Character

Nobody Intelligent Can Deny That Biden’s Statement In Florida That “Nobody Intelligent Can Deny The Impact Of The Climate Crisis” Proves That He Isn’t Intelligent Himself

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was considering posting about a completely superfluous article in The Atlantic called “Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls,” as an insult to the intelligence of the literate American public. Gee, that’s a tough one! What could the answer be (other than the fact that the biased and dishonest American pollsters haven’t started cheating yet)?

Could it be, perhaps, that Joe Biden has been a spectacular failure in the White House by almost any measure, has overseen an unprecedented attack on personal liberties and Constitution, has directed a banana republic-style effort to remove his primary political opponent by abuse of the justice system, and is older than dirt? Could it be that he is obviously in a state of cognitive decline from an intellectual foundation that was never adequate in the first place? I suppose readers of the Atlantic are so Trump-Deranged and dyed-in-indigo blue that none of that would occur to them.

This, in turn, got me thinking about my still-unfinished survey to determine whether Joe is the Worst American President Ever. I stalled after covering Woodrow Wilson, and realizing again how that awful man laps the field, making the task of covering the group of 18 POTUSes remaining (Woody was only #28) seem like a low priority. But the report about Biden’s statements in Florida over the weekend sparked an epiphany: even if Joe isn’t the worst President, he is unquestionably the dumbest. I don’t think anyone else comes close.

Back to Florida: After the President toured the damage in Florida from Hurricane Idalia, he had to politicize the visit by stating,

Continue reading →

A Cautionary Tale: The Worst Social Media Influencer Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(Don’t bet on it.)

Here at Ethics Alarms we try to steer clear of posts on conduct that is so obviously unethical that even the dimmest MSNBC host could figure it out. Normally, a mother being arrested after one of her kids escapes from the home, emaciated and with restraint marks, and begs a next door neighbor for help, would fall into this category. But this mother was a renowned web expert on parenting, with a popular Instagram account and YouTube channel. Her @moms_of_truth account on Instagram had 341,000 followers, and until it was mysteriously shut down last year, her “8 Passengers” YouTube channel (named after her, her husband, and their six kids)had a very profitable subscriber base of almost 2.3 million.

Ruby Franke, the wise and admired mom, was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated child abuse in Ivins, Utah this week. A press release issued by the Santa Clara-Ivins Public Safety Department stated that on Aug. 30, 2023 “a report came into our dispatch center regarding a juvenile asking for help.” Franke’s son, 12, had “climbed out of a window and ran to a neighbor’s home,” according to the police booking affidavit. The boy asked the neighbor for food and water. “The neighbor observed duct tape on (the boy’s) ankles and wrists and contacted law enforcement. Upon arrival, law enforcement judged the boy’s wounds and malnourishment to be “severe.”

Funny, Ruby never discussed that child-rearing technique on the web…

Continue reading →

Ethics Corrupters: “Work Friend” Advice Columnist Roxane Gay And The Irresponsible Newspaper That Employs Her

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The latter would be the New York Times. Gay (above) has a long and disturbing dossier at Ethics Alarms (under two tags, here and here, because of her annoying misspelling of her own first name).The last time I visited her work as an ethics corrupter, I wrote,

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the biases of the New York Times that its workplace ethics column, “Work Friend,” is authored by race-obsessed, radical, and combative gay feminist Roxane Gay. No biases there! …I have concluded that Gay is too often intellectually and rhetorically dishonest because of her ideological mission, and people like that shouldn’t have regular platforms (or advice columns) in the New York Times.

Now I have discovered that I was too kind in that evaluation. It isn’t just that Gay is so woke she can’t see or think straight; her ethics are rotten to the core, if one can call them ethics at all.

In today’s edition of her weekly workplace advice column for the Times, an inquirer writes that she and her colleagues have discovered that the sales office’s star employee has been faking her results, and is being rewarded for it. “She’s logging calls that never happened, and falsifying her activity to get to the top. This colleague now gets special praise each month, got promoted and is in a mentorship role, and makes everyone else’s numbers look bad,” the questioner writes. What should be done?

