Ethics Heroes

Ethics Hero (And Most Ethical Use Of “Asshole” of 2023): Gold Star Father Mark Schmitz

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Mark Schmitz, a Gold Star father, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday regarding the deadly suicide bombing in August 2021 that left 13 U.S. servicemembers dead, including Mr. Schmitz’s son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz. The cruel, irresponsible and incompetent American withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath ordered by President Biden has been largely forgotten by most American voters, since they have the attention span of ADD kittens. Perhaps Schmitz’s no-hold-barred attack on Biden’s conduct in this episode will remind them.

What am I talking about? The mainstream news media will make sure as few of the kittens see his testimony as possible, and there’s still more than a year for them to forget again.

His full statement:

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A 12-year-old Boy And His Mother Refuse To Be Bullied By Woke School Administrators And Win

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Notice the racist symbolism in that symbol above? No? That’s because there isn’t any, but never mind: Jayden Rodriguez, a 12-year-old middle-schooler in Colorado Springs, was kicked out of class at The Vanguard School, a local charter school, because he had a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack. Jayden was told he had to remove the patch before he would be admitted to the class again.

In an email, a school administrator claimed that the patch was “disruptive to the school environment.” Boy, do I ever remember getting upset over the patches fellow classmates had on their backpacks! This was, of course, an example of woke fascism by a teacher and a school, nothing more or less. Further emails from the school told the student’s mother that “some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate—or even racism.” Oh, well if “some” erroneously associate a historical symbol that had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or racism as offensive, by all means punish the kid who knows what it really symbolizes. “Some” see the American flag as a symbol of white supremacy, imperialism, and systemic racism. They are welcome to their foolish opinion, but that doesn’t mean they should have the power to stop any sane American from displaying Old Glory.

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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.

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Source: The Star Tribune

Ethics Hero: Military Judge Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr, the military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case, threw out confessions by the Saudi defendant Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in a 50-page decision yesterday. After all, the man accused of planning Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing on Oct. 12, 2000 in Yemen’s Aden Harbor that killed 17 U.S. sailors had been tortured by the CIA, or as th agency likes to describe it, “subjected to enhanced interrogation.” Yes, I seem to remember there was something in the Constitution that said you can’t do that. Quite a few things, actually.

Dirty Harry was also lectured on the same point, if I recall, 50 years ago.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…Ethics Hero: Elon Musk (Again)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(See: “It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America”)

Bravo.

Nate Silver Tells The Truth About Media Bias: Ethics Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The only surprising aspect of Nate Silver’s latest substack essay is that he actually wrote it and had the courage to put it on the web. He is honest about mainstream media bias, and until he got kicked off his own creation, the 538 blog, Silver was a willing accomplice in this rot in the foundation of our democracy, making a lot of money in the process. Now—finally—he’s using his substantial critical thinking and research skills to expose the bad guys (his former pals before they rejected him : yes, I suspect there’s a measure of vengeance in this)who continue to successfully warp public knowledge and the process of an informed democracy by convincing sufficient number of ovine citizens that the concept of progressive media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The focus of his traitorous analysis is how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has helped address the effects of the media’s partisan bias.

In “Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob,” Silver becomes one of the very few progressives of note to admit what has been going on under their cultural assault. Some others include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but Silver is more scientific and detached than any of them, and as a result, his analysis is more persuasive and, I hope, more disruptive to the blue wall of silence the progressive Borg has erected around a throbbing, obvious, disgusting truth.

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Ethics Hero: Jason Aldean, No Weenie He [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

This is strange. Not only am I not a believer in one of John Wayne’s most quoted movie lines, I’m not especially enamored of Aldean’s latest hit song and the in-your-face message it conveys. However, in one key respect, I admire Aldean’s defiant speech before singing his song tthat has been the target of furious attacks across the progressive spectrum. Here’s what he said…

What makes it a heroic moment is that he didn’t apologize. Too many celebrities, public figures and athletes have grovelled for forgiveness when their words or opinions have prompted attacks on their character and efforts to, as the singer described them, “ruin their lives.” They do it because they fear losing jobs, money, friends and associates, because what we’re experiencing today is culture-wide McCarthyism of the Left. The objectives and the methods are similar, but the ubiquity and power of the electronic media make the threat to freedom of speech and democracy even more dire—and it was pretty scary there for a while in the Fifties.

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Ethics Hero (Corporate Division): In-N-Out Burger

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.

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About This Exchange Between A Reporter Last Week And The White House’s Non-Historic, Non-Incompetent Paid Liar And The Later Response By The White House’s Historic, Incompetent Paid Liar…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. How can the White House not have a response prepared for this question?

2. How long can the mainstream media refuse to give this slowly exploding story the attention and coverage it obviously deserves?

3. It is true that everybody—I think literally everybody—knew that Joe Biden was lying when he said his son had “done nothing wrong” and when he said that he never discussed Hunter’s dealing with foreign governments with him. But is it possible that the President, his advisors and his party really think that they can duck the scandal with the Clinton “Deny, deny, deny!” formula?

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Ethics Hero: Non-Weenie Chard Scharf

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Pronouns again.

A reader flagged this story and it almost got lost in the swirl of ethics chaos this month, so I want to get it up quickly today. Chad Scharf was the vice president of software engineering at the Jacksonville, Florida, location of Bitwarden, which is a cybersecurity firm based in California. I suspect that headquarters locale is at fault for the fact that Bitwarden decided that all employees should include “their “preferred pronouns” in their personal profiles on Slack, an online messaging platform. This was, of course, part of its diversity/equity/inclusion embrace.

DEI is a cover for government, corporate and other sinister educational efforts to engage in discrimination, progressive virtue signalling and indoctrination, and the only way to slow it down until the courts step in is to show some backbone and say, “No.” That’s what Scharf did. He declined to list any preferred pronouns, and that should have been the end of the issue. There is a clear and reasonable presumption that an employee with a male name who doesn’t specify pronouns is content with being identified by male pronouns.

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