Business & Commercial

From The Ethics Alarms “Butt Out!” Files: Now Members Of Congress Are Telling The Hall Of Fame Who To Enshrine

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Yesterday,  U.S. Rep. David Trone Trone (D-Md.) and  Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) held a news conference calling  on the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame’s Golden Era Committee to nominate and elect former centerfielder Curt Flood when the committee meets in December. Trone said he was looking for something that both parties could agree on, and hit on this, which is, coincidentally, something neither party has any expertise about whatsoever.

“This really resonates across both sides of the aisle,” Trone said.  “Everybody in America, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, independent, white, black or brown, believes in the American dream and fairness and decency. Decency and fairness and justice. And we all believe in that at our core, in all parties, in all colors.’’

Trone says he polled colleagues in each party about supporting Flood “because Washington is such a broken community, nobody is doing stuff together. We ought to try where we can actually do something together to honor somebody who really paid a price. Curt Flood paid a pretty horrible price. He put everything on the line — his whole career, his whole life, he put it all out there on the line. It’s been really easy for people to come together and say, ‘You know what? We have to do something about this. Let’s do something decent for a change and speak to who America really is.”

Grandstanding. Race-pandering. Virtue -signaling. Abuse of position.

Also ignorant and stupid. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up,2/25/2020: Remembering “Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee” [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Notice of a correction: in the first version of this post, I mistakenly wrote that the famous photo above was  of the first Liston fight. It was not: this was the dramatic scene that ended the rematch. Thanks to Tim Levier for reminding me.

Good Morning!

1. Cultural literacy thoughts: I wonder…how many Millennial Americans—or among the post-boomer generations—recognize the context of the photo above? On this date in 1964, a brash 22-year-old black boxer named Cassius Clay (1942-2016) pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history, defeating world heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston, an 8-to-1 favorite, in a seventh-round technical knockout. The now iconic photo above captured the dramatic finale of the 1965 rematch, ending the speculation that Clay’s victory over the previously frightening Liston had been a fluke.

Indeed, the 1964 fight was just the beginning of a remarkable story.

After his stunning victory, the sudden celebrity attended a victory to a private party at a Miami hotel. In attendance was Malcolm X, the outspoken leader of the rising African American Muslim group known as the Nation of Islam. Two days later, Cassius Clay announced he was joining the Nation of Islam, and renounced his “slave name”  to adopt  the Muslim name, Muhammad Ali. As Ali, he became one of the most influential social and political figures of his era, affecting civil rights, politics, public attitudes, language and culture…and sports, of course, as  professional boxing’s greatest champion. After successfully defending his title nine times, Ali surrendered it in 1967 after he refused induction into the U.S. Army on the grounds that he was a Muslim minister and thus  a conscientious objector. His stand against the Vietnam War galvanized national opposition to the war, especially among students and the young. In 1971,  the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali’s draft evasion conviction, and in 1974, he regained his heavyweight title in a match against George Foreman in Zaire, enshrining his phrase “rope-a-dope” in our lexicon. Eventually Ali became  the first boxer to win the heavyweight title three times. His post-retirement diagnosis  of pugilistic Parkinson’s syndrome and the sad spectacle of the once loquacious and witty athlete’s slow decline into near speechlessness and impaired motor functionscontributed to the collapse of boxing’s popularity. Ali was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and lit the Olympic flame at the opening ceremonies of the1996  Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

My mother, who like virtually everyone in her first generation Greek family was uncomfortable around blacks, once met Ali, who was seated next to her at a Harvard College function when she was Assistant Dean of Housing. She said later that he was the most charming, charismatic, beautiful man she had ever met in her life.

2. You can lead an idiot to child-proof packaging, but you can’t make him think. A study in the Journal of Pediatrics aimed at figuring out why there has been a steep rise in accidental poisonings of U.S. children according to CDC figures has come to a disturbing conclusion. Researchers analyzed nearly 4,500 calls to five U.S. poison centers in Arizona, Florida and Georgia over an eight month period in 2017. They found more than half of the prescription medicine poisonings occurred because parents and grandparents removed  pills and medicines from child-proof packaging to make them more easily accessible, to help the adults remember to take them, or more convenient for travel. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Hollywood Icon’s Porn Star Daughter [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Well, now that he’s ticking off the ‘direct a move musical’ bucket list item, I guess Steven Spielberg can move on to  ‘direct a porn film starring your daughter.”

