Family

Museum Ethics: The Draft-Dodging Playboy and the Wright Bros. Plane

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The old TV show “Naked City” used to intone at the end of every episode, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” There are far more than eight million ethics stories in our country’s rich and surprising history. This is one of those, and I pass it along to you.

The Franklin Institute, a museum in Philadelphia inspired by the work of Ben Franklin and dedicated to the study of science, exhibits a plane built in 1911 by the Wright brothers. It was, they say, a gift from Grover C. Bergdoll, a strange man with a strange history who was once an infamous national figure but who is now forgotten.

He was a wealthy playboy who was heir to  a Philadelphia beer brewing fortune. He dodged the Great War draft in 1917, failing to report for military service. He was already known for his irresponsible conduct, taking flying lessons from Orville Wright and buying a plane from the Wright brothers that he used to buzz buildings among other stunts. He had  multiple accidents and traffic violations in automobile as a teenager, and served two months in jail after a head-on crash in 1913. Since he was rich and well known, the government decided to an example of him to discourage draft-dodgers, It  distributing wanted posters with his face and name, and when the soldier who supposedly was drafted to take Bergdoll’s place died in combat,  the New York had a front page headline, “Died Hero in Battle in Bergdoll’s Place.”

The story gets stranger. Bergdoll was finally captured in 1920 after an ongoing manhunt, and sentenced to prison for five years. He escaped after less than a year. He convinced authorities to temporarily release him from prison to  help them find a “pot of gold” that he claimed to have buried. Bergdahl escaped while his two U.S. Army escorts became distracted (they were playing pool at his family mansion), fleeing in his chauffeur-driven car to Canada, from which he travelled to Germany. He married there, but often returned secretly to the United States. Reported sightings of Grover were headlines news.

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Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks [Repaired]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”

1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?

2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)

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Ethics Hero: Some Rich Person In Idaho

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The holiday-appropriate heart-warming tale is told in this video I can’t embed here. Apparently a wealthy “Secret Santa” is giving $1 million to “deserving people in eastern Idaho,” and the East Idaho News is publicizing the plan with daily surprise visit to the lucky recipient. “Brenda in Blackfoot”is first up. From the News: “She is a single mom with eight adopted children who all have special needs. She works from 4:30 a.m. to approximately 1 p.m. every day to support her children… She has really struggled… In May, they experienced a small house fire, which caused a lot of damage to her home….Googling the repairs for instructions , [Brenda] did all of the repairs herself. Her family also had a flood in their home about six weeks ago….Brenda went through cancer treatment last year as well…”

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Ethics Villain: Ryan Borgwardt

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In “Double Jeopardy,” a 1999 thriller co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd plays a woman whose apparently loving husband fakes his own death while on a romantic yachting trip with her, leaving behind manufactured evidence that gets Ashley convicted of murdering him. To be fair, Wisconsin resident Ryan Borgwardt wasn’t quite that diabolical. He just faked his death while  pretending to be on kayaking fishing trip and fled the country. Then again, Ashley Judd’s husband only inflicted his plot on his wife and a single child, while Borgwalt has three kids.

On August 12, Watertown, Wisconsin’s big news was the disappearance of devoted family man, Borgwardt, 44. An emergency search found his capsized kayak on Green Lake and his vehicle and trailer parked nearby. A local fishermen found Ryan’s fishing rod and a tacklebox containing his wallet and other belongings. Such a tragedy!

But Borgwalt was not as clever as the husband in “Double Jeopardy,” however, so an investigation eventually uncovered evidence that he was alive and had crossed into Canada. Border authorities confirmed that they had checked his passport a day after his “drowning.” After that, Borgwardt’s elaborate plot to abandon his family, apparently to begin a new life with another woman (this was also the motive of Ashley’s evil spouse), began to come into focus.

