Character

Comment of the Day: “From Uvalde, The Message Is “Don’t Criminalize Incompetence and Cowardice”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I loved this: not only did long-time commenter Red Pill Ethics return to the fold after almost three years, he did it with brio, registering a Comment of the Day! This gives me hope: I periodically take inventories of which regular commenters have fled the nest, leaving me with only five. All I have to do is take the Ethics Alarms wayback machine, also known as “the archives” and peruse the names under “Comments.” I am always thrilled when I discover that an AWOL commenter has been following the blog all along when something rouses them from their torpor. We have had several instances of this lately.

Here is Red Pill’s Comment of the Day on the post, “From Uvalde, The Message Is “Don’t Criminalize Incompetence and Cowardice”…

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The DEI Slippery Slope Goes Here:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Suraj Bhaskar, 20, from Uttar Pradesh, one of the Indian states, failed the NEET medical school admission exam twice. Determined to become a doctor, however, the plucky young man wouldn’t give up. Indian law mandates a 5% set aside in admissions for people with disabilities (PwDs) in government-aided higher education institutions, including medical colleges.

So he cut off his foot.

A police investigation indicated the violent assault on Suraj that his older brother reported was in fact a carefully planned ruse. The aspiring doctor was indeed found unconscious with a severed foot, but the plot fell apart rapidly.

“The accused tried to mislead the investigation with a fabricated story, but his claims did not stand scrutiny during sustained questioning and examination of evidence,” a police spokesperson told local reporters. A diary belonging to Suraj conatined an entry that read, “I will become an MBBS doctor in 2026,” and his girlfriend testified to Suraj’s obsession with getting into medical school. He had unsuccessfully tried to obtain disability-related documents a few months prior, but was foiled. The medical report determined that Suraj’s foot had been cleanly cut off, most likely with a machine, and the incision was too clean to have been inflicted with a violent knife attack as the two brothers claimed. The syringes found in a field near where Suraj lay strongly suggested that used a drug to numb his legs before performing the self-amputation.

His foot is still missing.

There appears to be some doubt as to whether any charges or punishment will follow with this scheme, which is widely seen as self-punishing. If nothing else, Suraj’s medical career has definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.

I’m sorry, but I regard it as unethical to pass up an obvious punch line like that.

Kanye West Issues a Level #1 Apology…Or Maybe Not

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

That’s the full page ad that “Ye,” aka. Kanye West, paid to have placed in, of all papers, the Wall Street Journal. I wonder what percentage of WSJ readers even know who the hell he is? Never mind; he did it. Here’s what the ad says (I hesitate to put down “he wrote’):

“Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage – the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed….”

It wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2023. That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis. Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you’re manic, you don’t think you’re sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely.

Once people label you as crazy, you feel as if you cannot contribute anything meaningful to the world. It’s easy for people to joke and laugh it off when in fact this is a very serious debilitating disease you live from….

The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don’t need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, and unstoppable. 

I lost touch with reality. Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation, and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self. 

In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find: the swastika, and even sold t-shirts bearing it. One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type 1 are the disconnected moments – many of which I still cannot recall that lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people. 

To the black community – which held me down through all of the highs and lows and some of my darkest times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us. 

In early 2025, I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life. As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn’t want to be here anymore. 

Having bipolar disorder is not a state of constant mental illness. When you go into the manic episode, you are ill at that point. When you are not in an episode, you are completely “normal.” And that’s when the wreckage from the illness hits the hardest. Hitting rock bottom a few months ago, my wife encouraged me to finally get help. 

I have found comfort in Reddit forums of all places. Different people speak of being in manic or depressive episodes of a similar nature. I read their stories and realized that I was not alone. It’s not just me who run [sic] their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing “symptoms of autism.” 

My words as a leader in my community have real global impact and influence. In my mania, I lost complete sight of that. 

As I find my new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise and clean living, I have newfound, much-needed clarity. I am pouring my energy into positive, meaningful art: music, clothing, design, and other new ideas to help the world. 

I’m not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.”

It’s time to check the old, Ethics Alarms Apology Scale to see where this whatever it is fits.

