Character

Remember The Alamo Today, March 6, When The Fort Fell, And Entered American Lore And Legend Forever.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No, I didn’t forget the Alamo, and I hope against hope that more Americans than not are at least noting the anniversary of when the mission that became a fort fell in the early morning hours of March 6, 1836. As soon s I get this post up, I’m going to re-watch the 1960 John Wayne movie commemorating the siege and the men who died that day. The Duke’s film has plenty of flaws, but a lack of conviction and passion isn’t one of them; in the end that, plus the Demiri Tiomkin score, is what what makes “The Alamo” my favorite cinematic telling of the story.

Did the old newspaperman’s manifesto from another John Wayne movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” ever apply more perfectly to an event in American history?  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” “I answered them with a cannon shot.” The line in the sand. The couriers who came back to the fort to die. Jim Bowie fighting from his sickbed. Davey Crockett fighting to the end. Truth and fiction, the Alamo is my favorite of all American history tales, and the Alamo itself is my favorite historical site to visit in the United States.

I didn’t have a new inspiration to justify a new post this year, so I’m reprising the one from this date in 2023. Among other things, it included the climax of the Alamo diary Michael West contributed a few years ago.

Now the bugles are silent
And there’s rust on each sword
And the small band of soldiers
Lie asleep in the arms of the Lord.

***

I regard the siege of the Alamo one of the signature ethics events in U.S. history, both for what it was and what it came to represent. There have been many posts on the subject as well as many references to the Alamo in other posts, all of which are accessible here.

Today, March 6, marks the fall of the converted mission. Ethics Alarms has two pieces from its archives to present: Continue reading →

OK, a Show of Hands: How Many Believe That Gavin Newsom Has Had a Change of Heart Regarding Transgender Competitors In Women’s Sports?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I sure don’t.

In the debut episode of the California governor’s new podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” Newsom invited Turning Point USA founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk to banter about politics and public policy. To Kirk’s amazement (the New York Times assumes), Newsom concurred with the political right’s position regarding biological men participating in women’s sports. “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that,” Newsom told Kirk. “It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.”

The Times was shocked—shocked!—that Newsom would break from the official party line on the issue. In the Senate last week, not a single Democrat supported the House-passed bill banning such cross-gender competitors, despite polls showing that this is an issue in which about 80% of the public agree with conservatives. “The comments by Mr. Newsom, who has backed LGPTQ causes for decades and was one of the first American elected officials to officiate same-sex weddings,” the Times said, “represented a remarkable break from other top Democrats on the issue, and signaled a newly defensive position on transgender rights among many in his party.”

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Never Mind “The Appearance of Impropriety,” Democrats Need To Avoid The Appearance of Stupidity

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Let’s see: the ethical values that Congressional Democrats spat upon last night were competence, responsibility, integrity, respect, civility, courtesy, decency, dignity, self-restraint, prudence, fairness and patriotism. That’s quite an accomplishment in a single event. The party’s decision to challenge the GOP’s well-earned title as “The Stupid Party” last night during the State of the Union address was, in turn,

  • Foolish
  • Juvenile
  • Desperate
  • Embarrassing (to their party, the  nation and the institution of Congress)
  • Damning
  • Damaging to democracy
  • An appeal to the Trump Deranged while simultaneously proving how crippling the malady can be…and…
  • …a gift to the man they hate so much, President Trump.

In “True Grit,” the villain Tom Cheney is shot by young Maddie Ross after he taunts her by telling the girl how to cock the giant pistol she has aimed at him. He is stunned when she shoots him, and cries out, “I didn’t think you’d do it!”

I might make “The Cheney” a new Ethics Alarms distinction. I had read about the ridiculous college campus protest-level tactics Democrats were considering, and posted about them yesterday, as well as noting that the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jefferies, had advised them to eschew such nonsense in favor of a “strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber.” Jeffries was right for a change, and I really thought all of the stories about the Democrats bringing props and dressing up would prove to be false alarms. I didn’t think they’d do it! Yet when the time for the yearly Presidential “speech “state of the nation” speech arrived, there were the Democrats, looking like the studio audience in a particularly ugly episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.”

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Boy, If Aleysha Ortiz Wins Her Lawsuit, a Lot of School Boards Will Be Sweating Bullets…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Aleysha Ortiz, 19, has sued the Hartford Board of Education and city officials alleging that she cannot read or write even though she graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. Her suit accuses defendants of negligence by failing to provide adequate special education services. She told CNN that she was promoted all the way through 12 years in Hartford public school despite never acquiring fundamental literacy skills; in a May 2024 city council meeting, she testified that she was unable to read or write, yet was awarded an honors diploma.