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Ethics Verdict: The Trump-Deranged Harris Voters Are The Most Infantile Losers In US. Political History

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…

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Comment of the Day: “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Time for a Trump Derangement report Comment of the Day. This admirable job by AM Golden fills the bill nicely, especially since I had almost the exact same conversation with my own “not unintelligent” relative who has been a raging, drooling, Trump Derangement victim getting progressively (double meaning, there) worse (Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, now 5, and I suspect Stage 6 is terminal) for almost a decade. There is a viral social media tale with video about a woman who interrupted a conversation between two black Trump supporters to start screaming about how he was a criminal who wants Liz Cheney to be put in front of a 9-person “firing squad.” This lunatic also claimed to be well-informed, though she must only frequent MSNBC and other propaganda outlets that haven’t thoroughly debunked this most recent desperate lie. (All you have to do is read what Trump said.) There may be a new one by now; I haven’t checked.

I am going to depart from the usual format with COTDs here and follow AM’s post with some supplemental analysis of my own.

In the meantime, here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…,” which is a follow-up to this earlier post regarding the unforgivable “Trump threatened Cheney” AXIS hit.

***

Trying to convince people that what Trump said is being misrepresented, and deliberately so, by the Democrats and their media advocates is like pulling teeth.

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When Ideology-Driven Fads Harm the Innocent…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On Twitter/”X,” the advocacy organization “Restore Childhood” documents the horrific case study of a little boy pushed into “gender affirming care” by his woke-lunatic mother, facilitated by unethical medical professionals. Below is the tweet series. You can watch the disturbing videos here.

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So…The Second Gentleman Running For First Gentleman Impregnated His Nanny During His First Marriage and Slapped a Date In the Face: Is That a Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

By the established standards of the news media and the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, it should be, don’t you think? But apparently not.

Huh.

A throbbing example of wildly varying standards in the media depending on whether they are covering Donald Trump or Kamala Harris just raised its warty head. Did you see that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband who was largely invisible until she pushed President Biden off the Democratic ticket, admitted he had an adulterous affair with his nanny and got her pregnant, leading to his divorce? That happened in August, after the slimy Daily Mail broke the scandal and Emhoff came clean to CNN. I missed it entirely, which means that, for example, the New York Times either ignored it or soft-peddled it because, well, you know. But the story burst on the social media scene this week after ex-Obama paid liar Jen Psaki, now a full-time Axis propagandist at MSNBC, interviewed Emhoff and gushed that he had “reshaped the perception of masculinity.” “Has that been an evolution for you and do you think that’s part of the role you might play as first gentleman?” Psaki continued. Yecchh. That was nauseating enough (no Vice-President’s spouse has the power, visibility or status to “reshape” anything), but Emhoff’s answer exploded heads from coast to coast.

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Ethics Quiz: The Offensive… Wristband?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Apparently a biological male who “identifies as female” plays on the Plymouth Regional High School girls’ soccer team in New Hampshire. When the team played its regional rival Bow High School, some Bow parents, protesting the presence of the player whom they regarded as a danger to the born-female players on the Bow team, wore wristbands like the ones above as a silent protest. The Bow High athletic director had told concerned parents before the contest that “in the wake of a federal judge’s ruling that the term ‘girl’ includes males who identify as female,” he felt he was powerless. (He’s a weenie. If he agreed with the parents, he could simply have his team refuse to play the Plymouth team, accept the consequences, and raise the issue.)

When the parents’ “XX” bands appeared at the game, school officials stopped the soccer match, ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, and even “issued [a] police-enforced ‘No Trespassing order’” against two parents who refused.

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More Thoughts About “The Box”….

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is very strange. I wrote about the ethics horror movie “The Box” just this year, yet had no memory of writing the post or seeing the whole movie, despite stating in the post that I had. Then I noticed that the post was dated February 28, the day before I found my wife’s body in our living room. Apparently the shock erased some files.

Moreover, it is creepy that I posted on a movie about a couple that pushes a button on a mysterious box after being told that doing so will kill a stranger but also result in their receiving a million tax-free dollars from an anonymous authority, and shortly thereafter discovered that my own wife had died of unknown causes.

Did somebody push that button?

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