wife’s sister reported that at Pearl Harbor she witnessed smiling Japanese tourists posing by the memorials to the Arizona, the Oklahoma and the Utah.

Where does this attitude come from? Over at Victory Girls, Kim Hirsch writes, “Money and fame have replaced honor and memory of the history which changed the world.” I’d put it a little differently: as our culture increasingly sends the message that history is just another tool of politics, the public is either ignorant of the facts of the past, unable to understand why those facts are still important, or believe that history is irrelevant to their lives.

Unethical Website Of The Month: “The Anarchist”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“The Anarchist”is the website of a hate-based Toronto coffee shop of the same name. Ironically, Ethics Alarms just learned of the site’s existence as it announced the demise of the business. (Good!) The shop anointed itself as “an anti-capitalist cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land”—yes, the owners are delusional. It was a “pay what you choose” establishment designed to spit in the metaphorical eye of evil Capitalism. Of course it went belly-up, though the fact that the carzy project lasted even a year is impressive, sort of, in the same way Brian Stelter getting hired is impressive.

Here are some highlights from the website:

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Two For The “Shut Up And Act” Files

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The ethical formula is to concentrate critical evaluations on the message rather than the messenger, but celebrities using their popularity and influence to push for policies they are unqualified to evaluate and activism they are too corrupt to promote have to be in a separate category. They use their cognitive dissonance scale weight to make irresponsible positions seem reasonable to those sad and numerous members of the public who assume that being rich, beautiful and talented automatically makes one wise.

I know the temptation for these stars of both the glittering and the shooting- variety is great, but it is their duty to resist it except in the rare instances where they have more practical experience and knowledge of an issue than the average airport show-shine stand proprietor, and fully functioning ethics alarms. (Remember: Hollywood shorts out ethics alarms .)

Two prominent actresses in recent days have illustrated the principle.

1. Kate Winslet

Winslet is one of my favorite actresses, but unfortunately she’s British. The British don’t understand or support freedom of speech and expression, as anyone who watched the anti-monarchists being hauled away by police at King Charles’ coronation can attest. Accepting a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for her performance in a show about the dangers of social media, Winslet said,

To people in power and to people who can make change, please criminalize harmful content. Please eradicate harmful content. We don’t want it. We want our children back.”

Shut up, Kate.

Who is “we”? What is “harmful?” Dim bulbs like Winslet, waving the “Think of the Children!” banner, will lead us right to Big Brother’s door. If you’re worried about what your children see online, set rules for them and enforce them yourself. Better yet, teach them about what social media is and how to avoid its many perils. Monitor what they are hearing from their teachers in school, if you want them “back.” Educate yourself, and then educate them. It’s your job, not the government’s.

2. Natalie Portman

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A Ripley From Canada: Barking Is Banned At A Dog Park

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This would also qualify as an Ethics Alarms res ipsa loquitur file item, but the EA category reserved for conduct so astoundingly stupid that it beggars belief is the right place for this one.

Imagine: according to a new sign posted on the gate to the long-standing dog park at the corner of Jean-Talon Street and Provencher Boulevard in Montreal’s Saint-Leonard borough…

…. “it is forbidden to let your dog bark, whine, or howl.” Violators —well, the owners of the violators—could be fined between $500 and $2,000.

Will Canadians put up with this? The totalitarian virus seems to have gained a stronger foothold in Canadian culture than in the U.S., and thank heaven for that. However, the City of Toronto installed similar no-barking signs at dog park in March but had to remove them after a strong negative reaction from the public. The difference is that at this point no local U.S. government would dare put up such a sign in a dog park. I offered the hypothetical to the owners of some of Spuds’s pals, and the reaction to the idea bordered on violent.

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Our Incompetent News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

During today’s historic coronation of King Charles III, covered live by all of the news networks, the American reporters on ABC, NBC and CBS all referred to Charles being “coronated.”

The proper term is “crowned.” Dozens of sources would have so informed them—if they had done minimal research. No, it is not a big thing. It is just one more example of how negligently and lazily our journalists perform their jobs.

And thus once again I have to ask: Why does anyone trust these people? How can anyone trust these people? Journalism is no longer a profession in the United States. It is self-indulgent, privileged club.

Hallelujah! Sen.Kennedy Puts On The Record The Irrefutable Evidence That Democratic Climate Change Policies Are Incompetent, Dishonest, And Irresponsible…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La) questioned Department of Energy Deputy Secretary David Turk today before the Senate committee on appropriations to discuss the 2024 budget request for the Department of Energy.

The following remarkable exchange ensued during the testimony, and it should be used to confront every climate change activist, believer, hysteric and expert, constantly and repeatedly, until they are forced to admit the truth:

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: When “Bite Me!” Is The Ethical Response

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Please, God, have somebody this woke-deranged knock on my door.

The father in the video erred by continuing to tolerate this outrageous example of rude and unjustified interference with his legitimate parental authority, even to the extent, at the beginning, of huminahumina-ing justifications, of which he owed none and none were necessary. Had he been exploiting his child (as he would if he had her carrying a political message) or harming his child (by making her wear a mask), the woman would have at least had a colorable reason to intervene on the child’s behalf.

But being told that dressing the toddler in pink is somehow an offense mandates a quick and effective response: “Bite me!” followed by closing the door sharply in the meddler’s face. Anything more extensive or polite conveys gravitas to the confrontation that it does not deserve.

Who ARE these people?

Ethics Dunce: National Guardsman Jon Lynch

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

There is no excuse for this.

New Hampshire-based Air National Guardsman Jon Lynch made a promotional ad for the social media platform TikTok, announcing,

“My name is Jon Lynch, and I’m a member of the National Guard. I use my TikTok channel to spread helpful and useful information to benefit military members and their families. TikTok allows me to give other military members and other families these experiences to appreciate this life that they’re in.”

TikTok is a popular app that allows users to upload their short videos, sometimes leading to lucrative social media stardom. It is owned by the China-based ByteDance technology company. TikTok is believed to be a source of data on Americans and American institutions for the Chinese government, as well as a potent propaganda vehicle.

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