In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Mikaela Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s and actress spouse Kate Capshaw’s adopted  daughter, revealed that she is producing solo porn videos. The 23-year-old also revealed that she would love to become a stripper, as she moves forward aggressively to fulfill her ambition of being an  adult entertainer.

Explaining to the paper that she ” just got tired of working day to day in a way that wasn’t satisfying my soul….I feel like doing this kind of work.”  Mikaela swears that her  parents were not upset when she informed them of her new career path.  Mikaela also said she’d like to make fetish videos, though she won’t have  sex with anyone on camera, because she respects her supportive 47 year-old fiancé Chuck Pankow too much to do THAT.

Yikes.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day, and I’m serious about this, is:

Do children have an ethical obligation not to embarrass and humiliate their parents?

Continue reading →

Sundown Ethics, 2/20/2020: Post Nevada Debate Mourning Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I hope you had a nice day…

The reaction among the Facebook Borg after last night’s car wreck of a debate was interesting; very muted, subdued, remarkably few comments regarding the debate, some denial, and some epicly stupid comments. I use four classes of the Deranged on Facebook: there are four or five genuine friends who are in clinically dire condition but who also don’t take serious disagreements personally. There are the inexplicable Facebook Friends who I don’t care if I upset them or not, or, franfly, if I ever see r hear from them again. Then there are nice people who I like and respect when they aren’t reciting back resistance talking points drilled into their brains like in a Mengele experiment. I leave them alone, even when one of them writes something unbelievably stupid. Today’s example: the kind, funny, brilliant actress and teacher who wrote, “Bernie and Warren are not extremist left. Sorry. They demand systemic change to support the people.” I had to wrestle myself to the ground not to respond to that one. And she’s a teacher.  Any more questions about why so many twenty-somethings are hypnotized by Sanders’ Bolshevik leftovers?

In the fourth class are strangers who are friends of friends. I randomly pick off a few of these every day for fun and practice.

1. Speaking of denial: here’s a Twitter exchange passed along by Arthur in Maine:

On the related topic of Bernie supporters’ often ugly rhetoric, it is amusing to read the same people who have used the actions of most extreme of President Trump’s supporters to characterize him protesting that Bernie bears no responsibility for his followers’ misconduct. Continue reading →

Noonish Ethics Round-Up, 2/19/2020: That Other Day That Will Live In Infamy…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Hi!

1. On this day in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, empowering the Army to issue orders emptying parts of California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona of immigrants from Japan, who were precluded from U.S. citizenship by law, and nisei, their children, who were U.S. citizens by birth. After the order, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court including future liberal icon William O. Douglas, the Japanese-Americans  were first warehoused at “assembly centers,” which could be racetrack barns or on fairgrounds, then shipped to ten detendtion camps in Western states and Arkansas. Armed guards and barbed wire, plus morning roll call were part of the degrading and punitive experience.

It is fair to say this treatment was substantially rooted in racism, for there was no mass incarceration of U.S. residents with ties to Germany or Italy. Once the U.S. appeared to be on the way to victory along with its Allies in December 1944, the Executive Order was  rescinded. By then the Army was enlisting Japanese American soldiers to fight in Africa and Europe. President Harry Truman told the all Japanese-America 442nd Regimental Combat Team: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice—and you have won.”

California is now preparing to formally apologize to the families of those interned.State Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) introduced a resolution that will formally apologize for California’s “failure to support and defend the civil rights” of Japanese Americans during that period,” and it is expected to pass today.