Ortiz is now enrolled at the University of Connecticut: yes, she was accepted and got a scholarship despite being, in her own assessment, illiterate. She explains this by her adeptness in using technology such as speech-to-text and text-to-speech programs.

Says Newsweek, amusingly, “The case has drawn attention to how academic achievement is measured and whether special education students are truly receiving the skills they need to succeed beyond high school.”

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Addendum: “Gee What a Surprise: NOAA ‘Adjusts’ Its Historical Weather Data Just As ‘Climate Change Deniers’ Claim They Do

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As it happens, the day that I posted on NOAA’s inherently ethically dubious “adjustments” to historical climate data, a blog post by The Manhattan Contrarian turned up in my email following up on the same ABC News story that sparked my post. It is well worth reading. His conclusion:

“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”

Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.

Trump’s Pete Rose Pardon: Not the Most Unethical Pardon, Just the Dumbest

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Above you see the President with a photo of the late, great, baseball slimeball doing the Nazi salute like Elon Musk, which I’m sure is what endears him to Trump.

Kidding!

Not kidding: between their various pardons, I’m pretty sure Presidents Biden and Trump have so degraded the status of the Presidential clemency power that it will never recover. Once, such pardons conveyed ethical values and legitimate justifications for a President’s compassion. This thobbingly stupid pardon should make the gesture an embarrassment forevermore.

Here is the President’s asinine, even by his standards, Truth Social post:

Ugh. Fisking this crap is too easy but noxious, like shooting dead rats in a barrel…

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Ethics Dunce: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and Further Observations on the Oval Office Fiasco) [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

I worked for many years for a fascinating man, a brilliant negotiation specialist and consultant, Richard Halpern. My first thought yesterday after watching the astounding argument that broke out among the President, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was, “Boy, I wish Rich was still here to analyze what went wrong.” Rich died in 2009, but I learned enough about the art of negotiation from working with and observing him to be confident in how he would have reacted to what occurred on live television yesterday. My thoughts also reached back across the decades to the seminar I took on negotiation in law school with Adrian Fisher, then Dean of Georgetown Law Center after a career as a top arms control negotiator for the United States.

Both Richard Halpern and Adrian Fisher would have agreed that Zelenskyy was incompetent. I would add that he behaved like a deluded fool who had come to believe his fawning press notices.

First, Zelenskyy did not sufficiently research his negotiation partners, their preferences, their character, and their “hot buttons” that should never be pressed without sound reasons. Second, he did not properly prepare to insulate his own hot buttons from making him behave against his country’s best interests. Third, he did not comprehend why he was in the Oval office and what was expected of him.

Finally, he did not understand that as a supplicant nation seeking critical aid from the United States, he was not on a level playing field, particularly since he was in the U.S., on the President’s home turf. His job was to be respectful, compliant and non-confrontational no matter what occurred or was said.

The previous press conference with a foreign leader that President Trump had completed just the day before should have served as a guide. Keir Starmer was content to stay in the background and barely speak while the President rambled on in his inimitable fashion, and Great Britain has accumulated far more credits and greater good will with the U.S. than Ukraine. One commenter said that yesterday Zelenskyy failed to “read the room.” It was far worse than that: he failed to read the room, whom he was talking to, why he was there, and what he had to accomplish.

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Behold! A Fascinating Visit To The Mind of a Trump Derangement Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.

I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.

I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.

Yes, I’m Thinking About “The Greatest Show on Earth” Again…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I checked: I’ve made various comments about 1952’s The Best Picture Oscar winner “The Greatest Show on Earth” over the years, but I never mentioned that it’s an ethics movie. The Cecil B. DeMille wide-screen spectacular is often cited by current critics as the worst “Best Picture” ever, which tells you a lot about movie critics and the leftward biases of our so-called elite.

I just watched the end of the film because it happened to be showing on MGM+ this morning, catching the film right after its DeMille trademarked train wreck, which both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have said helped inspire them to be movie-makers. The circus train suffers a disastrous crash that devastates performers, animals and equipment, and the company, already in dire financial straits, appears to be doomed. But in the best “the show must go on,” “fight, fight, fight!,” “Don’t give up the ship!,” “I have not yet begun to fight!,” “Victory or death!” (It’s Alamo week, remember!) American tradition, the performers rally around their grievously wounded boss (pre-Moses Charlton Heston) and put on a ramshackle show in an open field after parading through the nearby town to gather an audience. Meanwhile, Jimmy Stewart, as a clown who is secretly a doctor on the run from law enforcement after his mercy killing of his wife, reveals his identity to a police detective by using his skills as a surgeon to save Heston’s life.

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Rachel Maddow’s Self-Indicting Message on MSNBC’s Firing Joy Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow told us all we should need to know…. about Maddow…with this outburst:

“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”

All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.

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