Business & Commercial

We Don’t Have To Debate This, Do We? Brian Kilmede Is an Ethics-Challenged Idiot and Fox News Must Fire Him Immediately.

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Why hasn’t he been fired already? Why wasn’t he pulled off the air with a giant hook before he could complete what would laughingly be called his “thought”?

“Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade, who has long been an embarrassment on Fox News’ routinely embarrassing news happy talk moring show “Fox and Friends,” said during a discussion with fellow (almost equally annoying) anchors Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt last week that homeless people (like the maniac who killed the young woman on the train in Charlotte) should be given “involuntary lethal injection(s).” Homeless problem solved!

Jones began the assault on due process, civil rights and decency by saying about the homeless, “A lot of them don’t want to take the programs. A lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re gonna give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” Kilmeade added. “Or, involuntary lethal injection — or something. Just kill them!”

Nice.

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The Hyundai Raid: Parallel Universes

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Here is how Fox News reported on the massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia:

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of 475 illegal migrants during a major immigration enforcement raid on Thursday at a Hyundai electric car battery factory in Georgia. 

HSI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven Schrank noted that while the raid was at a Hyundai facility, not all the migrants worked for the parent company. Some worked for subcontractors at the site.

“We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said during a news conference on Friday.

Here is how the New York Times reported the same story (Gift link!):

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One More Time: If People Tell You the Mainstream Media Isn’t A Democratic Party, Progressive Propaganda Mouthpiece They Are Liars or Morons…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yesterday we had one more flagrant example of how completely useless our news sources have become in letting the public know what is happening in the nation and the world so they can be responsible citizens. Well, I guess they are not useless to progressives, Democrats and leftist totalitarians, because the biased and distorted stories, reports and interviews they spew out daily does keep citizens in the dark (where “democracy dies,” sayeth the Washington Post. Silly me, I once thought the Post meant that was a bad thing.) On the August 31, 2025 “Face the Nation,” host Ed O’Keefe interviewed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the American Left’s latest martyr, “Maryland Dad” Kilmar Abrego García. What the audience heard was this:

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The Unabomber Was Right, Example #7,853

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My first “The Unabomber was right” essay was in 2017, and he’s been proven more right with every passing year. In that post, I began,

“As I understand it, Ted believed that technology was destroying society, making us all slaves to it, and taking the joy out of life. I have yet to see how blowing people up addressed this problem, but then he shouldn’t have had to be right about everything. The evidence has been mounting since 1995, when he killed his final victim,that  the Unabomber  wasn’t quite as crazy as we thought.”

The intensity of that conclusion has only multiplied with time, further technological excesses and inconveniences, and experiences like today’s trip to Staples to buy some wildly over-priced black ink for my crummy Hewlett Packard printer, purchased by my late wife when our ethics training and consulting business was even more financial distress than it is now.

It is a Sunday on Labor Day weekend, and the parking lot at the strip mall near my house was, as I expected, nearly empty. Staples, however, had the longest line at the single register open I had ever seen there. Some of this was the fault of Staples, which like just about every other chain, decided to keep its workforce cut to the minimum after the pandemic eased. After all, where else will the customers go? All of the stores have lousy service now; all of them are understaffed. For that, you can blame the progressive idiocy of raising the minimum wage to the point where it costs too much to pay for minimally-able employees. The result: fewer jobs, inflation, Staples-style (CVS-style, Home Depot-style, etc.) non-service.

But I digress. The huge line moved like a rabbit through the alimentary canal of a snake (maybe slower) because, I soon realized, everyone was using an app on their cell phones, and neither they nor the clerk were quite sure how the system worked. One woman was at the register for 20 minutes all by herself, looking and pounding on her smart phone, showing it to the poor guy trying to check her through. Every single purchase appeared to take at least three times as long as it would have before the addition of the apps to the process.

When I finally got to the head of the line with my three items, it still took too long: I had to enter two phone numbers, confirm my address, and “tap” with my card, but I was easily the quickest customer through the line, because all I did was pay for my stuff. A woman behind me actually said, “Wow! That was quick!”

I replied, “Want to know my secret? I bring up what I want to buy and pay for it.” You warned us, Ted. We just didn’t listen….

Ethics Verdict On President Trump and the Silly Cracker Barrel Episode

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Verdict: President Trump abused his position, power and influence by weighing in on a private company’s choice of logo and continuing to make declarations about it as if it is any of his business or a proper matter of concern for the President of the United States.

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Ethics Villain: AOL

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I have AOL as my email provider. It was not by choice: Verizon handled my email (I get about 300 non-spam emails a day) but sold their business to AOL, which is why I have a jamproethics@verizon.net address. AOL is clunky, but I depend on email, and having to change over my address promises to be a disaster, losing me clients who are increasingly precious commodities. When Grace died, several clients who were supposed to always copy me in on messages to her didn’t, and moved on to other (and lesser) ethics trainers. So I have, though sheer inertia, kept my AOL account while paying the reasonable yearly fee.