According to the scale, this is the hierarchy of apologies, their function and their motivation, from most admirable to the least credible:

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Inside The Mind Of The Kind Of Progressive Fighting Law Enforcement In Minnesota

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

The term suggested is “pro-crime” leftist. I’d prefer pro-chaos leftist, because the Far Left has always sown chaos as the perfect compost for expended government power and totalitarianism. Somehow, the Far Left is now just the Left. How unhinged (or sinister) are these people? Behold Anna Krauthammer, for whom indoctrination, mainstreamed bias from the new media and an IQ below freezing resulted in her authorship of “Why I Didn’t Report My Rape” at the Socialist/Communist rag “The Nation.”

She’s a “prison abolitionist,” as well as a Defund the Police lunatic and a “law enforcement is racist” puppet. Here’s enough of a sample of her nonsense to send you to the nearest toilet:

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How Paul Anka Proved Harry Truman Right…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am not a big fan of Paul Anka or his work, so I considered the new documentary on his career a default choice this morning since ice is on my satellite dish and the channel selection on Direct TV was severely limited. But it’s true: you learn something new and useful almost every day, and often in the least expected places.

I did not know, for example, that Anka wrote “Johnny’s Theme,” the now iconic music that Johnny Carson walked onto the stage to at the start of his version of “The Tonight Show.” But it’s how it ended up as Carson’s entrance music that hammers home an ethics lesson.

When Johnny Carson was preparing to take over from Jack Paar as the host of “The Tonight Show” in October 1962, he ran into Anka, whom he had worked with in a TV special. Carson mentioned to Anka that they needed a new theme, so the pop star composer of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “Puppy Love” and the theme to “The Longest Day” repurposed the instrumental arrangement for “It’s Really Love,” a song recorded by his one-time girlfriend Annette Funicello (not one of Annette’s hits) and sent a demo to Carson.

Johnny phoned Paul and thanked him for the offer (and said he and Ed McMahon loved the tune) but said that “Tonight Show” bandleader Skitch Henderson had “his nose out of joint” (does any one use that phrase any more?) because Carson wanted to use a melody written by a “20-year-old kid.”

So Anka suggested that Johnny Carson write new lyrics to his song and that they call it “Johnny’s theme,” which would then be the composition of the “20-year-old kid” and Henderson’s boss. Brilliant! Henderson had to consent to the song’s use every night, and it was Johnny’s walk on music for 30 years until Carson handed over the show to Jay Leno.

Carson’s name on the song meant that he got half the royalties, which averaged $400,000 per year: Carson’s cut was $200,000 a year for lyrics that were never heard or sung. “Johnny’s Theme” had been played more than 1,400,000 times by the end of the Carson’s show’s run. Anka says that Carson admitted he was embarrassed to make all that money for nothing, but the singer shrugs and smiles about it. Johnny got a great theme, and they both made money.

My favorite Harry Truman quote, perhaps my favorite ethics quote by any President and right up there with Winston Churchill’s immortal, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” is:

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

I don’t know if Paul Anka was familiar with the quote or even if he knows about it yet, but his solution to the “Tonight Show” dilemma is as good an example of Harry’s wisdom in practice as we are likely to see.

[Still waiting for WordPress, or someone, to tell me how to get page breaks in posts under their new %$^&#@ block system…]

It’s “Unprofessional Nurse Day” on Ethics Alarms! And When You Combine Unprofessional Nurses With Trump Derangement, You Get…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

..this despicable individual, ex-nurse Alexis ‘Lexie’ Lawler.

Lexie was canned by Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital after announcing in a TikTok video, “As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope that you fucking rip from bow to stern and never shit normally again, you cunt.” 

Leavitt, President Trump’s extremely competent paid liar, announced last month that she was expecting her second child. The injury Lawler wished on Leavitt requires immediate surgery and can cause long-term chronic pain.  The vicious and hateful post received many “likes” and “loves,” because these are really irredeemable people.

The Daily Mail says that it “led supporters of President Donald Trump to call for her firing.” Wait: wouldn’t all decent people call for the firing of a “labor and delivery nurse” who made such a statement? This is one of those stories I want to shake in the faces of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends. much like Dickens, my late, great Jack Russell Terrier, killing a rat.

What monsters they consort with! What monsters they have become….

A spokesperson for Baptist Health confirmed to that this unprofessional ethics villain is no longer employed at the Boca Raton hospital.

But she does have a professional hairdo!

