Character

In the Hallowed Halls of Congress, Ethics Dunces, Dolts, and Disgraces All Around

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

A House Oversight Committee meeting was pondering whether Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), responded to a question from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” Stay classy, MTG! (In truth, MTG has never been classy). “That is absolutely unacceptable,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interjected, proving that she’s not wrong all the time. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”

Greene then turned her wit, such as it is, on AOC, asking, “Are your feelings hurt?” “Oh, girl? Baby girl,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, trying hard to sink to the ridiculous Republican’s level, “Don’t even play.” Then Greene asked Ocasio-Cortez, “Why don’t you debate me?,” and AOC snapped back, “it’s pretty self-evident.”

I wonder what she was referring to? Jean Kerr once wrote that it was folly to argue with a six-year-old because you would inevitably start sounding like one.

“You don’t have enough intelligence,” shot back Greene, eschewing the more sophisticated, “I’m rubber and you’re glue” bon mot.

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Suggested Course For Princeton: “Campus Protesting For Weenies”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I waited a few days before writing about this because I had to stop giggling to type.

I you watch Aaron Sorkin’s excellent if a bit too fawning movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” you will see that the anti-war campus protesters of the Sixties had, if nothing else, integrity and guts. Maybe they had inherited some from their parents, of “The Greatest Generation.” Today’s student protests in favor of Hamas, terrorism and Jew-killing (I know, I know: “Think of the children!”), in contrast, are marked by hypocrisy, ignorance and weenie-ism.

Princeton has certainly moved to the front of the line in the latter. After the protesting students announced a hunger strike in support of allegedly starving Gazans (Pro tip: if you don’t want to suffer from the predictable consequences of war, don’t elect terrorists as your government). Then they complained that they—the students, now, not the Gazans—were hungry. One female protester shouted into a megaphone, “This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now as you can see.” What, is the nearby McDonald’s closed?

Then the protesters persuaded some of the professors whose indoctrination made them the misguided weenies they are to make themselves look foolish by signing a letter of protest in the students’ support. It’s long and infuriating, but here are the best parts…

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Observations on a Scenario in Which Everyone and Everything Involved Looks Bad Including the Schools and American Society in General

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Zoey (above), a high school senior at Ayala High School in Chino Hills, California —we don’t yet know her whole name—was expelled for cyberbullying, intimidation, harassment and attempting to cause physical injury to another person after she used her cell phone to live-stream a classroom brawl between fellow students. There seems to be some suspicion that she was in on the plot to attack one of the combatants, though Zooey denies it. The incident and the report covering it raise all sorts of ethics questions and conclusions.

Such as…

1. Why are students allowed to have cell phones in class at all, specifically cameras? The school has a rule against filming and posting occurrences in the school involving students, potentially embarrassing them, humiliating them and harassing them—why not just confiscate all of the phones before class so this kind of thing is impossible?

2. Zoey’s explanation: “In our generation, you go live to do makeup, to do everything, so it was just going live just to go live. It wasn’t my intent to purposely or try to cause harm to anyone.” I see Zoey has virtually reached adulthood without anyone teaching her that rationalizations aren’t valid reasons for unethical conduct, and “Everybody does it” is particularly wrong.

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Unethical—But Revealing!—Quote of the Month: Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Remember: Trust the scientists! They know best…

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

—British vulcanologist and climate scientist William J. McGuire, “Bill” to his friends, cheering on human death in a tweet he quickly removed after colleagues advised him “Uh, Bill? We’re not supposed to say things like this out loud…”

Of course, the professor might have been saying that the economically disastrous measures being proposed and in some cases adopted by foolish governments like the Biden administration won’t affect the climate sufficiently to make a difference, so the whole movement is futile, irresponsible, based on speculation, and, to be blunt, stupid, but of course he wasn’t. No, this scientist, who is among those we are supposed to trust and obey—you know, like the health “experts” who crippled the economy, our society and the educational development of our children based on guesses about the Wuhan virus that were represented as fact?—believes that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe (and we all want to do that, right?) is to have millions of people die as soon as possible, one way or another. A plague is a good way! Or we could just execute them, like Mao did. Of course, he shouldn’t be one of those sacrificed for the greater good, because his life is too valuable.