What should be done??? Could a work-related question be easier? Go to the management with your colleagues and your evidence, and demand that the lying, fabricating co-worker be properly dealt with. Be prepared to go up the ladder as far as it is necessary to go. The situation has to be exposed, and nothing short of a fair resolution should be accepted. Continue reading →

On The Washington Post, Its Readers, Its “Fact Checker,” And Spinning For Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“If you can’t hide it, decorate it!” the maxim goes. Thus it is that someone in the ethics-free “resistance”/ Democrat/mainstream media alliance (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” we call it in in these parts) decided that President Biden’s problem with the truth—he ignores, distorts, and denies it regularly—must be dealt with, since part of the strategy to defeat Donald Trump is to emphasize his “falsehoods” and “lies.” So a directive went out to the Washington Post’s “Factchecker,” Glenn Kessler: “Hey, Glenn, do one of your cool columns, the ones with the Pinnochio-head ratings system, about Joe’s fabulism, but make sure you’re careful which whoppers you mention, and make sure you don’t call them ‘lies.’ Trump lies. Joe…well, you know, he just does what he does, but it’s no big deal, in fact it’s kind of endearing.” And whoever it was—heck, it might have been Dr. Jill, Chuck Schumer or Merrick Garland!—added, “And besides, it will be good for you, too! It will prove that you’re objective, fair and non-partisan!”

The Post dutifully agreed, because it is not objective, fair, or non-partisan. Neither is Kessler, whom I have tried mightily over the years to regard as a man who tries to do his job ethically, but because bis biases make him stupid, can’t quite manage it. Ethics Alarms officially recants that sympathetic assessment. Yesterday’s Post feature by Kessler headlined “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” clinches it. Kessler is a disgusting hack with no shame or integrity, and the Washington Post is a full-time agent of the Democratic Party and an enemy of democracy.

As for its readers…well, I’ll get to them.

“President Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories — stories that attempt to connect his life story with his audiences and make up an essential part of his persona,” Kessler begins. He uses a “everybody does it” approach right away, mitigating Biden’s serial lies and sliding over the fact that lies from the president of the United States are not in the same category as lies by “everyone.” “The Fact Checker” also defines Biden’s lies out of existence by labeling them “stories.” Stories are entertaining! Stories are fun! Stories aren’t lies. See, when Donald Trump said that he saw Muslims in the U.S. celebrating after the 9-11 bombings—it was on TV someplace—that wasn’t a story, that was a lie. When he described how he vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion from the very beginning (in fact, he initially said he agreed with it), that was a lie too. But when Joe says that he never, ever, ever discussed his slime-ball son Hunter’s business dealings with him that’s just a story. When Joe says that U.S. citizens weren’t allowed to own cannons in the 18th Century (which he does almost every time he talks about gun control), that’s just a story too, a charming, completely made-up story, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Stating that he attended a “historically black college” while addressing an African American audience? A harmless story! Saying that Beau was killed in Iraq? A comforting story from a grieving father. Understand?

Yeah, I understand, all too well.

Continue reading →

More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: Martha Stewart Abuses An Iceberg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Mock away. The climate change fanatics are truly bananas.

Lifestyle media icon Martha Stewart was vacationing on a cruise around Greenland and posted a photograph of a cocktail chilled by ice she said had been chipped off an iceberg. “End of the first zodiac cruise from @swanhelleniccruises into a very beautiful fjord on the east coast of Greenland,” she wrote in the post. “We actually captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.” Wait a sec—Marlon would like a word…

Stewart was immediately scorched on social media because using ice from an iceberg is promoting global warming, or cruelty to icebergs, or anti-Semitic (“Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”) or something. “Wealthy white people drinking their iceberg cocktails while the planet is in flames is a bit tone deaf,” wrote a typical hysteric. “Please don’t use an endangered whale or seal to make any elitist meals like you did with the disappearing iceberg,” wrote another. You know: morons.

Martha is no weenie: She followed up by posting a photograph of an iceberg and wrote, “Pleated iceberg. Perfect for cocktails!”

Perfect response, too.

I would have been tempted to post a photo of me eating a polar bear steak.

Officials And Leaders Who Conservatives Consider Essential Bulwarks Of Constitutional Government Really Have To Stop Relying On “The King’s Pass”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Take Clarence Thomas for example.

As with Donald Trump, who was the object of much rationalization here yesterday, Justice Thomas apparently is certain that conservative and Republican integrity don’t have the rigor to make him accountable for a truly staggering series of judicial ethics breaches. He is also apparently correct in this assumption.

Justice Thomas finally acknowledged publicly that he should have reported selling real estate at a suspicious profit to billionaire political donor Harlan Crow in 2014, a transaction disclosed by ProPublica earlier this year. The Crow company bought a string of properties for $133,363 from co-owners Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed. Conservative power-player Crow then owned the house where a Supreme Court Justice’s elderly mother was living—hey, no big deal!—and soon contractors began tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. Although a federal disclosure law requires SCOTUS Justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000, Thomas never deigned to mention this convenient and inherently suspicious transaction. You know, that “appearance of impropriety” thingy?