“The comments made in a social media video by a nurse at one of our facilities do not reflect our values or the standards we expect of healthcare professionals,” the hospital’s spokesperson said. “Following a prompt review, the individual is no longer employed by our health system.”

Please note: these are the kinds of people who polls say will prevail in this year’s elections. Gina?

But there needs to be a a strong, competent, effective response beyond just being afraid.

[Note: I want to apologize to Gina Davis, whose clip from “The Fly” is one of the most frequently used on Ethics Alarms, yet I somehow hadn’t included it in the Hollywood Ethics Clip archive until just now. The number of clips is up to 45. Check it out here.]

Should It Matter If a Children’s TV Hostess Is a Virulent, Lying Anti-Semite?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is remarkable the things you learn while searching for ethics topics that have nothing to do with President Trump.

For example, I had never heard of Ms. Rachel, perhaps because my ‘kid’ is 31. Ms. Rachel is the professional moniker of educator, YouTuber, and singer-songwriter Rachel Accurso. She created the YouTube series “Ms. Rachel” (originally known as “Songs for Littles”), a children’s music series that focuses on language development for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

That’s nice! Unfortunately, she can’t resist exposing the fact on social media that she hates Jews . Last week, she “liked” a post by one of her followers on Instagram that said “Free America from the Jews.” Oh-oh. Then she posted a video in which she wept pitifully and claimed that she had meant to delete the thing but inadvertently “loved” it.

Oh. Well, anyone can make a mistake, though I don’t see how someone could make that one. The problem is that this kiddie educator has been ranting on social media about Israel “genocide” in Gaza for quite a while now. Earlier, she posted on Instagram, ‘”Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran.” Last year she filmed a ‘Letter of the Day’ video with Palestinian journalist, Motaz Azaiza. Azaiza has praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, in which infants and children were massacred among other victims. He once posted online, “May God curse the Jews themselves.”

Call me judgmental, but hosting an anti-Semite like this guy seems like an ominous sign for a child educator. Yet Ms. Rachel appears to be uncancellable. Over at “Unspiked,” Brendan O’Neill speculates why. He writes in part,

“The Damocles sword of cancellation dangles precariously over all of us for such trifling speechcrimes as wondering if the Koran is bollocks (Islamophobia) or thinking immigration should be curtailed (racism). And yet you can openly rub shoulders with anti-Semitic people or anti-Semitic posts and the cancellers will look the other way.

“Be honest: what fate would befall a kids’ entertainer if they hosted on their show a man who had once said ‘Fuck all black people’? And if they then liked a post on Instagram that said ‘Get all blacks out of America’? We know exactly what would happen. They would be savagely cancelled. The only time we’d ever see them again would be in a Netflix documentary 20 years hence about the much-loved kids’ clown who lost it all by chumming about with racist scum.

“…The exact opposite has happened with Ms Rachel. She may have exposed the kids who follow her to a man who once said ‘Curse the Jews’, and she may have liked a post calling for the mass expulsion of Jews from the US, but she will survive. And thrive. Cancel culture will lay not one finger on her. And we all know why: because Jews enjoy none of the protections of ‘political correctness’. Jews have not been granted access to the kingdom of liberal concern. Offending Jews is seen as a lesser crime than offending any other group. Ms Rachel will suffer no consequences so long as her blunders only touch on the lives and feelings of Jews.

“The real problem is not Ms Rachel, who’s fundamentally just another celeb building a virtuous self-image from the rubble of Gaza. It’s the politics of identity. It’s that ideology’s ruthless demotion of Jews to the bottom of the league of identities. Scuff a page of the Koran and you’ll be had up for Islamophobia. Film a kids’ video with a man who said ‘Curse the Jews’ and you’re grand. There it is: the merciless neo-racialism of the woke era….”

This is another Cognitive Dissonance Scale issue at heart. Maybe a competent online children’s educator can still be regarded as effective and trustworthy as long as she keeps her vile political and social views out of her videos, songs and books. On the other hand, as Captain Hook would say, I’d rather have someone who isn’t a lying anti-Semite entertaining my children if I have a choice.

You?