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Mother’s Day 2024 Ethics Warm-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day. It’s not going to be a happy one at the lonely Marshall house, though my sister and I will be having dinner to celebrate her motherhood as well as the two dead mothers in the family. She talked me out of bringing Grace’s urn to the dinner, as I expected she would. I’m still tempted.

In more dark news, it seems a cruel twist of fate that the major event in U.S. history that occurred on this date was the discovery of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, dead. Happy Mother’s Day!

On to the ethics inventory…

1. About that Trump trial…I haven’t written much about Alvin Bragg’s blatantly political and partisan prosecution of Donald Trump in New York. I’m not there and it’s not being broadcast; meanwhile, the news media is setting new records for completely slanted and biased coverage: going back and forth among Fox News, MSNBC and CNN is like visiting parallel universes. But even a legal analyst on CNN confessed that the prosecution had yet to prove any crime had been committed, and it seems clear that the judge’s decision to allow Stormy Daniels to testify extensively about the alleged sexual activities engaged in with the former President guarantees a guilty verdict being thrown out. From what I can determine, the judge should throw out any guilty verdict as a matter of law, because guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be legitimately found when the two primary witnesses for the prosecution are as inherently unbelievable as Daniels and Michael Cohen, who is a disbarred lawyer, a disgruntled former employee of Trumps, and an admitted perjurer. Jonathan Turley, who has registered his utter contempt for this case (recent posts here, here, and here), had a funny line about waiting to see if the courthouse is struck by lightning when Cohen takes the oath before testifying.

It is so clear, in listening to the MSNBC and CNN commentary on the trial as well as print and online accounts like Maureen Dowd’s column“Donnie After Dark” that the real objective of this trial is to humiliate Trump and expose his “bad character.” This is not an ethical or legitimate use of the justice system, but Democrats are committed to it. How desperate they are. I was thinking about this even as I laughed at Jerry Seinfeld’s movie sharply tweaking Democratic icon Jack Kennedy’s serial adultery and sex addiction: after JFK, after Bill Clinton, and with a their own current President credibly accused of rape and caught on film sniffing and touching young girls as his own daughter’s diary documents them showering together, this is the best they can muster to impugn Trump? And how many Trump supporters are under the delusion that he has embraced high moral and ethical values in his private life? if anything, Trump’s handling of the lawfare assault on him has raised my opinion of his character. His determination and resilience are amazing. He epitomizes the lesson of “Laugh-In” comic Henry Gibson’s favorite poem (by Frank Lebby Stanton), “Keep A-Goin’.”

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Unethical (and Telling!) Quote of the Month: Rep. Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“[T]hese poor souls who are looking for some answers….we’ve given them to them, but they are blocked by some of their views on the three G’s: guns, gays, and God—that would be a woman’s right to choose—and these cultural issues cloud their reception to an argument that is really in their interests.”

—-Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D-Cal.) appearing at an Oxford Union debate to take the position that populism  is a threat to democracy in the United States.

Let me get a compliment out of he way and on the record up front: Pelosi showed guts by appearing in this forum, and that is worthy of a measure of respect. Of course, her daring may be less attributable to guts than hubris, arrogance, or stupidity, because her position is indefensible from a Jeffersonian and Madisonian point of view and stating it in a public forum demonstrates that the totalitarian disease now rampaging through the Democratic Party has so corrupted its values that leaders like Pelosi no longer are capable of realizing how repulsive its ideology has become. Continue reading →

I Don’t Understand This “Niggardly Principle” Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-odlCalifornia teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

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Ethics Dunce: Ohio State 2024 Commencement Speaker Chris Pan

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Usually the many Ethics Alarms train wreck graphics are reserved for official Ethics Train Wrecks, but not this time. The episode under consideration didn’t involve an actual train, but Ohio State alum Chris Pan‘s commencement address to about 12,000 2024 graduates was somewhat more literally akin to train disasters, at least ones involving trains leaping the tracks.