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Donald Trump Has No Convictions, But He Has No Convictions

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

by Curmie

[Notes from your host: 1) Curmie and I did not coordinate our posts, and 2) as usual, his erudition puts me to shame.]

***

I’m currently in the process of moving into a new office which is far too small to accommodate my collection of books, even after I gave away over 1000 of them.  One of the volumes I still haven’t figured out what to do with is my Penguin paperback copy of Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” purchased over 40 years ago for a course I took in grad school.

Coming across that volume triggered a memory of struggling with one of that book’s most famous sections, the Stasis in Corcyra.  It wasn’t that the passages in question were too confusing.  Rather, it was that word “stasis”; no one would describe the civil war on the island of Corcyra in 427 BCE as static. 

A little digging (well, actually more than a little, as these were the days before the internet) revealed that virtually all English translations of those passages of Thucydides had simply adopted a cognate of the Greek word στάσις (stásis), meaning roughly “that which is stood up.”  So something firmly placed and unchanging would be static, or in a state of stasis.  But the word also carried the meaning of “standing up against,” in the sense of resisting authority.  So the insurrection on Corcyra was, in fact, an act of stasis.

These linguistic constructions, known as contranyms, auto-antonyms, or “Janus words” (among other locutions) are not uncommon.  We all understand that a peer might be a member of the English nobility or an equal, or that “it’s all downhill from there” might mean that the system is in decline or that the hard part is over and we can coast to the finish line.

I’m not sure if there’s a word for the variation on the theme that forms the title of this essay: the two meanings of the term are not in direct contradiction, but they lead to pretty close to opposite conclusions.  What I find interesting is that both definitions can apply simultaneously. 

That is, “having no convictions” can mean lacking a system of guiding principles, especially one involving a moral compass or an ethical center. It can also mean that the subject has never been convicted of a crime.  I’d argue that Donald Trump fits both descriptions rather well. 

Continue reading →

Snap Out Of It! Trump’s Latest Disqualifying Statement Is Signature Significance—Stop Pretending He Is A Rational Option To Elect President

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Asked by Glenn Beck in an interview “[I]f you’re president again, will you lock people up?”, Donald Trump, the supposed champion of democracy and heroic foe of the Democratic totalitarians, answered, “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.” 

Dingdingdingdingding! This is signature significance, just like his earlier musings about suspending the Constitution. As I wrote earlier this year, “As divided as Americans are, it doesn’t appear that enough of them care about preserving democracy to do anything to preserve it. They only differ on the means by which they are willing to let it collapse.” Electing Donald Trump as President, with his sick “tit for tat,” “Do unto others as they do to you,” “vengeance is mine” approach to ethics magnified by his “the ends justify the means” orientation can’t possible “save” democracy. The most it can do is maximize the chances that the totalitarians we end up with aren’t socialists, anti-white bigots and addicted to toxic woke fantasies. That shouldn’t be good enough. It isn’t good enough, not for this nation. That so many still think it is depresses and frightens me greatly.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: 14-Year-Old Connor Halsa

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Well, let’s start out today with a hopeful story; I don’t know about you, but I need one.

14-year-old Connor Halsa of Moorhead, Minnesota was fishing with his family on Lake of the Woods when he hooked an Iowa farmer’s lost wallet that had come to rest about 20 feet under the surface of the large ( 85 miles long and 56 miles across at its widest point) lake. The previous summer, Jim Denney’s boat had capsized in rough waters, and when he dried out later, he discovered that his wallet was gone along with the $2,000 vacation money he had stored there.

After Connor discovered the wallet and the cash and had dried it all out, he agreed with his father that the next step was tracking down the money’s owner.The only clue inside the wallet was a faded business card with a phone number belonging to a livestock owner in western Wisconsin. The number led them to Denney at his Mount Ayr, Iowa farm. The astonished farmer tried to give Connor a reward, but he refused, saying that he should not be rewarded for doing what was obviously the right thing.

Isn’t that nice? Well, get over it; now its time to start wallowing in the usual muck….

PS. Connor wearing a T-shirt that appears to honor my dog had nothing to do with his selection as today’s Ethics Hero.

_____________

Source: The Star Tribune

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

Continue reading →