From Maryland, A “When Ethics Fails, The Law Steps In” Verdict

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I recently re-watched “Runaway Jury,” the ethically and legally repugnant film adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller. It’s one of the most unethical movies extant, and before the last couple of years I would have said such egregious lawyer conduct as depicted in the film was unlikely to the point of impossible (as in most of Grisham’s books). The novel and movie involved a high-profile civil suit: the widow of a man murdered when a fired employee “goes postal” seeks to hold the manufacturer of the gun used by the killer liable for millions in damages. A pair of anti-gun zealots conspire to both rig the jury verdict and ruin the evil jury consultant (Gene Hackman) who helped defeat their home town in a similar case years before. In the end the “good guys” win (that is, Hollywood’s idea of “good”); I have mentioned the film before in the context irresponsible films and TV shows that actively misinform the public about a lawyer’s ethical responsibilities. Now comes a jury verdict from Maryland where a jury delivered a multi-million dollar verdict against Walmart for allowing an employee to buy a shotgun before he used it to blow his head off.

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Don Lemon Was Never A Real Journalist, and He Can’t Claim to Have Been One When He Invaded That Church

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Not to say I told you so, but I told you so: Ethics Alarms flagged Don Lemon as an unethical, biased, arrogant, preening disgrace as a journalist long before he was finally canned by CNN, and he has done nothing but live up to my assessment, indeed, show how restrained it was, since. See? I’m smart!

Over the weekend an anti-ICE mob stormed a church in St. Paul on the theory that one of the pastors was an ICE agent. I know, that makes no sense to me, either. They interrupted the service, chanting Renee Good’s name, “Hands up, don’t shoot” and other nonsense that had nothing to do with the service was shut down. Lemon was part of the mob.

The administration has been investigating the disruption at the church as a violation of the Face Act, a law that makes it a crime to physically obstruct or use threats of force to intimidate or interfere with a person seeking to participate in a service at a house of worship. It seems pretty clear that this is what the mob did, and that Lemon is as guilty and any of the thugs who did this.

Lemon filmed the event and claimed he was just there as a journalist. No, he’s an ex-journalist, as am I: I was on the staff of my high school newspaper. Lemon made his claim of being at the illegal intrusion as a reporter rather than a participant is weak, and made weaker by his comments on the podcast “I’ve Had It” with Jennifer Welch. “And there’s a certain degree of entitlement. I think people who are, you know, in the religious groups like that,” Lemon said. “It’s not the type of Christianity that I practice, but I think that they’re entitled and that that entitlement comes from a supremacy, white supremacy, and they think that this country was built for them, that it is a Christian country, when actually we left England because we wanted religious freedom. It’s religious freedom, but only if you’re a Christian and only if you’re a white male, pretty much.”

Doesn’t sound like he was in that church as an objective observer to me. Lemon is such an idiot. Listen to him in the clip above, implying that there is a Constitutional right to burst into a church, stop a service, and protest something that has nothing to do with the service or the parishioners at all.

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From Uvalde, The Message Is “Don’t Criminalize Incompetence and Cowardice”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A deranged gunman massacred 21 people at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary three years ago. The murderer is dead and someone must be held accountable, so a former school police officer was tried for abandoning or endangering children. Adrian Gonzales (above, checking his phone like he probably did as the kids were being shot), the first officer to arrive at the school, faced 29 counts of abandoning or endangering children, 19 for the dead and 10 more for survivors. A jury found him not guilty yesterday. Soon the pretty clearly incompetent school former school police chief Pete Arredondo will face trial later on similar charges, and we should expect the same result.

One of Ethics Alarms’ encomiums is that when ethics fail, the law steps in and usually makes a mess of things. If people won’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing, making them do what the state says is the right thing because they’re afraid of being punished is a very poor substitute. Those following the law may not have any concept of what the right thing to do is.

The Uvalde prosecutions arise out of anger and frustration, and reasonably so. Emotions, however, are not reliable motives for law enforcement. The school’s police pretty clearly failed the children of Robb Elementary because Gonzales and Arredondo choked when an unexpected crisis required them to place themselves in harm’s way. As much as we find it disheartening, lack of courage in a crisis cannot be criminalized. These officers thought they had accepted a relatively low-stress job in a quiet community. They hadn’t dealt with a gun-wielding madman before. Sure, we’d like to know that a Dirty Harry is ready to let an active shooter “make his day,” but in the real world—and, I will say without more than my own assessment, increasingly a nation of weenies—that is probably not going to happen. Gonzales had received active shooter training and was also a co-instructor in such a course, but training, however, is one thing, and the a real gun-wielding killer is another.

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