Outkick has tagged the speech the “Worst Commencement Speech Ever.” I doubt that it is that, but Pan’s self-indulgent blather might be the most unethical one ever—if there have been more unethical addresses, I’m not sure I would want to hear them even as an analytical exercise.

Let’s start with the fact that Pan conceived the speech while he was high on the psychedelic drug Ayahuasca. He admitted this later, and appears to be proud of it, or think its funny, or something. This makes him an Ethics Alarms certified asshole as well as an Ethics Dunce. When people are trusting you to perform at your best in support of an important task, project or event, you don’t impair yourself with foreign substances—not alcohol, not uppers or downers, and definitely not mind altering drugs. Doing so is deliberately defying common sense, personal responsibility, and well-established societal standards.

Moreover, you risk a debacle like the speech you will see in this video. If you like, you can skip the glowing introduction by OSU President Ted Carter, though it provides useful context as Pan was to humiliate Carter as well as himself. It’s a bit like knowing that they called The Titanic “unsinkable” before it sank on its maiden voyage. Pan starts speaking at the 1:47 mark.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“My working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he’s not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.”

—Law professor/”Fiercely neutral” blogress Ann Althouse, characterizing President Biden’s contradictory and cynical treatment of Israel after he announced that the U.S. will withhold critical arms support for the attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah despite previously agreeing that Hamas had to be destroyed.

Ann adds, “But I suspect he’s too far gone to give us that.”

I was pondering how to frame a post about Biden’s craven perfidy regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict, as he literally tries to take both sides at once in order to avoid rejection by the Democratic Party’s pro-terrorism bloc, which has turned out to be a lot bigger than even critics suspected. Then I read Ann’s post highlighting Jon Podhoretz’s article for Commentary, “Biden’s Shameful Betrayal.” (Full disclosure: I know Jon, and like him: he was a member of my theater company’s board until he moved out of the District.) I don’t think Althouse has been red-pilled exactly—I’ll still lay odds that she ends up voting for Biden—but she seems genuinely disgusted by the age-addled President’s latest example of fecklessness and irresponsible leadership, as should we all.

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The Nathan Wade Interview: Apparently Fulton County Lawyers Don’t Get That “Legal Ethics” Thingy…or Ethics Generally

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I find the transcript of the interview of deposed Fani Willis prosecutor and loverboy Nathan Wade many things: damning, outrageous, disgusting, shocking. Mostly I find it to be more evidence that I have wasted the last 25 years trying to make the legal profession more ethical. This guy, a “prominent and respected Atlanta lawyer,” not only doesn’t know what ethics is, he’s infuriatingly smug about his ignorance.

These are the people Democrats have placed in charge of “saving democracy” by using the criminal laws to keep Donald Trump from delivering condign justice to the Biden presidency, as in crushing, unequivocal defeat.

On Sunday’s “World News Tonight” and Monday’s “Good Morning America” ABC revealed two segments (here and here) from an “exclusive” interview with former Fulton County, Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade. He was, you’ll recall, forced to withdraw from the lucrative gig gifted to him by his girlfriend Fani Willis by the judge in the case, Willis’s prosecution of Donald Trump for “election interference.”

If there are more segments, I think I’ll pass: cleaning up the serial head explosions caused by what I’ve seen already is more than enough for me. Nothing in them could change my mind about Wade (or Willis) at this point. He’s not just an unethical lawyer.He’s a fick. And an asshole.

I’ll just repeat some of the more glaring statements so you get the idea:

  • Asked how he could endanger a high profile prosecution by letting an illicit romance pollute the prosecution: “You don’t plan to develop feelings. You don’t plan to fall in love. You don’t plan to  have some relationship in the workplace that we  you don’t set out to do that and those things develop organically. They develop over  over time. And the  the minute we had that sobering moment, we discontinued it.”

I see: he’s 13 years old, then….just so darned romantic or horny that he couldn’t help himself, even though this was exactly the opposite of professional behavior. Continue reading →