It’s naked grandstanding and virtue signaling, of course. The federal government apologized for the unconstitutional imprisonment and granted financial redress to survivors with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and the Supreme Court overruled its decision  upholding internment in 2018. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/18/2020: ARRRGH!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Grrrr…

Well, that’s my reward for setting the all-time ethics Alarms record for posts yesterday (8): I wake up to find my desk top won’t connect to the internet, sending me into Verizon Customer Service Hell. Then the tech puts me in safe mode, where I can connect to WiFi, but my password stops working, and I can’t get out of safe mode. I’m doing this post on my laptop, or as it affectionately known on Ethics Alarms, the Typo Machine. Other asides:

  • The Get Well bouquet Other Bill sent my wounded wife on behalf of the blog’s commentariat after her fall finally withered after exactly three weeks. It brightened our home and her spirits, and we are very grateful.
  • We joke about Trump Derangement, but the phenomenon resembles an actual illness, unlike its predecessors, the Clinton, Bush and Obama Derangement Syndromes. What has changed is the news media, which feeds and magnifies the mob-mentality and blind hatred with its daily, sometimes hourly, click-bait outrage stories aimed at the President. The Deranged immediately post them to a throng of “likes,” spawning the usual insulting comments. Imagine, a daily game based on denigration of the President of the United States, played daily and gleefully by millions of Americans. It is not healthy, responsible, respectful, or fair.

1. Wow, the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal is  making people angrier as time goes on. MLB is taking measures to protect Astros players from retaliation from pitchers, as dark comments have been made about how the competition will inflict punishment on the cheating players even if Commissioner Rob Manfred has not. Yesterday, a poll participated in by thousands of baseball fans favored the Astros having to forfeit their 2017 World Championship by a three to one margin. (Please  recall that taking away the title was my recommendation when the scandal first broke.)

I also find it disturbing that while the Astros players and owner have been on an apology tour (though not a very effective one), deposed Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who was identified by the MLB investigation as the mastermind behind the sign-stealing scheme, has said nothing–no confession, no apologies, no statements at all.

Another scandal related note: the MLB Network’s Brian Kenny expressed amazement at the difference between players angry reactions to the sign-stealing revelations and the way they closed ranks and largely refused to condemn the steroid cheats. “They say now that they weren’t playing on a level playing field with the Astros knowing what pitches were coming,” Kenny said. “Level playing field! What did they think was the situation when the batters were juicing?” Continue reading →

Oh, No! Not The Seat Reclining Ethics Debate Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I saw Ann Althouse’s post about a seat reclining dust-up on American Airlines, and immediately decided that the issue wasn’t worth posting about, since in my view, the ethical choice is clear. Then the issue exploded all over cable news and the web, so here I am. It would be so much easier if more people read Ethics Alarms.

A woman had posted on Twitter mid-flight:

She attached the video. Many of Ann’s commenters opined that the woman was a “jackhole” herself (for some reason I’ve never liked that term) for videotaping him and sending his face hither and yon rather than having a civilized discussion with him. How the flight attendant could justify siding with a jerk who was punching a seat, I cannot fathom. Now “Wendi” says she is considering suing American.

I addressed this issue in 2014, in the context of a product called “The Knee Defender,” which a jackhole could install to prevent the seat in front of you on a plane from reclining. I was pretty ticked off about it, too. In fact, I got on a roll: Continue reading →

A Poll: Which Is The Most Mock-Worthy Example Of Corporate Virtue Signaling Diversity Pandering (VSDP)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The mad diversity obsession being flung at American culture from the depths of the progressive insanity is a brainwashing exercise to make society forget what it has already learned: What matters is whether a group is constructed based on merits such as talent, experience, relevant skills, achievement, potential for significantly contributing to the success of an enterprise, and character. To the extent that the presence of diversity in a group suggests that opportunity has been equally available to all, contingent on these qualities, of course, it is a welcome condition. If the diversity can only be achieved by warping, rigging or ignoring the relevant qualifications, however, the process is destructive, and indeed unethical. Diversity for diversity’s own sake is a rationalization for unfair treatments and incompetence.

Corporations, sucking up to current fad as they are programmed to do,  will eagerly enable this destructive cultural brainwashing, if the more level-headed and ethically grounded among them don’t do our duty and mercilessly mock such examples as these:

Sports Illustrated Continue reading →

Oh, Great: Baseball Turned Bernie Sanders Into A Socialist

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

First the sign-stealing scandal, and now this.