But this month, the provider decided to force me and other users into paying them more. A third of my email home page is now taken up with obtrusive, often animated ads. If I click on an “expand” button to restore the page to the readable status it once was automatically, I get a message inviting me to pay for “ad free” email. Then the screen goes back to its ad-cluttered format. I can only “expand” three (or four: I haven’t counted) times before AOL informs me that I have exhausted my daily quota (of returning to the screen format I had been paying for), and that my only option is to pay extra to end the annoying interference.

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Stop Making Me Defend Cracker Barrel!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Wow. Just when I thought the Left’s outrage machine had reached new levels of absurdity over an attractive white woman advertising bluejeans by using a very old play on words (Jeff Goldblum uses the same one in “Jurassic Park”),the Right’s outrage machine says “Hold my beer!”

Cracker Barrel stripped its old logo of both its barrel and its “cracker,” and all of a sudden it was Bud Light all over again. The company’s stock even crashed. How the decision could possibly be seen as some kind of kowtow to wokeness is beyond me, and should be beyond everyone who isn’t Woke Deranged.

The old logo was archaic, messy and unattractive. Okay, so the old guy sitting by the barrel looked white, but he was yellow, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t like removing Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima, or that naughty Native American lass whose Land O’ Lakes box could be rigged to make a wallet peep show. I’d compare the Cracker Barrel change to Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming KFC, and no one freaked out over that, though, admittedly, it transpired before both conservatives and progressives had gone nuts in their distrust of each other.

The one aspect of this nothingcracker that supports the fevered conspiracy theory on the Right is the Cracker Barrel management’s deplorable past record as a pandering, cowardly, principle-free bunch of weenies.

Here is the Ethics Alarms post (from 2020) about the last time this company entered the culture wars. I still haven’t forgiven it.

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Today’s Trump Deranged Facebook Post…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“I’ve have been a professional waiter in DC for the last 30 years. Today is the first time I was cut from my shift (of two waiters) during the popular restaurant week. People here are terrorized becauseof that POS in the White House Trump shits on EVERYTHING. He is a disaster for working Americans.”

Does anybody have a theory why Trump is being blamed for restaurant business declining in D.C.? There is no question that the extra presence of the National Guard makes the city safer for tourists, diners, visitors, residents. Is the drop in eatery reservations because those in the Greater D.C. area are watching, listening to and reading fear-mongering hysterics who are characterizing the cleaning up of the nation’s Capital, which has been a dangerous, crime-infested mess for decades, as some kind of apocalyptic institution of a police state?

Is it because restaurant patrons in D.C. are overwhelmingly white, and mostly don’t live in the District? How does an otherwise intelligent person (I know the Facebook poster) make the connection that President Trump is responsible for a restaurant laying him off? The likely culprits are the Axis media and the fools who won’t eat in D.C. because they are less likely to be robbed or murdered.

The downturn in D.C. restaurant business was a 2024 development, with rising costs being the major cause. Also, D.C. eliminated the tip credit that allowed restaurants to use tip income to reach the minimum wage requirements. Yet now it’s President Trump’s fault.

What’s going on here?

Incompetent Re-Branding of the Decade?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Amazing. Mediaite, an MSNBC cheerleader, calls this thing above as ‘surprisingly elegant.” Elegant? MS is best known as a disease, and a nasty one. If someone says, “I have MS now,” the proper result is, “I’m so sorry! What’s the prognosis?” More pandering from Mediaite: “Media rebrands usually stink. Quibi. Tronc. Syfy. The graveyard is crowded with names that sounded bold in the boardroom and ridiculous everywhere else, which is why MSNBC’s new identity as MS Now feels like such a surprise. It’s not perfect. It’s not thrilling. But it’s… smart.” Hey, everybody! It’s smart to make your new identity the common name for a dread disease! Is it possible that no one mentioned this among the dozens—hundreds?—of alleged professional marketers and image consultants involved in the process? Just to make sure I’m not imagining this, I just Googled “MS.” The result:

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!…That Major League Baseball Is Facing a Gambling Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Cleveland Guardians (you know, the Indians?) pitcher Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary administrative leave through August 31 as part of Major League Baseball’s ongoing investigation into gambling. Clase’s teammate, pitcher Luis Ortiz, was the first player placed on leave under the ongoing investigation.

“The Guardians have been notified by Major League Baseball that as part of their sports betting investigation Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary paid leave per an agreement with the Players Association,” the team said yesterday in a statement. “We have been informed that no additional players or Club personnel are expected to be impacted. The Guardians are not permitted to comment further at this time, and will respect the league’s confidential investigative process as we continue to fully cooperate.”

Clase, an elite closer (the relief pitcher who pitches in the 9th inning when his team is ahead) signed a five-year, $20 million extension in April 2022. He’s being paid $4.5 million this year and has a $6 million guarantee for the 2026 season under the terms of that contract. Why would anyone making that much money risk it all to get involved with gambling in a sport where doing so guarantees banning from the game? That’s easy: professional athletes are not, as a rule, very bright, but are greedy,and have the ethics alarms of 12-year-olds.

I covered this issue in a longer post in February. I was right, the professional sports leagues are wrong, any fool could see it (but these organizations are not run ny just any fools, but very special fools), and the result is unavoidable. The embrace of gambling by sports organizations is going to be a disaster. It is hypocritical, incompetent and irresponsible.