Character

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.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Stephen King

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.

King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”

He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.

Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.

But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.

Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.

King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.

Ethics Proposition: Someone Who Would Write, Say or Think This Cannot Be Trusted To Teach Children…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Fair?

Kristen Eve is a Pre-K teacher. Among her deficits is that she doesn’t understand the Bill of Rights. Or irony: I have no doubt that Kirk had sufficient integrity to understand that even an abuse of the right to bear arms resulting in his own death isn’t sufficient justification for removing that right from law-abiding citizens.

How many teachers like her do you think are out there indoctrinating kids? My guess: a lot.

Believe It or Not! The Murder Wasn’t The Most Disturbing Aspect Of The Charlotte Stabbing

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

It seems incredible, but Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a Charlotte light rail train was not the most disturbing aspect of her murder by a deranged man who just decided to kill her for no discernible reason. Nor is the fact that the killer had been arrested 14 times and turned back into the streets as part of the Mad Left’s urban “de-incarceration” agenda the worst aspect of the story, or even the deliberate burying of the event by the mainstream media, which felt that the public didn’t need to know this occurred because it undermines so many Axis narratives (gun control, how safe Democrat-run big cities are despite all evidence to the contrary, “Black on white crime? What black on white crime?,” the virtues of public transportation). And it isn’t the fact that so many Americans have been brainwashed that many (including commenters on this blog) have defended the media’s censorship of inconvenient reality.

No, I have concluded upon watching the various surveillance camera videos that the worst aspect of the incident is that even after the young woman was stabbed and was bleeding out in her seat, not one of her fellow passengers lifted a finger to try to save her life.

That’s some community you have there, Charlotte. Be proud…

Continue reading →

The Villain In The Phillies-Marlins Ball Heist Was NOT the Obnoxious Phillies Fan…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, indeed.

The incident that has “gone viral” from the stands at a Phillies-Marlins game in Miami is covered in the videos above. Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader hit a home run into the left field seats. The ball hit the bleachers and rolled around as four fans tried to nab the souvenir. A man appeared to win the battle, returned to his seat and gave the ball to his young his son, who rewarded him with a hug.

Enter Cruella DeVille. A woman who had been scrambling for the ball, wearing Phillies gear, confronted the man and demanded the ball, claiming she had a hold of it before he got it. The father complied, taking the ball out of his son’s glove and handing it to the woman. Of course the incident was filmed and posted on social media, with the unidentified woman being quickly dubbed “Phillies Karen.”

Sensing a public relations opportunity, the staff at the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park (another horribly named baseball park: money isn’t everything, guys!) wanted to make things right, so they sent a stadium employee to give the son and his sister a goody bag full of baseball stuff.

Awwwww…

The villain in this incident was not the horrible woman. (She doesn’t know her baseball ball-chasing rules, incidentally. In those scrambles for bouncing balls, whoever gets a firm grip on the ball first wins fair and square. I have been in many of these tussles, one of which featured a little old lady snatching the ball from me —a Mickey Mantle foul!—just as I thought I had it in my grasp….) No, the villain was the weenie father.

What a disgrace. This guy gave up in the face of an unjust and unreasonable confrontation because he didn’t have the guts to tell the woman to buzz off, de-gifting his son of a prize—it was his birthday!—in the process. In that moment, he taught to boy many things, none of them good. Don’t fight for what’s yours. Let bullies win. Avoid unpleasant confrontations at all costs, even when it means letting unethical tactics prevail.

He also taught his son that his father is a weenie. Good to know, I guess.

The Organization That Will Help You Kill Yourself for $20,000…What a Deal! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“People” magazine is carrying the depressing story of Maureen Slough, (above), an Irish woman, 58, who told her family she was going on vacation to Lithuania with a friend. However, she confided to two friends that she would really be traveling alone to Switzerland, where a non-profit there would help her to kill herself.

And that’s what she did, after paying the organization, Pegasos, in Liestal, Switzerland, £15,000 (a bit more than 20,000 U.S. dollars) for the assistance.

A brief digression: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and had been since 1942. It isn’t euthanasia which is illegal but often isn’t punished here in the U.S. and elsewhere: the patients kill themselves with prescribed drugs, and doctors aren’t involved beyond writing a legal prescription. (Writing a prescription for a drug that the doctor knows the patient will use to commit suicide is, in my view, a violation of medical ethics.)

Maureen’s adult daughter received a text message on WhatsApp from Pegasos informing her that her mother had died. That was nice of them. “What was worse was not only did I get the text on WhatsApp, they had advised me that her ashes would be posted to me in 6-8 weeks,” she said. “In that very moment, because I was alone, I just sat there with the baby and cried… I just felt like my world ended.”

Later, Slough’s ashes arrived.

Continue reading →

The Ethicist Rejects Unconditional Love

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I don’t.

“My Brother’s an Unpleasant Drunk. Can I Cut Him Off?” the headline to The New York Time’s weekly ethics advice column reads. Well, obviously you can cit him off, but this is ethics: should you cut him off? I must confess, I developed a healthy dislike of the inquirer, who may not be a drunk but is also unpleasant. He writes in part…

Continue reading →

Professor Jacobson Asks, “What Happened To Tucker Carlson?” EA’s Answer: Nothing! He Was Always Like This!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Prof. William Jacobson of Cornell oversees an excellent, well-researched conservative blog that often delves into the world of ethics, often from a legal perspective. One of his current posts is titled “What Happened to Tucker?,” as the Prof. laments what he sees as Carlson’s turn to the Dark Side. “He’s turned out not to be the person I thought he was,” Jacobson writes. “After leaving Fox News, he has done more to normalize Jew-hatred and bring it into the MAGA movement through the “woke right” than any other major ‘conservative’ personality…Something has gone very wrong. Maybe his true self finally was freed of the constraints of corporate news, or maybe something else influenced him. But now he is — in my estimation — a malign force and not just as to Jews and Israel, but also to the Trump agenda which he seems determined to undermine.”

You see Fredo above in his pathetic protestations of intellectual acumen from “Godfather II,” one of my favorite entries in the EA Hollywood Clip Archive, because in this instance, I was way ahead of Prof. Jacobson. Last December I issued this post, in which I quoted from an earlier “Why can’t everyone see that Carlson is an untrustworthy asshole?” essay that said in part,

“ [Tucker Carlson is] a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it.…since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has! Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

I Don’t Know What Presidential “Approval” Polls Mean

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…which means they are misleading, manipulative, and useless, except to be misleading and manipulative.

I just saw a Rasmussen Poll that measured Trump’s approval split at 49%-49%. Which side of that split would I belong on? I’m not sure I know. Hmmmmmm….

Do I approve of Trump’s character? Do I like the fact that someone like him is the symbol of the United States to the world? Do I think his conduct as President is likely to have a positive effect on the United States society and culture over the long term? Do I think his conduct as President is likely to have a positive effect on the office of the Presidency over the long term? Do I approve of his social media postings and his unrestrained outbursts on whatever topic engages him at a particular moment? Do I approve of his extreme narcissism, his cruelty, his misogyny, his exaggerations, his constant resort to ad hominem attacks?

Nonononononononononono! I do not approve. Not only that, but I don’t approve of anyone who does approve these aspects of Donald Trump.

Continue reading →