It is, apparently not exactly a new revelation that having his juvenile heart broken by a baseball team set Bernie Sanders on the dark road that had stops in Moscow and the Workers’ Paradise, but it is a timely moment to expound on the tale, readying as the Vermont Senator is to tear the Democratic Party asunder.

Many distinguished Americans of a certain age, from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to Old Blues Eyes himself have waxed nostalgic about Walter O’Malley’s great betrayal, when he yanked the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers away from their iconic Ebbets Field home to the corrupt embrace of La La Land.

As  baseball fans know *or should), the year was 1957. The Brooklyn Dodgers, affectionately called “Dem Bums” by  the locals, had finally rewarded their community with a World Series championship over the hated Bronx-dwelling Yankees in 1955. Then, on a day that lives in infamy, Dodgers owner O’Malley announced that the team was leaving. (So were their National League rivals, the New York Giants, heading to San Francisco.) The Dodgers were a massive part of the Brooklyn community’s self-image, and the degree of trauma  it suffered cannot be underestimated. Bernie suffered too, and the scars still ache. Sanders told the Times in a recent interview:

“It was like they would move the Brooklyn Bridge to California. How can you move the Brooklyn Bridge to California?… I don’t want to tell you that was the sole reason that I’ve developed the politics that I’ve developed. But as a kid, I did see in that case about the greed of one particular company. And that impacted me.”

And here we are. In one of the more dramatic examples of Chaos Theory in action and the Law Of Unexpected Consequences, an upheaval in the  national pastime started the dominoes tumbling that threaten the Democratic Party and the nation’s economic stability 63 years later. What fun! Continue reading →

Oscar Ethics Part II: The “In Memoriam” Snubs

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

For some reason, Luke Perry’s snub (That’s Luke above) has attracted most of the outrage, though he is far from the worst of the omissions, as you will see.

Luke Perry

(October 11, 1966 – March 4, 2019

Perry became a teen idol at 23 after he was cast as the brooding son of a millionaireon Fox’s prime time soap opera,  “Beverly Hills, 90210.”  A riot broke out when 10,000 teen girls attended one of his  August 1991 autograph sessions  While starring in “90210,” Perry appeared in the original film version of Joss Whedon’s” Buffy The Vampire Slayer” (1992). That was pretty much the high point of his film career, though he had a small role in “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”  Mostly he was a TV actor whose career, after a spectacular launch,  settled into the typical orbit of supporting roles in various series and guest shots in everything from sitcoms like “Will and Grace” to “Law and Order: SVU.”  Between those jobs, voice-over work and regional theater paid the bills and kept him working.

He was, in short, a working professional actor who had one burst of superstardom, which is more than most. Perry was only 52 when he died of a massive stroke.

Michael J. Pollard

(May 30, 1939 – November 20, 2019)

Pollard rose to fame in 1967 as  Bonnie and Clyde’s dim-witted gang member, earning an Oscar nomination along with the other honors racked up by Arthur’s Penn’s ground-breaking, violent epic about the lover-killers. He went on to a long career as a Hollywood character actor, aided by one of the most memorable faces in screen history. That face had made him a familiar TV actor before “Bonnie and Clyde” made him famous: he played the cousin of Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” and Virgil, the cousin to  Barney Fife (Don Knotts), on “The Andy Griffith Show.” In the first season of the original “Star Trek,” he was  a creepy  teenage cult leader on a planet of children.

Pollard continued to make significant films after his Oscar nomination, such as  “Little Fauss and Big Halsy” (1970), a motorcycle racing buddy film in which he co-starred with Robert Redford. He was Billy the Kid in “Dirty Little Billy” (1972), an inept fireman in “Roxanne” (1987), the friend of a Utah gas station owner  who claimed to be Howard Hughes’s beneficiary in“Melvin and Howard” (1980), and  surveillance expert Bug Bailey in “Dick Tracy.”

Pollard was acting right up until his death: two of his films that yet to be released. Continue reading →